Sociolinguistics Topic Language Culture and Worldview.

1. Language Culture and World View
• Language
The word “language” means the most specialized sound signalling system which seems to be
genetically programmed to develop in humans
• Characteristic of Language
• “ Language is the dress of thought”
• “ Language shapes our ideologies and world view”
• “ Language and culture are directly proportional to each other”
• “ The shared languge of a community is the most essential carrier of their common
culture”
• Language and culture are grown up together”
• The form of language used determines individual’s thought”
• The structure of language influences how its speaker view the world around them”
• Culture
Culture in narrow sense means “art and sciences”. In broad sense means “our ways of living,
religion, laws, manners, housing, dress, etc are called culture
• Characteristics of Culture
• Culture is acquired
• Culture is shared
• Culture is learnt
• Culture is transmitted
• Culture is dynamic

2. • Culture is adaptive
• Culture is influential
• Types of Culture
There are four types of culture
• Material / Physical culture
• Non-material / cognitive culture
• Real culture
• Ideal culture
• Material / Physical culture
It includes man-made objects such as tools, implements, furniture, etc. It is concerned
with the external, mechanical and utilitarian objects. It includes our banks, parliments, insurance
scheme, currency systems, and etc. It is referred to as civilization.
• Non-material / Cognitive Culture
It is something internal and intrinsically valuable. It reflects the inward nature of man. It
consists of the words the people use or the language they speak etc. It includes our customs,
tastes, attitute ans outook, in brief, our acting, feeling and thinking etc. It is mental organization
in each individual’s mind.
• Real culture
It is that culture which can be observed in our daily life. The culture on which we act upon
in our social life is real. It is the culture people adopt in their real life. The whole of the culture
can never be real because some of its part may remain unpracticed. Real culture include the
values and norms being practiced.
• Ideal culture
The culture which is presented as a pattern or precedent to the people is called ideal
culture. It is the goal of the society It can never be achieved fully because some part of it remains
out of practice. Ideal culture encompasses the values and norms a culture demands.
• Language and Culture

3. Language and culture both are determined by each other. It is generally agreed that language and
culture are closely related. Language can be viewed as a verbal expression of culture. It is used
to maintain and convey culture and cultural ties. Language provides us with many of the
categories we use for expression of our thoughts, so it is therefore natural to assume that our
thinking is influenced by the language which we use. The values and customs in the country we
grow up in shape the way in which we think to a certain extent
Culture and Language
What We Say Influences What
We Think, What We Feel and
What We Believe
Unique human ability
· Ability to create and use language is the most distinctive feature of humans
· Humans learn their culture through language
· Culture is transmitted through language
The nature of language
· Considerable variation in the number of languages in the world
· 95% of the world’s people speak fewer that 100 of the approximate 6,000 different
languages
· Linguists concerned about the last 5% of the world’s languages which are in danger of
disappearing
Seven functions of Language
· Instrumental Language
· Regulatory Language
· Interactional Language
· Personal Language
· Imaginative Language
· Heuristic Language
· Informative Language
Regulatory Language
· Using language to control the behavior of others or getting them to do what we want
them to do
· May include giving orders or at more subtle levels manipulating and controlling others
· Positive regulatory language is “life skills” of parents, management and administrator
must know
Interactional Language
· Used to establish and define social relationships and language all of us use in group
situation
· “small talk”, negotiations, encouragement, expression of friendship are examples

4. · Because those who are effective in building social skills are likely to succeed, children
need to develop need to develop awareness of the ability to use language to establish
relationships
· Work cooperatively, enjoy companionship
Personal Language
· Used to express individuality and personality
· Strong feelings and opinions are a part of personal language
· Often neglected in classrooms and thought inappropriate.
· Yet through personal language that students relate their own lives to the subject
matter being taught establish their own identities, build selfesteem and confidence
Heuristic Language
· Used to explore, to investigate, to acquire knowledge, to do research, to acquire
understanding
· It is the language for wondering, for figuring things out
· Inquiry is its most important function
· Dense Textbooks?
Communication
· The act of transmitting information that influences the behavior of another person
· While communication among animals is critical to their survival, it is limited
compared to human language
Call Systems
· Animal systems of verbal communication are referred to as call system
· Call system—a form of communication among non-human primates composed of
a limited number of sounds that are limited to specific stimuli in the environment
· Chimp-”Squeal Squeal” –”danger here”
· “Closed System”
Call System/Closed System
· Primate Communication system is complex
· Non-Human Primate have a Closed Call System
· Sounds are unique in form and message
· Sounds are mutually exclusive
· Can’t signal “Tomorrow I’ll climb that tree”
Humans/Open Call System
· Starting with a limited number of sounds. Human are capable of producing an
infinite number of meanings by combining sounds and words into new meanings
· Can send messages that have never been sent before.
· Can talk about things not present and have yet to happen
Human Language
· Is capable of recreating and complex thought patterns and experiences in words

5. · Without human language, human culture would not exist
· Plays a crucial role in the maintenance of human social relationships
· Because language is a creative and open system it is extremely flexible and can
communicate new ideas and abstract concepts
Displacement
· Human capacity to convey information about a thing or an event that is not
present
· Enables humans to speak of purely hypothetical things
· Transmitted largely through tradition experience alone
Language and Culture
· Anthropologist learn to communicate in another language in order to do field
work
· Language reflects a Way of Thinking
· Close relationship between language and culture. Culture is transmitted by
language
· Clear that the terminology used by a culture primarily reflects that culture’s
interest and concerns
How Culture Influences Culture?
· Cultural emphasis—the vocabulary found in any language tends to emphasize the
words that are considered to be adaptively important in that culture
· Military metaphor in medicine
· Technology also affects language
Acquiring language
· Linguistic symbols are all arbitrary—that is they are conventions by which certain sounds
are attached to certain objects and events
· C/A/R=car
· Humans’ normal physical and mental apparatus allows them to learn any language with
equal ease
· Human Being would speak no language if he or she were taught none
· Critical period of language development for humans before the age of six— thereafter
learning language skills become increasingly difficult
• Language is determined by Culture
Language and its structure are dependent on the cultural context in which they
existed. There are ways in which culture really varies and determines language.

6. Language as a part of Culture
Language is not just the medium of culture but is also a part of culture. Linguistic differences
are often seen as the mark of another culture, and they create divisiveness among
neighbouring people or even among different groups of the same nation
• World View
It is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the entirely
of individual’s or society’s knowledge and point of view including ethics, values etc
• Linguistic Determinism
It states that the structure of language determines our thought patterns
• Linguistic Relativity
“It means that users of different grammers are pointed by there grammer towards different type
of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation and hence are
not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different view of the world”
The linguist Sapir and whorf maintained that
“The language spoken by a society influences the way in which that society
thinks about the world”
• Certain System of Classification in Language and Society
There are three systems of classification which are as follows
• Kinship system
• Colour Terminology
• Taboo & Euphemism
• Kinship System
Kinship systems are the universals features of language because kinship is so important in
social organization that people use language to describe a particular kin relationship.

7. • Colour Terminology
It is also used to explore the relationship between languages and cultures. The colour
spectrum is a physical continum showing no breaks at all. The interesting issue is how colours
are referred to in different languages? All languages make use of basic terms.
• Taboo & Euphemism
To express cultural meanings in language,there are certain basic limitations. Taboo is the
prohibition or avoidance in any society of behaviour believed to be harmful to its members in
that it would cause them anxiety, embarrassment or shame.
• Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
• This hypothesis states that
• “Semantic structure of language shapes or limits the ways in which
speakers form the conception of the world”
• According to this hypothesis “our thinking is according to our structure of language”
• 1st Claim
• The structure of language determines the way in which speakers of that language view
the world.
• Weaker claim
• It is that the structure does not determine the world- view but is still influential in
predisposing speakers of a language towards adopting a particular world-view
• Opposite Claim
• It is that the culture of people finds reflection in the language they employ. In this
view, cultural values do not determine the structure of the language.
• Neutral claim
• It is that there is little or no relationship between language and culture
• Most accepted Claim
It is that the structure of language influences how its speakers view the world.

8. The linguistic relativity principle, or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, is the idea that differences in
the way languages encode cultural and cognitive categories affect the way people think, so that
speakers of different languages will tend to think and behave differently depending on the
language they use. The hypothesis is generally understood as having two different versions: (i)
the strong version that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and
determines cognitive categories and (ii) the weak version that linguistic categories and usage
influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behavior.
The idea was first clearly expressed by 19th century thinkers, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt
who saw language as the expression of the spirit of a nation. The early 20th century school of
American Anthropology headed by Franz Boas and Edward Sapir also embraced the idea. Sapir's
student Benjamin Lee Whorf came to be seen as the primary proponent of the hypothesis,
because he published observations of how he perceived linguistic differences to have
consequences in human cognition and behavior. Whorf's ideas were widely criticized, and Roger
Brown and Eric Lenneberg decided to put them to the test. They reformulated Whorf's principle
of linguistic relativity as a testable hypothesis, now called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, and
conducted experiments designed to find out whether color perception varies between speakers of
languages that classified colors differently. As the study of the universal nature of human
language and cognition came in to focus in the 1960s the idea of linguistic relativity fell out of
favor. A 1969 study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay showed that color terminology is subject to
universal semantic constraints, and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis was seen as completely
discredited.
From the late 1980s a new school of linguistic relativity scholars have examined the effects of
differences in linguistic categorization on cognition, finding broad support for weak versions of
the hypothesis in experimental contexts. Effects of linguistic relativity have been shown
particularly in the domain of spatial cognition and in the social use of language, but also in the
field of color perception. Recent studies have shown that color perception is particularly prone to
linguistic relativity effects when processed in the left brain hemisphere, suggesting that this brain
half relies more on language than the right one. Currently a balanced view of linguistic relativity
is espoused by most linguists holding that language influences certain kinds of cognitive
processes in non-trivial ways but that other processes are better seen as subject to universal
factors. Current research is focused on exploring the ways in which language influences thought
and determining to what extent. The principle of linguistic relativity and the relation between
language and thought has also received attention in varying academic fields from philosophy to
psychology and anthropology, and it has also inspired and colored works of fiction and the
invention of constructed languages.

9. Conclusion
Language = knowledge
Knowledge = culture
So,
Language = culture
Both are the means of identity. Both denotes life style and both are dynamic
Language is the keystone to the culture. Language is the carrier and container of cultural
information. Language expresses and symbolize cultural reality. Language is the primary means
to the cultural transmission.