For many years, researchers have tried to define the exact line that separates language and culture. But two are so fundamentally interrelated that you can’t really have one without the other.
Language can be thought of as a set of rules that facilitates communication; and communication is of course a cornerstone of culture. Culture on the other hand defines many aspects of language, like how a young person should speak to an adult or how an employee should speak to a manager.
Take a look at the following story, and you’ll see how language and culture are deeply intertwined:
A woman has just moved to the United States and met her new neighbor for the first time. They chatted for several minutes, when the neighbor said, “I have to go, but we’ll chat later.” After the neighbor left, the woman went into her apartment and starting preparing snacks and tea for when her neighbor would be ready to chat later again. She waited for hours into the night with no sign of her neighbor.
In this story the woman is perfectly able to carry out a fluent conversation. But she failed to understand the cultural connotation of the phrase, “we’ll chat later.” It does not literally mean that they will be meeting up to chat more later that day, or even the next day. “We’ll chat later” is just another way that Americans might say “goodbye.”
True mastery of a language involves much more that just linguistic competence. An understanding of the subtle cultural inferences tied to language is also needed. Cultural competence, defined as knowledge of conventions, customs, beliefs and systems, is crucial for understanding the cultural bits and pieces of a language. Learning about a culture can also make you feel closer to the language and associated societies, making your linguistic experience more native-like.
When learning English, learners will face cultural elements that may seem quite foreign. For example, in English we address adults and children with the 2nd person singular pronoun ‘you’ and there is no distinction between the two groups. In many languages, like French, there are specific pronouns used in different contexts; ‘tu’- used with someone younger or familiar to you and ‘vous’- used when being polite. If a French English-learner doesn’t understand this difference they may feel that it is rude to call an elderly person ‘you’. And on the flip side, an English French-learner may not realize that using ‘tu’ in a job interview would be considered rude.
Many other areas of culture affect language, for example: agreeing and disagreeing, giving and taking compliments and giving or asking for advice. We’ll dig into the cultural aspects of language again in a future post.
