Language and Culture

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Claire Kramsch on language and culture Chapiter 1 the relationship of language and culture Language is the principal means whereby we conduct our social lives. When it is used in contexts of communication, it is bound up with culture in multiple and complex ways. The people express facts, ideas or events that are communicable because they refer to a stock of knowledge about the world that other people share. In other words, language expresses cultural reality. This people do not only express experience but they also create experience through language. They give meaning to it through the medium they choose to communicate with one another, for example, speaking on the telephone or face to face, writing a letter or sending a email message, reading newspaper or interpreting a graph. Indeed, the way in which people use the spoken, written, the speaker’s tone of voice, accent, conversational style, gestures and facial expression. Through all its verbal and non–verbal aspects, language embodies cultural reality. Speakers identify themselves and others through their use of language, they view their language as a symbol of their social identity. The prohibition of its use is often perceived by its speakers as a rejection of their social group and their culture (in others words, it is perceived like a rejection of our humanity). So, we can say that language symbolizes cultural reality. Nature, culture, language One way of thinking about culture is to contrast it with nature. Nature refers to what is born and grows organically ( from the Latin nascere: to be born); culture refers to what has been grown and groomed (from the latin colere: to cultivate). The debate is now: Are human being mainly what nature determines them to be from birth or what culture enables them to become through socialization and schooling? Culture are not a biological phenomena but

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