Culture and Language
There are many ways in which the phenomena of language and culture are intimately related. Both phenomena are unique to humans and have therefore been the subject of a great deal of anthropological, and sociological study.
H.D Brown in his book “principle of Language Learning” writes that sociocultural factors such as stereotyping, attitudes, second culture acquisitions, social distance, culture in classroom, and language thoughts, and culture are the important parts of learning new language. He also writes that Social factors may affect a language, depending on a person’s status in society. For example if you are poor and cannot afford an education or you were raised to believe schooling wasn't important or you grew up in a rural area where proper grammar wasn't encouraged, your way of speaking might be different or not as eloquent as opposed to someone of higher standing.
I think that there are many ways in which culture really does determine language, or at least certain facets thereof. For example, in different languages we notice that you cannot find a specific word, just because that word is not simply a part of that culture. In Afghanistan for example, there is no word for “dating” because there is nothing like “dating” in this culture. And therefore, people do not know what to call this word. Or the new generation that now know what this means to them they use the English name for it. In the same vein, there is no word for “depression” in Farsi just because people are not in this situation ever, they are either sad or happy and there is nothing like “depression”.
Another part, which I think is really interesting in language and culture, is the word restrictions. Our culture does, sometimes, restrict what we can think about efficiently in our own language. For example, some languages have only three-color terms equivalent to black, white, and red; a native speaker of this language would have a difficult time expressing the concept of "purple" efficiently.
Linguistic differences are also often seen as the mark of another culture, and they very commonly create disagreement among neighboring peoples or even among different groups of the same nation For many people, language is not just the medium of culture but also is a part of culture. It is quite common for new language learners to a new country to retain their old customs and to speak their first language amongst fellow language speakers, even if all present are comfortable in their new language. This occurs because the native speakers are eager to preserve their own heritage, which includes not only customs and traditions but also language.
Over all, I believe that culture and language have a very strong relationship. As second language learners we have to be careful about some common errors and generalization that people make about a new culture and new language. As Brown concludes that “It appears possible to talk about anything in any language provided the speaker is willing to use some degree of circumlocution, every natural language provides both a language for talking about every other language, that is a metalanguage and an entirely adequate apparatus for making any kinds of observations that need to be made about the world”
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