Does language influence culture?
Here's an interesting article on the Wall Street Journal about the relationship of language and culture. If you haven't studies psychology or applied linguistics, it's an interesting thought provoking article to get you primed for further exploration into the topic of language and culture - and if you are not interested in these topics enough to study them further, then it's a nice conversation (or ice breaker) topic for any meetups or cocktail parties that you go to :-)
The author, a university professor, writes that Chomsky's Universals have not withstood scrutiny. I am only starting to to immerse myself in psycholinguistics
so I don't really know much about the subject (other than the primers on Chomsky's Universal Grammar
), but as far as I know, Chomsky keeps refining his hypothesis, so if one version of the hypothesis has some issues, as more knowledge on the subject is gained and as more studies are conducted, we see newer interpretations of this hypothesis.
The interesting thing in this article is that studies show that by using different languages different things rose to importance in what people remembered. I think that this is interesting, and a reason for immigrant parents to really teach their kids both their native language and the lingua franca of the host country (in the case of the USA - English). It's also important to point out that we need to resist linguistic imperialism
(be it the imperialism of Chinese, English, Russian or any other language) and keep our ties to our ancestral languages so that these modes of though are retained. With greater diversity we have more opportunities for exploration and knowledge creation (How goes the Vulcan saying? Infinite Diversity Infinite Combinations?)
In any case, back to culture. I personally don't think that language is the sole influencer of culture. Language after all is a human construct. I think that culture influences language and vice versa. It's a circle whereby happenings in our cultures (history, religion, power, human-to-human relations, scientific discovery, etc.) influence what we use in our language and how we use it, and language itself goes back to influence our culture - think of Homer Simpson and the by now infamous "D'oh!" - I am certain that people use D'oh! and have never watched the Simpsons!
This topic is way too big to cover in one blog post, but it's definitely worth a discussion!
The author, a university professor, writes that Chomsky's Universals have not withstood scrutiny. I am only starting to to immerse myself in psycholinguistics
so I don't really know much about the subject (other than the primers on Chomsky's Universal Grammar), but as far as I know, Chomsky keeps refining his hypothesis, so if one version of the hypothesis has some issues, as more knowledge on the subject is gained and as more studies are conducted, we see newer interpretations of this hypothesis.The interesting thing in this article is that studies show that by using different languages different things rose to importance in what people remembered. I think that this is interesting, and a reason for immigrant parents to really teach their kids both their native language and the lingua franca of the host country (in the case of the USA - English). It's also important to point out that we need to resist linguistic imperialism
(be it the imperialism of Chinese, English, Russian or any other language) and keep our ties to our ancestral languages so that these modes of though are retained. With greater diversity we have more opportunities for exploration and knowledge creation (How goes the Vulcan saying? Infinite Diversity Infinite Combinations?)In any case, back to culture. I personally don't think that language is the sole influencer of culture. Language after all is a human construct. I think that culture influences language and vice versa. It's a circle whereby happenings in our cultures (history, religion, power, human-to-human relations, scientific discovery, etc.) influence what we use in our language and how we use it, and language itself goes back to influence our culture - think of Homer Simpson and the by now infamous "D'oh!" - I am certain that people use D'oh! and have never watched the Simpsons!
This topic is way too big to cover in one blog post, but it's definitely worth a discussion!
Comments
As far as the US goes, the picture is a bit more "asta na pane" from what you describe. Because education is something that individual states take care of, you might have 50 different ways of doing things. In Massachusetts currently school teachers cannot speak to kids in their native language (except to make very brief clarifications) otherwise they have a lot to answer for (I do believe that they may even lose their jobs in the worst case scenario).
In the US, at least one example we've seen regarding linguistic imperialism is that of the native americans/indians where kids were being forced to go to schools where they were punished for speaking their own language. I think we've got tons to discuss when we meet face to face next time - kafeneio time! LOL :-)