READING/LISTENING

Exercise 1. Read and listen to Part 3of the series about culture using the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/webcast/tae_whoonearth_archive.shtml

The ‘building-blocks’ of culture are those things which help give a culture and its people their character, those things which can often be so very different from one culture to another. The most obvious difference of all is language.

There really ought to be a word 'languaculture' because language and culture are so fundamentally tied together. The way you speak to someone you know well would be completely different from the way you speak to someone you don't know well, or the way you speak to somebody junior to you would be very different to the way you speak to somebody who's senior to you. These are distinctions which are cultural and they have come into the language itself.

So, culture and language are tied together. Language isn’t just a tool to help people from the same culture communicate effectively. It’s also a window into the way people from that culture see the world.

Why should language tell us anything about a particular culture? Surely, we all look at the world in much the same way? After all, we are all human. Isn’t it natural to think that people from other cultures will use language in exactly the same way that we do? Well, maybe not.

A hundred years ago, language experts believed that you could say exactly the same thing in two different languages just by accurately translating the vocabulary and the grammar. But in the early 20th century, people began to look at languages a bit more closely. One of these people was the amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. He went to study the language of the Hopi people, in the south west of the United States of America. And he made some interesting discoveries. For example, the area where the Hopi lived was very cold – so they had many more different words for snow than, say, English has. Whorf also learnt that the Hopi saw ‘time’ as one continuous event. It couldn’t be broken up into units. So the language had no words to distinguish seasons like summer, autumn and winter – and there were no past or future tenses. Facts like these lead Whorf to draw conclusions that revolutionized the way people thought about language and culture. Whorf deduced from this that how you perceive the world affects the language that you speak because the language that you speak arises from your needs as a culture, the environment that you live in and that must mean that all of our languages are in some way different. And anyone who's ever tried to translate anything from one language to another will know that it's not easy and you sometimes have to translate concepts with very different words for the people in another culture to get the same meaning from them - this means that languages are relative and not universal.

Languages are different – and not just in the way they sound, or the words they use. The customs of a language, its grammar, the words themselves, are a product of the way the people of a culture experience the world. And we don’t all experience the world in the same way. This means that accurately translating words from one language to another may not be enough for us to understand the cultural meaning that lies behind the words.

Religious terminology features a lot more in Arab culture. People would invoke the name of God as protection over a new born child, they would say “praise God” if they mean I'm fine or if something good has happened, “if it's the will of God” when they're talking about hoping that something will happen. So that is a very strong feature in the language which means that a direct translation into English often sounds strange.

George Zhang from China thinks that the Chinese language helps people to visualize whereabouts they should be in the society and how they should behave - you are taught ever since you start to speak the language to follow certain kinds of rules. Writing an envelope is a very easy example. If you want to write to somebody in English you would say the name of the receiver, and then the number of the house and then you got a street and the district and the city and then finally the country. Well in Chinese it's the other way round. You start with the country and then go into the city and go in the district and then street, number of the house and person who receives the letter. In the Chinese language the person, the individual doesn't make any sense unless it is in the context. So the culture and the language in many ways are inter-related.

How are we going to understand anyone from a different language background if languages are so closely related to their culture and it’s so difficult to translate cultural meaning accurately? Well, don’t despair. We can still communicate with people from other cultures despite linguistic and cultural differences. The important thing is to be aware of these differences and to think about them when we meet people from different backgrounds. And when we do this, we take an important step on the road to more effective inter-cultural communication.

Exercise 2. Match the beginning of the sentences with the end. Translate the sentences.

1) The “building blocks” of culture are	a) a product of the way the people of a culture experience the world.
2) There must be a word “languaculture” because	b) the way we see the world.
3) Language is a tool to help people	c) things which can be so different from one culture to another.
4) The customs of a language, the words themselves are	d) despite linguistic and cultural differences.
5) Accurately translating words from one language to another may not be enough	e) from the same culture communicate effectively.
6) Our native language actually affects	f) language and culture are so fundamentally tied together.
7) You are taught ever since you start to speak the language	g) to follow certain kinds of rules.
8) We can still communicate with people from other cultures	h) to understand the cultural meaning that lies behind the words.

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