Dear Khalil,
I suppose that valuable responses you could obtain from social and culture psychologists,sociolinguists. I would like to draw your attention to accurate suggestion expressed by Ludwig Wittgenstein who said: "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world". Various interpretations could be applied.
Language is part of one's identity. If you look into the identity factors for example, hearing impared or the fully deaf, they see their "special" ability of communicating through sign language as being part of their group identity. In multicultural societies where there are two or more spoken languages such as in Belgium, Canada (Quebec), New Zealand, and in Israel, (Arabic and Hebrew), as well as in countries of major immigration, for better and for worse, language is part of the group identity.
It depends how much is the intensity of the immersion. More immersion means more adoption of the culture. I understand, it is very hard to separate language and culture. However, if it is ESP then it may have minimum impact. I hope it helps!
Dear colleague,
Yes, the language may have an impact on the cultural and national identity and the given impact can be managed, for instance:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303543422_RECENT_REDAGOGICAL_STRATEGIES_DIRECTED_TOWARDS_THE_MAINTENANCE_OF_NATIONAL_IDENTITY
Conference Paper RECENT REDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES DIRECTED TOWARDS THE MAINTENAN...
Can a language affect cultural identity?
Yes it does - in Malaysia, there is a saying "Bahasa Jiwa Bangsa" meaning language is the soul of a nation.
what other factors can have an impact on cultural identities?
Agreed with what Bakthiar has shared above, want to add other factors include:
Yes, language can affect cultural identity significantly. Research proved that there is a strong link between language and identity. In our study in South Darfur among internally displaced people, we have found that people had a strong awareness of the importance of their own languages for their cultural identities. There was negative attitude towards Arabic because it symbolized the Arabs and their cultural accused of dominating the linguistic reality of the Sudan (Dahawi &Maddam, 20013, International Journal for the sociology of Language).
If you think from the Cultural Studies, and perhaps a bit from the previous Linguistic Turn, the language "is" cultural identity. It is not only part of what makes up our cultural identity but, following Wittgenstein, our understanding of the world and therefore our phenomenological-cultural vision of our environment, goes through our language.
Language can affect the cultural identity of the learner, but it cannot erease her/his ethnic identity (see Waters M. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. University of California Press).
Dear all,
Thanks for your contribution to this question thread. I'm doing research on literary language used in postcolonial fiction in English (especially in Pakistani English short story). Literary writers intentionally use language variety... what will you say about the language used in literature... In my selected story the author uses Arabic words, Persian words, Urdu..Irani together with English as the principle medium.. I expect that here the author wants to restore lost identity.. lost past...
After winning the War of Independence from Britain (1783, or thereabouts) there was a strong movement in favour of adopting German as the official language of the USA. The vote was extremely close - but we can say that history would undoubtedly have turned out very differently, if German had been chosen instead of English !
Hi! I think so, and it is important to go beyond just categorically saying yes or no. One should also demonstrate the impact and how. Perhaps soon, we can evolve a taxonomy of impact patterns.
I have something to share too.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229049761_Englishization_as_an_Aspect_of_Building_Singapore_Identity
Chapter Englishization as an Aspect of Building Singapore Identity
As a fact the idea is not new, it has a long history. You can follow the idea of language building a "cultural identity" back to Leibnitz "language is a mirror of the human mind" (translated free), or Grimm (Jacob) to just call some examples. I guess there have been comparable thoughts and theses of English or other scientist in the 18th/19th century who used your question as a basic assumption.
Yes, it does. Articles and bibliography available on Academia.edu, on websites https://txupi.wordpress.com ; http://users.clas.ufl.edu/hardman/ ; in the digital Jaqi collection of the UF library http://ufdc.ufl.edu/jaqi ; on my primary website http://at.ufl.edu/~hardman-grove/ ; y otros sites tras el Internet. Actualmente hay trabajo interesante en el Perú y que va reconociendo la naturaliza de identidad y lenguaje hasta con leyes al respeto.
There are a lot of good reads for this question. Here is one i quoted from an article, "Once we have moved away from the place of our original culture and begun the process of adapting to another culture, we broaden our perceptions, noticing things that are done differently or similarly between the two cultures. We learn a whole new set of culturally and linguistically defined rules and value systems with the result that our own perception of the culturally induced life experience is expanded." http://www.digitrends.com/crossingcultures/iden.htm
Dear Khalil,
I suppose that valuable responses you could obtain from social and culture psychologists,sociolinguists. I would like to draw your attention to accurate suggestion expressed by Ludwig Wittgenstein who said: "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world". Various interpretations could be applied.
The short answer is that language IS cultural identity, at least, the language(s) you speak identify you culturally. And for all cultures their language is their greatest heritage, it's just that minoritised language-cultures are more aware of that than languages of strong international powers, who may be more unaware, because as they see their language shared by many millions of people they may identify their culture to establish a smaller cultural identity within a larger language community, e.g. different cutlural identities within English, Spanish or Arabic -language communities.
language is a part of cultural identity, I think the question is to what degree language conditions our understanding of the world and of ourselves in it (Sapir - Whorf hypothesis). In this respect it will be interesting to research bi- or multilingual speakers.
By learning a language you certainly develop a secondary language personality. This means you take in a lot from the culture of the people who speak the target language. There are things (in my language) that I would never say in English because people might find them offensive. Therefore, my mother tongue personality changes into a different personality when I speak English, for instance, or German.
I believe it was the poet W B Yeats who said: "English is my native language but Irish is my mother tongue." That sums up my attitude. I am fluent in Irish, but English is undoubtedly the language I am most proficient in. I have no emotional attachment to English, it in no way defines who I consider myself to be.
Wolfgang - That is indeed an interesting question regarding the [future] 'working' languages of the European Parliament. I am inclined to guess that, if all member nations were asked to vote, then there would be a lot of support for retaining English - even after 'Brexit'.
The linguistic diversity of the European Union is something of a sham. Earlier in my career I used to attend a lot of EU meetings on education and language policy. They were invariably conducted thru the medium of English. It was common at the beginning of a session to 'dismiss the interpreters', on the basis that everyone knew English. Sometimes the English was execrable--I remember a Portuguese delegate whose English was quite unintelligible, but all the attendees insisted on favouring English as the sole conference language. I used to ask the French and Spanish delegates why they didn't use their languages--it seemed that language policy people in Europe are really just ESL people. Also Mass Immigration favours the BIG Languages, especially English. Just about none of the huge number of foreign migrants in Ireland bothers to learn Irish, for example.
Good evening Khalili,
You may be interested in Merleau-Ponty's writing on the subject in Phenomenology of Perception . A common methodology used by Merleau-Ponty is to consider a non-standard case relating to his subject, to look at a situation where there is a social difficulty or a pathological problem - where something is abnormal or 'broken'. In this case he considers language skills by investigating how an individual could learn a second language. One could gain a rudimentary comprehension by studying text books and from classroom work, however, in order to acquire a cultural comprehension, and to be able to express oneself in a fuller sense an immersion in a world that speaks the target language is required.. The conclusion is that we are most comfortable and expressive when speaking in our native tongue, that is, in the majority of cases, the language learnt from birth, childhood and adolescence. These language skills are informed by our habitus, the cultural messages and values that are passed on by parents and the cultural groups with which we associate up to early adulthood.
Best wishes in your endeavours.
@ David B - [There are plenty of Irish people, too, who do not bother about mastering Irish >] - So here is a more reprehensible example: There are Brits who have been living in Spain for a decade or more, but without learning more than a dozen words of Spanish ! ... Changing the subject, it is of course ridiculous to try and insist that all 27 (?) EU languages should have 'official' status; thus, you and Wolfgang are right, three is a good, workable compromise [i.e., + French, + German]... I remember reading somewhere that the Italians were quite happy to accept that it would not be more than three; (Spain, on the other hand, tried to insist on adding Spanish).
Your analogy is defective, since Spanish is a great world language and will survive just fine whether or not some retirees on the Costa del Sol try to learn it. (And why do you pick out British retirees, you're surely not claiming that German retirees make an effort to learn Spanish?). Irish, in contrast, is in intensive care. Of course migrants are not responsible for that, but every migrant who settles Ireland strengthens the position of English, and weakens that of Irish.
I don't understand your reference to Spanish. Spaniards and Hispanic Americans would be quite right to insist on Castilian being included in any list of fundamentally important languages. It has far more speakers than German or French, and is spoken in far more countries. Mexico alone has a hundred million.
On another point, I notice earlier you recycled the old canard about German nearly becoming an official language of the US. That;'s a myth, it didn't happen.
Thank you David B, for drawing my attention to the "Muhlenberg Myth" ... [2] Yes, Germans are more prepared than English people to learn other languages - and that includes the German retirees that I have met here in SE Spain, who do make a very commendable effort to learn Spanish... [3] Within the context just of Europe, Italian is more important than Spanish. [4] On a world-wide basis, yes, Spanish certainly deserves to be included in the list of the six (or eight?) most significant languages - but it can be misleading to focus purely on numbers of speakers; i.e. we need to try and look beyond mere quantity - although it would admittedly be difficult to do that rigorously. But as a suggestion, we might observe that the Gross National Product of Germany (and of Japan) is greater than the sum of the GNP's of all the Hispanic countries (at least, I believe so?) We could perhaps also compare numbers of academic articles and books published during the last several decades: German and French would both feature well in that regard.
Yes, but language, such as identity, is not simply something given. It is a process, wich usally works in a open, dialogic way. Nowadays, in the age of intercultural exchanges, we should be far away from the Romantic equation: language equal to identity, "soul" of a "people" (Herder). Identity as "sameness" is an ideological construct. More exactely, identity is a narration, using one o more languages, and lots of other ways of expression / symbolic representation. See also Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre, Le Seuil, 1990.
I think if it doesn't there hasn't been any progress in leaning ..... I recommend further reading on the term 'intercultural speaker' (Michael Byram, for example)
I think Lera's work will be very insightful to you. She is a specialist on the topic and she defends that language shape our thoughts. Take a look at this short article: https://psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/sci-am-2011.pdf
Apparently, language makes a significant factor in establishing a cultural identity. If it did not, there would not be four different languages nowadays referred to as Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian. Many linguists still consider these as one and the same language. However, laypersons, politicians, nationalists, etc think otherwise.
David M: I suggest you travel a little in Latin America and see how far German, or even French gets you. As regards your rejection of 'quantity', it appears you are thinking of what you construe as 'quality'---you seem to think that a German capitalist is worth more than a Colombian farmer. I don't. If I can adapt Dean Swift's line--"whosoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind than the whole race of EU industrialists put together."
Your claim that the GNP of Germany exceeds the combined GNP of all the Spanish-speaking nations looks bogus to me, though even if it were true, so what?
Your anecdotal experience of the readiness of German speakers to learn Spanish really has no validity. My experience has been different, but I don't put my experience forward as evidence. In any case far more Spaniards want to learn English than want to learn German. They're more willing to use English in stores, restaurants etc.
As regards numbers of scholarly articles, you don't strike me as competent to assess how many are published in Spanish.
David Barnwell,
I have been studying Irish for several years and am still working on a teaching tool (sentence pattern translation) at http://mokennon.albion.edu.
If I ever immigrate to Ireland, I will continue studying Irish. I think there are many people who will immigrate with that attitude. I hope so anyway. Intensive care is better than dead.
There are many people in Canada who study Irish intensively and even somewhat competitively. There is even a Gaeltacht in Ontario. I hope Irish has a bright future.
Sorry if this sounds sentimental rather than academic. It is both.
There are no poor or rich languages; there are poor or rich language users (identity is within them)!
Valdimir Ž. Jovanović is right: Of course language may be basic in establishing (cultural) identity: it is an excellent ingredient in the narration (good entry, Nora Moll) of identity that nationalists like. It happened with Basque, which became the main asset of Basque nationalism.
We our birth we come to know because of our parents observe & atmosphere of our family & with increasing observation we come to know thru our parents,CASTE,CREED,& RELIGION . It is this triangle every human beings differ from person to person as they have with them the knowledge of their mother tongue,cultural environment of the family & the umbrella of religion prepare them to cover for worthy human being.
It is not the language of our Mother tongue only but with our own contribution & under our successive career & working environment we come across quite good of our colleague we can receive an opportunity to come to know regarding the exchange of our views & knowledge of each other which also play an important the input of our cultural in personal life .
This is my personal opinion
Yes. Language transmits people's cultural aspects . When Language is dead, culture is dead. Factors include migration, intermarriage, employment , urbanization and religious factors
Hi!
Here is an interesting article that can answer your question
http://languagemagazine.com/?page_id=2103
Certainly, more than that, language has the prevailing role in this issue. There is a nice experiment in the article by Katherine D. Kinzler et al. Accent trumps race in guiding children's social preferences. The results were interesting.
The role of language in the formation of cultural identity differs greatly across communities. This is probably what explains why in migration situations some communities retain the language for two or three generations while others switch into the majority language within the first generation (e.g., in Australia Arabic speakers would be an example of the former and Dutch speakers of the later). Jewish communities are also a good example of a group whose identity is not crucially attached to language, as many members of these communities identify as Jewish without necessarily speaking Hebrew/Yiddish/Ladino, etc. I would say that the role of language in the formation of cultural identity is thus very idiosyncratic. But another question would be, to what extend does the support/rejection of a minority language by the wider community impact on the ethnic/cultural identity of a minority language speaker?
In fact, language is an integral part of cultural identity. The proof is in the various ethno-cultural, philosophical and cultural particularisms, present in all languages of the world.For example, the word 'saudade' is a part of the portuguese specifical and lexicon identity, which not exists in any other cultural space.
Susana A.E. - [looking too at Khalil's second question: "What other factors can have an impact on cultural identities?"] - one's religion plays a key role. This might explain why second and third-generation Australian Arabs are encouraged to cultivate Arabic (because the ability to read the Qur'an in the original language, is regarded as important ... whereas there is not as much pressure on Jews [am I right?] to read their ancient texts in Hebrew). Also - referring now to Vladimir Ž. Jovanović's mention of differences between the Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian tongues - we do know that their respective religions helped to separate them into three distinct communities.
Language, being a tool of communication, reflecls one,s cultural identity through the words and structure and sometimes interpretation of new words .I found one American could not get the meaning of synopsis. I have to use the word abstract, where as abstract is different for Indians
Good day,
Teacher Anzanyo says that culture dies with the loss of the hereditary language. If this is so, most of us must be twitching zombies and cultureless orphans. We are better off not setting ourselves up for a fall by adopting this view too strictly.
When the world chooses at last an auxiliary language, its citizens will throw off the burden of multilingualism and free up time and resources for the proper maintenance of local and minority languages and for the close monitoring of cultural succession.
Through the implementation of a world-wide second language, the precious generational depth of language-culture pairings could pursue its maturation undisturbed, and without the perplexing drain witnessed in current projects designed to maintain or revive languages and associated cultures.
Until then, distressing questions of the relationship between language and culture will never move much beyond being just that -sources of more and more distress and bleak questioning.
The human brain has the power and potential to handle any number of languages and cultures, but life is too short to realize more than a symbolic shadow of this capacity.
Internationally standardized bilingualism, on the other hand, is surely attainable by all without serious inconvenience, and through it local languages may not merely survive, but thrive.
To some degree, language does impact on one's beliefs and practices. The element of borrowing and sharing perspectives on issues that impact one's everyday experiences does lead to change. Such change may be for the better - a broader understanding - and alternative ways of doing/experiencing the world by the individual.
In my opinion, culture is certainly affected by language or vice versa. I am 56, and the son of a refugee family settling in Turkey nearly a century ago. I have cousins taking refuge in USA, Syria, Jordan, etc. We all speak the same native language despite living in different countries, but you can see a lot of differences while we are speaking as to our jokes, the words we use and our gestures or mimics. So I agree with Ms. Nyamasyo.
As far as I'm concerned, language impacts one's culture but in a positive way. We develop a certain awareness, understanding and easiness in communicating with others. We'll have access to other worlds: music, literature, customs etc. All this interaction will bring people closer and let them see that they are not so different indeed. What an impact!! A monoglot will never have this chance and see other languages as a threat rather than a chance.
Off course, language "is" cultural identity in so many ways. Our language constructs a substancial part of our identity because it "makes" the world in wich we live in. Maybe you would like to read the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein or John Austin.
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