I am also interested in the relations between language and culture. I have an article on my ResearchGate "Publications" page, in Spanish, about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which you might find useful. Any feedback or criticism would be most welcome.

Thank you David for replying. I will get onto it straight away.

i strongly agree with you, like my country, Indonesia, we have many ethnic languages and there are almost 700 languages from more than 300 ethnics. Although we have national language, "Bahasa Indonesia" but we still use ethnics languages in a particular circumstance. if we live in the different ethnic we must know about their language, and when you learn about it, you must know their culture before. its because the language is a product of the culture.

Thank you Yoggi.

I live in New Zeland, and I have this nagging thought in the back of my mind that unless we make Te Reo Maori compulsory in the schools, we will always have a cultural gap.

Hi luis,

being fluent in a foreign language is a difficult cognitive process that require reading skills and strategies and also decoding skills and comprehension. you can learn it just as a technique to decode but you will understand its organization by knowing the culture because the language system is the mirror of a culture. fluency and conversing are tools that you can learn, but when you can think, dream, be angry or swear in an other language automaticaly without a conscious thought about it, that means that you've acquired the culture. when the customs of that foreign language are not strange to you anymore but became part od your way of life you have adopted this culture as your own, it's an inalienable part of you and who you are. learning a new language you develop metalinguistic skills that makes you think deeply about the language. language is pragmatic, so you can't learn it without a context, and when we talk about context we must know that cultur is context.

with this topic we can start a new one, and it's bilinguisam.

PS

Hi Luis,

being fluent in a foreign language is a difficult cognitive process that require reading skills and strategies and also decoding skills and comprehension. you can learn it just as a technique to decode but you will understand its organization by knowing the culture because the language system is the mirror of a culture. fluency and conversing are tools that you can learn, but when you can think, dream, be angry or swear in an other language automaticaly without a conscious thought about it, that means that you've acquired the culture. when the customs of that foreign language are not strange to you anymore but became part od your way of life you have adopted this culture as your own, it's an inalienable part of you and who you are. learning a new language you develop metalinguistic skills that makes you think deeply about the language. language is pragmatic, so you can't learn it without a context, and when we talk about context we must know that cultur is context.

with this topic we can start a new one, and it's bilinguisam.

PS

I like the idea of making Te Reo Maori cumpulsory.

Hi Petra,

Thank you so much for your answer. It makes perfect sense and is exactly what I 'believe' in. The issue I have is when a nation declares itself bicultural although does not do enough to promote the 'other' language which (it my mind) leaves the population is a perpetual catch up mode in terms of understanding the other official culture. It needs a completely different change of mindset and (I think) 2 generations to turn around.

Hi again David.

Te Reo Maori (along with Sign Language and English) are the official languages of New Zealand although I do not see it being pushed through the education curriculum at a level that I would like.

There is no appetite for this to happen both politically and socially, and still the cultural gap remains.

If language helps with learning the culture then I see this as a 'must have'.

I will keep plodding away.

Cheers

Luis

Apreciado Luis:

Here are some links you may find interesting and/or useful:

http://www.unesco.org/cpp/uk/declarations/linguistic.pdf

(Write to me for a PDF of a more complete version published by the activists that drafted the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights.)

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/strengthening-education-systems/languages-in-education/

http://www.inali.gob.mx/

http://diariooficial.segob.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?codigo=698625&fecha=13/03/2003

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/links.html

Keep on plodding,

David

Thanks Danielle. Appreciate you comments.

Are any First Nation languages promoted in the Canadian Education Curriculum and if so, what has the feedback been from students, policy makers etc?

Your effort is better understood...when u study ur question from nations having language diversity..........1.language is first taught by family...which is nothing but socialising the child2.primary /secondary education is taught in mother tongue...thatz second phase of teaching culture 3.after the decline of imperialism..all the countries ruled by british accepted english as second/third language...the result is adopting western culture in high degree...i.e.westernised4.present day world is highly westernised....i.e...english is taught all over the world along with mother tongue

by the above....we can conclude ....a culture better understood...when we read the language...whether it should be adopted or not..decided by studying its language(literature) only......next.....a culture or language will not develop...if it does not have state support

Yes,Language laernign teaches about the culture . Language is the repositoryof culture. If a language is lost the whole culture is lost. E.Haribabu

A helpful conversation and I agree!

Thank you Chaitanya. We do not have state support here for Te Reo to move beyond its current level (as far as I can see).

Thank you Danielle. Is there any political appetite to move native language into the mainstream? If not, why do you think there isn't?

Thanks Linda.

Language is certainly a big part of culture, but its role is sometimes exaggerated (for example, in the writings of Benjamn Lee Whorf). Mental images and memories related to the other senses are all part of the picture, as cognitive anthropologists have shown us. The work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson sheds some light on this (for example, their book Philosophy in the flesh).

Thanks David. I am currently looking at Whorf and will now also look at George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. As usual, thank you for your high quality input.

You're very welcome, Luis. Here's something else you may find interesting:

Boroditsky, Lera, “How language shapes thought, the languages we speak affect our perceptions of the world,” in Scientific American (Nature Publishing Group), vol. 304, no. 2, Feb. 2011, pp. 43-45.

Thank you David (English)

Gracias David (Spanish)

Good onya Mate (Australian)

Kia Ora David (Maori)

In many sociological and economic studies on the effects of local or national culture on something, mother tongue/majority language is employed as a proxy for the person's/region's culture. You might find some justifications for using language as proxy for cutlure in the papers co-authored by Luigi Guiso (EIEF) as well as the paper on culture, democracy and happiness written by me and co-authored by David Dorn, G. Kirchgaessner and A.Sousa-Poza. The argument is that values and social norms are embedded in language.

Thank you Justina. Much appreciated

If I learn a new language outside of the country (and perhaps by a second language speaker), then I may not learn or be aware of the cultural aspects. However, if I learn a language in the country where it is spoken the most, I will be learning the cultural aspects since I will be practicing the language within the language community . The language environment matters, and I think. there may be bi-directional causality between language acquisition and cultural awareness, provided the environment is supportive.

Thanks Ronald. A supportive environment is a key aspect that I will need to look at as well. Thanks again.

P. S. I recently came across a video of a lecture by Lera Boroditsky where she goes into greater detail than in the Scientific American article: http://fora.tv/2010/10/26/Lera_Boroditsky_How_Language_Shapes_Thought

Thank you David.. Must have been reading my mind!

Yes you are correct. Learning a persons language allows us to also understand ones culture. Culture as we know is basically the way of life of a group of people so, language plays a vital role in it. I think if we don't understand the language than it will be very difficult to research into other culture. If someone else explains it will be very hard sometimes to understand and interpret in our writings. There can be instances where the translator may not understand what we want, so learning the language helps us understand the culture also.

Thank You

Seeing as I am every language, learning a language teaches Me about Myself.

Erik, this is art (nice).

Yes, as the Linguist and Language in One and as the Painter and Painting in One, I have the most beautiful experience of My Unity and Being. Peace on Earth, Ana.

Me and my Creation...

Happy Easter!

Thank you Sajid.

I can safely say that across the board people do agree with the concept although there are some areas we need to keep in mind aka (Ronald - supportive environment and David - Mental images and memories related to the other senses).

I am not specifically looking for advantages in cultural / societal benefits. I am finding it extremely hard to find anything on the subject that refers specifically to native - western bilingual benefits. Coming from New Zealand I have a 'hunch' (not very scientific I know) that if you were bilingual in Te Reo Maori / English your cultural capital would increase and therefore there may be a decrease in anti Maori encoding across media / population over time.

Studies around the world for Inuit / English, Navajo / English or Te Reo / English are non existent. Studies for Western / Western are numerous. I am working through a research proposal at the moment which will be looking at this very gap.

Regards

Luis

Thank you Ana and Erik.

Beautiful

You might want to check the book Jarvis, S. & Pavlenko, A. (2008). Crosslinguistic influence in in language and cognition. Routledge.

It is quite interesting and full of cross-linguistic examples, including the interaction of language and culture.

As far as Johnson & Lakoff (1980) is concerned, they are mainly dealing with conceptual metaphors. I don't know if you find that useful.

And I have to say that it is actually a misconception that Inuits have 100 different words for snow. This idea initially started with Whorf in 50s, where he mention there have several words, and that number with each author and each citation grew. Today, it is well know they have only few word roots for snow (e.g. as much as English does).

Laura Martin first wrote about it, you can check it if you want to know more about it: Martin, Laura (1986). "Eskimo Words for Snow: A case study in the genesis and decay of an anthropological example". American Anthropologist 88 (2), 418-23

Tanja: If you take a good look at George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's book *Philosophy in the flesh, the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought* (1999), as well as Lakoff's work *Women, fire, and dangerous things: what categories reveal about the mind* (1987), in addition to Lakoff's and Johnson's text of 1980 that you mention, I think you will find ideas that are relevant to the discussion of the role of language in cognition and culture. Lakoff shows how cognitive models give structure to our thoughts and form the basis of conceptual categories which go beyond the lexical sphere:

“But metaphor is not merely a matter of language. It is a matter of conceptual structure. And conceptual structure is not merely a matter of the intellect — it involves all the natural dimensions of our experience, including aspects of our sense experiences: color, shape, texture, sound, etc. These dimensions structure not only mundane experience but aesthetic experience as well. Each art medium picks out certain dimensions of our experience and excludes others. Artworks provide new ways of structuring our experience in terms of these natural dimensions. Works of art provide new experiential gestalts and, therefore, new coherences. From the experientialist point of view, art is, in general, a matter of imaginative rationality and a means of creating new realities” (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we live by, 2nd. ed., Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1981 [1st ed. 1980], pp. 235, 236).

Several years later the same authors expanded these ideas:

“Metaphorical idioms are philosophically important in a number of ways. First, they show something important about meaning, namely, that words can designate portions of conventional mental images.

“Second, they show that mental images do not necessarily vary wildly from person to person. Instead, there are conventional mental images that are shared across a large proportion of the speakers of a language.

“Third, they show that a significant part of cultural knowledge takes the form of conventional images and knowledge about those images. Each of us appears to have thousands of conventional images as part of our long-term memory.

“Fourth, they open the possibility that a significant part of the lexical differences across languages may have to do with differences in conventional imagery. The same metaphorical mappings applied to different images will give rise to different linguistic expressions of those mappings.

“Fifth, they show dramatically that the meaning of the whole is not a simple function of the meanings of the parts. Instead, the relationship between the meaning of the parts and the meaning of the whole is complex. The words evoke an image; the image comes with knowledge; conventional metaphors map appropriate parts of that knowledge onto a target domain; the result is the meaning of the idiom. Thus, a metaphorical idiom is not just a linguistic expression of a metaphorical mapping. It is the linguistic expression of an image plus knowledge about the image plus one or more metaphorical mappings. It is important to separate that aspect of the meaning that has to do with the general metaphorical mapping from that portion that has to do with the image and knowledge of the image” (George Lakoff y Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought, New York, Basic Books, 1999, p. 69).

I found these books to be invaluable when I was trying to work out the relationship between language and culture in general, around ten years ago, as part of my doctoral studies.

The book by Jarvis and Pavlenko looks interesting. I will try to locate a copy and have a look.

Thank you David for your exhaustive answer. I agree with all stated.

Also, I believe Lakoff&Johnson's work is quite interesting and has a great theoretical value. However, observed patterns in language do not necessarily reflect the pattern of thought (they might, but mere linguistic data is not an appropriate evidence for that). Only few conceptual metaphors (to my knowledge) have been empirically tested (such as "time is space", "sad is down, happy is up" etc., i.e. mapping from one domain to another. Boroditsky has done a great body of research on first topic).

Furthermore, studying conceptual metaphors is only one fraction of language-culture relationship.The book suggested above (Cross-linguistic influence...) gives an examples for verbs, personal pronouns, tense etc. in different languages.

When said "I don't know if you find that useful." I just wanted to say I do not know what the author of the question was asking/looking for. I was not underestimating the work of L&J, an I am sorry if you anyone got it that way.

It seems to me that we have different approaches and ideas when talking about the "culture". Does this refer to concept organization or the way people live? Their habits and mores?

Just to mention one more thing related to the topic

There is a work of Eleanor Rosch that is dealing with the perception of colors in different cultures, i.e. with the testing of strong Whorf hypothesis. If anyone finds this interesting.

Rosch, E.H. (1973). "Natural categories". Cognitive Psychology 4 (3): 328–50.

Rosch, E. (1975). "Cognitive representation of semantic categories," Journal of Experimental Psychology 104(3): 192-233.

Tanja:

Thank you for sharing the references. All of this is very useful to me.

This is the working definition of culture I came up with for my studies of Mesoamerican pictorial manuscripts (translated here from Castilian): "The ideas, values and collective behaviour patterns of a determined human group; culture consists of a complex of interrelated subsystems, the borders of which are generally blurry and don't coincide; these cultural subsystems are transmitted and learned, and are continously being adapted to changes in the geographical and social context of the group."

The reason I became interested in the relations between language and culture is that the evidence I was looking at suggested the existence, in the central highlands of Mexico and adjacent regions at the time of the Spanish conquest, of a relatively homogenous central Mexican culture shared by speakers of languages from very diverse families (Yutonahuan, Otomanguean, and the isolate Tarascan). There was -and still is- a rather naive belief that linguistic borders tend to coincide with the borders between other cultural subsystems (like diet, religion, dress, social organization and others). The influence of Whorf, direct or indirect, seems to be behind this naiveté. I came to the conclusion that Whorf's postulate that language determines culture greatly overestimates the role of language in determining cognition and culture. Lera Borodistsky tries to prop up Whorf's view, and does indeed show some cases where languages can cause differences in thinking between one language community and another, while cognitive differences can cause linguistic contrasts. She concedes that cognition seems to be a complex of linguistic and extralinguistic processes, while insisting that language plays an important role in most of our cognitive processes.

It is these extralinguistic processes that interest me, especially those related to images, since central Mexican pictorial writing is essentially a translinguistic pictorial notational system, semasiographic in nature, that was shared by speakers of very diverse languages (although this system lends itself to the occasional language-specific glottograph, through homophonic word plays using the "rebus" principle). Central Mexican pictorial writing goes beyond iconography in its conventionality, its complexity, and its use as a mnemonic device to reinforce oral discourse and transmission. It straddles the blurry border between Western semantic categories of "writing" and "painting/sculpture". Indeed, if one looks up "writing" and "painting" in colonial dictionaries with Castilian words glossed in native languages, one invariably finds the same native word for both lexical items.

I also found that cultural subsystems were shared across linguistic boundaries, by comparing lexical items within semantic fields (like social structures, calendrical terms, toponyms, anthoponyms, and others), including metaphorical couplets where the combination of two concepts produces a new concept that goes beyond the sum of its parts.

All of this work led me to the conclusion that the role of language in culture is often exaggerated, especially in anthropological studies dealing with Mesoamerica. The role of mental images has been underestimated. Recent studies in neuroscience are shedding some badly needed light on this area of research.

This time I'm afraid I have gone beyond what Luis was trying to elicit with his question!

Thank you for your answer, David.

That is very intriguing research you've done.

Unfortunately, I have no knowledge of Mexican pictorial writing and belonging linguistic background. However, you gave us a nice insight in this problem, and I might take I better look in it.

As far as linguistic determinism is concerned, I agree with you that the role of language in thinking and culture is often exaggerated.

Tanja: I should have mentioned that from March to July 2013 we had a discussion based on Whorf's postulate that language determines culture here at ResearchGate:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_are_the_current_views_on_Benjamin_Lee_Whorfs_ideas_that_language_determines_culture

learning a language of advanced country means you can learn a lot of scientific literature of that advanced country. Its one of the way to learn latest knowledge

Dear Luis,

Thank you for your good and important question.

Before answering this question, it is important to understand and confirm your motivations to language learning because the motivation would decide the state of your language acquisition and your attitude toward cultural engagement. It is highly associated with, or sometimes depends on in many ways, language learners' personality, expectation, and need.

As John Keller (1983) argues, "Motivation refers to the choices people make as to what experiences or goals they will approach or avoid and the degree of effort they will exert in this respect" (p. 389).

If you decide to be humble to know, understand, and engage other people's culture (ways of knowing, being, doing) and not just learn their language skills (i.e., effective communication), then it is correct and legitimate to contend that a valid language learning would need to include cultural learning.

If we take this question into an alternative level to highlight why learning minority or disadvantaged languages is so important for human beings, the studies on endangered language will be helpful in deepening our understanding of your question. Many linguists and sociolinguists (Joshua A. Fishman, Suzanne Romaine, Leanne Hinton, Nancy N. Hornberger, etc.) have evidenced that indigenous languages involve unique cultural knowledge systems that are uncovered or not well-known. Reading their work can get the sense of the significance of language, culture, and identity.

If you want to increase your intercultural sensitivity or capacity, I strongly suggest K. David Harrision's work as a good starting point. I hope my feedback helps!

References

Harrison, K. David. 2007. When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press.

Harrison, K. David. 2010. The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society.

Keller, John. 1983. "Motivational Design of Instruction." In Instructinal-Design Theories and Models: An Overview of Their Current Status, edited by Charles M. Reigeluth, 383-434. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Agreed with Che-Wei Lee