An Essay on Linguistic

An Essay

                                    On

                    Language & Culture

                                                           
  An Essay on Language and Culture

  Culture is a wider system that completely includes language as a subsystem. In a broad sense, it means the total way of a people, including the patterns of belief, customs, objects, institutions, techniques, and language that characterizes the life of the human community. In a narrow sense, culture may refer to local or specific practice, beliefs or customs, which can be mostly found in folk culture, enterprise culture or food culture etc. This thesis discusses the relationship between the culture and the linguistics, especially in a language way.

1) Firstly, Language both expresses and embodies cultural reality. A language not only expresses facts, ideas, or events which represent similar world knowledge by its people, but also reflects the people’s attitudes, beliefs, world outlooks etc., Moreover Language plays a major role in perpetuating culture (or consolidating it over time), esp. in print form. Take this reality as an illustration. USA, advanced computer technology, Microsoft, pop songs, the Hollywood movies; however, incomplete without the Declaration of Independence and other historic event. Further more, culture affects language. In Hopi, there is something very special about its grammar. One of the features that separate it from other languages is that it does not use the same means to express time, and hence is called as a “timeless language”(没有时间的语言). Do not recognize time as a linear dimension. Two American scholars conducted a large cross-linguistic investigation of basic color vocabulary.

  The finding is that color word systems in different languages are not like what has been assumed by the Sapir and Whorf hypothesis, being culturally determined and hence absolutely different from one another. Different languages might well undergo a universal...