Does Language Shape Culture?

Csecsei Luca 12. IB Does language shape culture? Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Just look at the way people talk, they might say. Certainly, speakers of different languages must attend to strikingly different aspects of the world just so they can use their language properly. The word order can be completely different among languages. And also there are tenses in some languages that we do not have, use or do not know what it really means.

Such as the subjunctive in pish language. It is a tense which is the hardest to learn while learning pish, because such a tense that has so many meanings does not exist nor in hungarian, neither in english. I had the chance to spend a year in the U. K. and i also to take pish there, i experinced that to learn this tense is just as hard for the english as it was for me when I learned pish in my previous school, which was a pish-hungarian bilingual school. Culture is learned, but taught through the language.

Language is never the entity which has been invented in isolation. It certainly has evolved gradually with the continuous development of a culture. A culture being a building made of different beliefs in supernatural, social behaviors, human emotions, or way of expressing feelings, the language has continually adapted accordingly to accommodate these identified notion and gesture of human activity. Finding a symbolism every time to register it in the language, thus contributing to its growth.

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A language has always been a weapon to express one's ideas and feelings. And the reason enough to make this weapon more efficient to handle one's need of expressing things with intended accuracy. It has been tuned-up with each new finding, getting honed up continually to get its flawless shape with developing culture. Culture is determined by the language it uses with a great extent. The first thing that comes to my mind is always slang. Language clearly shows where people belong, if someone speaks really mincing his words that shows he is educated nd nor grown up on the streets like most of the people who use slang words and developed a whole new language between them. We are all members of a social group and members of `society? as a whole. People interact in many ways and communication is just about the most common and among the most important. Whatever is meaningful to a group, from their everyday life to their traditions constitutes their very own culture and is generally respected by all group members. Language is only one of such items.

For ethnic minority groups that may have a language of their own, their language is a cornerstone in their culture. Take a look at dialects anywhere int he world. It clearly shows different customs, not just in language or communication. There a lots of dialects in South-America, for instance. Spanish in Latinamerica differs a lot from nations to nations, or we can also say, from culture to culture. There are dialects also in our country, Hungary. And people on the north of the country speak in a different way, like pronounce sounds so much different.

Use words and expressions that we do not use at all. They also have differently built, constructed and decorated houses, songs, tales and wear different clothes as their costume. Taken together I do think linguistic processes are obtrusive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of observation and perception to major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human and is central to our beliefs, and the languages we speak profoundly shape our culture.

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