Introduction

Language is the principal means whereby we conduct our social lives. When it is used in contexts of communication, it is bound up with culture in multiple and complex ways.

To begin with, words people utter refer to common experience. They express facts, ideas or events that are communicable because they refer to a stock of knowledge about the world that other people share. Words also reflect their author's attitudes and beliefs, their point of view, that are also those of others. In both cases, language expresses cultural reality.

But members of a community or a social group do not only express experiences; they also create experience through language. They give meaning to it through the medium they choose to communicate with one another, for example, speaking on the telephone or face-to-face, writing a letter or sending an email message, reading the newspaper or interpreting a graph or chart. The way in which people use thte spoken, written, or visual medium itself creates meanings that are understandable to the group they belong to, for example, trhough a speaker's tone of voice, accent, conversational style, gestures and facial expressions. Through all its verbal and non-verbal aspects, language embodies cultural reality.

Finally, language is a system of signs that is seen as having itself a cultural value. Speakers identify themselves and others through their use of language; they view their language as a symbol of their social identity. The prohibitionj of its use is often perceived by its speakers as a rejection of their social group and their culture. Thus, we can say that language symbolizes cultural reality.

Culture, on the other hand, refers to what has been grown and groomed (from the Latin colere: to cultivate). The words culture evokes the traditional nature/nurture debate. Are human beings mainly what nature determines them to be from birth or what culture enables them to become through socialization and schooling?

The process that language and culture impose on nature correspond to various forms of socialization or acculturation. Etiquette, expressions of politeness, social dos and don'ts shape people's behavior through child rearing, behavioral upbringing, schooling, professional training. These ways with language, or norms of interaction and interpretation, form part of the invisible ritual imposed by culture on language users. This is culture's way of bringing order and predictability into people's use of language.

The language you use relates to your identity as an individual and as a member of a cultural group. How you view the relationship between your language and your culture will increasingly determine the way you talk and write at home, at school, and at work.

Does our society encourage negative images of female roles with terms like "tomboy" and "sissy"? If women are treated in English as "sex objects", are men likewise reduced to "success objects"?

To examine our language, then, is also to examine our values, norms, and standards.

All of us who wish to improve relations across cultures and groups of people must be concerned with the effects on others of they way we talk and write.

To communicate effectively, we must consider the feelings and perspective of the audience we're addressing, just as we hope that audience will consider our own perspective.

You ask yourslef about the way you think, and the way you think about others, through the language you use.