The Relation between Language and Culture
Introduction
As we all know that different countries have different cultures, and also different language. Language and culture are interdependent and interactional. Language is one of the most important carriers of culture，and culture also have a great impact on language, that is culture conditioning. As language and culture all belong to the social phenomenon, the differences between languages have reflected the differences of national culture. Because each nationality's historical development, geographical position, the thinking mode, the habits and customs, the value , the religious belief and so on are different, thus has formed the different cultural standard, that is so-called cultural difference. Knowing the language and cultural backgrounds can help our communication. Instead, it will cause many communicative barriers. The culture teaches people how to use the language, but certain language forms only then in the specific cultural context, can have the related language human relations significance. In this article, I summarize the relationship between language and culture, simultaneously example to explain it‟s impact on cross-culture communication.
Relationship between language and culture
Language is a part of culture and culture is the foundation of survival and development of human society. The society is actually a complex cultural system, and language is just one of the elements of a cultural system. That is to say, culture is not equal to language, culture is more than language. From the perspective of semiotics, language symbols, such as the deaf gestures, graphics, sea and land traffic signals, etc can also express a certain meaning, but human behavior and experience are mainly embodied by the meaning of language symbols. On the other hand, other elements of culture system must be by the language to express, consequently get evolution and development. Culture, in other words, as a big system can't exist independently in language system, and vice versa. Language is not only a part of culture, and also is the mirror reflection of culture, through the language of a nation level, we can see the nation's colorful cultural forms. Culture has a distinct nationality, different
nationalities have diverse culture naturally. These differences in cultural forms will inevitably present in different level of the language system. At first ,vocabulary is the basic element of language and the existing backbone of a language system, so the cultural differences in vocabulary level reflects the most outstanding, most widely involves surface. For example,China in the qing dynasty, the emperor harem three thousand beauties, hierarchical wives and vocabulary related to the maid name in Chinese is rich and colorful, such as the queen, the imperial concubine of the emperor, princess, wives, noble, this is one aspect of China's qing dynasty palace culture. The UK is a monarchy, the aristocracy by the monarch of the letter to hierarchy is very strict, and this kind of title culture is closely related with the title name in English, such as the duke, marquis, earl, viscount and baron, etc. By the same token, the Japanese vocabulary about fish is very rich, it shows that the Japanese culture has a deep bond with fish，and so on. The above examples is the embodiment of the cultural differences in vocabulary level.
Secondly, cultural difference is reflected on the syntactic level. The most typical case is comparison of Chinese and western indo-european. Chinese language is a kind of parataxis, unlike indo-european language, there are no complicated displacement, change, change shape, so the combination of Chinese outside of the form composition, and depending on whether the semantic collocation is reasonable. Indo-european language form is fused to the shape of that sentence structure is rigorous. The western philosophy, art, and language pay more attention to the natural time and space, and especially lay particular stress on space natural authenticity while Chinese philosophy, art, and language emphasis on the psychological time and space, especially focus on the logic of time matter reason, even the space is often characterized by flowing space. This kind of cultural psychology contributed to different sentence structure model.
In addition, cultural differences also reflect on the language register layer. Foreign friends to the Chinese people's home, for example, when you see the host's wife, will say "Your wife is really beautiful", Chinese will humble or embarrassed to say "no no, overpraise", and foreigners
hear similar words of praise, will say "thank you".Obviously a foreigner emotion is very straightforward, and Chinese people are modest and reserved. Again for instance ，China is a long period of farming c ommunity, there‟s lot of „food‟ in the daily expression. When people meet with each other, they will say “have you eaten? ‟”for greeting. This way of greeting is just the same as „hi‟ or „hello‟ in western country. In China, it is a common way to say „hello‟, but the western people don‟t think so. They may think this greeting seems to be saying: “I have nothing to eat. Come on. Let‟s go to eat something.”Or “I was going to ask you to go to my house for a dinner.” All in all, this means that say „hello‟ invi tation to dinner sometimes. In short, in cross-cultural communication, ignore the register of the national culture characteristics, is hard to avoid “culture clash”.
Conclusion
Language is closely related to culture,and language expresses and embodies cultural reality. They both cannot survive with each other. With the high speed of the globalization , the relationship between our country and other countries in the world will also become closer and closer.Various cross-cultural communications become more and more frequent, it makes the people from different countries have more opportunities to communicate than before.So we must pay much attention to cultural differences in the cross-cultural cummunication. In order to communicate effectively,all of us should have a good understanding of language and cultural differences between China and foreign countries. More importantly,we should know how communication is affected by language and cultural differences. If we do like that,I believe that we can get along with the people from different countries very well in the conversation.
At the same time, every country has its own culture formation and individuality.This special culture is one of the most important source of affinity and cohesion of a country. For this reason, we must protect and develop the culture of the various nation, country and region, keep variety of our global culture.
The Relation between Language and Culture
Introduction
As we all know that different countries have different cultures, and also different language. Language and culture are interdependent and interactional. Language is one of the most important carriers of culture，and culture also have a great impact on language, that is culture conditioning. As language and culture all belong to the social phenomenon, the differences between languages have reflected the differences of national culture. Because each nationality's historical development, geographical position, the thinking mode, the habits and customs, the value , the religious belief and so on are different, thus has formed the different cultural standard, that is so-called cultural difference. Knowing the language and cultural backgrounds can help our communication. Instead, it will cause many communicative barriers. The culture teaches people how to use the language, but certain language forms only then in the specific cultural context, can have the related language human relations significance. In this article, I summarize the relationship between language and culture, simultaneously example to explain it‟s impact on cross-culture communication.
Relationship between language and culture
Language is a part of culture and culture is the foundation of survival and development of human society. The society is actually a complex cultural system, and language is just one of the elements of a cultural system. That is to say, culture is not equal to language, culture is more than language. From the perspective of semiotics, language symbols, such as the deaf gestures, graphics, sea and land traffic signals, etc can also express a certain meaning, but human behavior and experience are mainly embodied by the meaning of language symbols. On the other hand, other elements of culture system must be by the language to express, consequently get evolution and development. Culture, in other words, as a big system can't exist independently in language system, and vice versa. Language is not only a part of culture, and also is the mirror reflection of culture, through the language of a nation level, we can see the nation's colorful cultural forms. Culture has a distinct nationality, different
nationalities have diverse culture naturally. These differences in cultural forms will inevitably present in different level of the language system. At first ,vocabulary is the basic element of language and the existing backbone of a language system, so the cultural differences in vocabulary level reflects the most outstanding, most widely involves surface. For example,China in the qing dynasty, the emperor harem three thousand beauties, hierarchical wives and vocabulary related to the maid name in Chinese is rich and colorful, such as the queen, the imperial concubine of the emperor, princess, wives, noble, this is one aspect of China's qing dynasty palace culture. The UK is a monarchy, the aristocracy by the monarch of the letter to hierarchy is very strict, and this kind of title culture is closely related with the title name in English, such as the duke, marquis, earl, viscount and baron, etc. By the same token, the Japanese vocabulary about fish is very rich, it shows that the Japanese culture has a deep bond with fish，and so on. The above examples is the embodiment of the cultural differences in vocabulary level.
Secondly, cultural difference is reflected on the syntactic level. The most typical case is comparison of Chinese and western indo-european. Chinese language is a kind of parataxis, unlike indo-european language, there are no complicated displacement, change, change shape, so the combination of Chinese outside of the form composition, and depending on whether the semantic collocation is reasonable. Indo-european language form is fused to the shape of that sentence structure is rigorous. The western philosophy, art, and language pay more attention to the natural time and space, and especially lay particular stress on space natural authenticity while Chinese philosophy, art, and language emphasis on the psychological time and space, especially focus on the logic of time matter reason, even the space is often characterized by flowing space. This kind of cultural psychology contributed to different sentence structure model.
In addition, cultural differences also reflect on the language register layer. Foreign friends to the Chinese people's home, for example, when you see the host's wife, will say "Your wife is really beautiful", Chinese will humble or embarrassed to say "no no, overpraise", and foreigners
hear similar words of praise, will say "thank you".Obviously a foreigner emotion is very straightforward, and Chinese people are modest and reserved. Again for instance ，China is a long period of farming c ommunity, there‟s lot of „food‟ in the daily expression. When people meet with each other, they will say “have you eaten? ‟”for greeting. This way of greeting is just the same as „hi‟ or „hello‟ in western country. In China, it is a common way to say „hello‟, but the western people don‟t think so. They may think this greeting seems to be saying: “I have nothing to eat. Come on. Let‟s go to eat something.”Or “I was going to ask you to go to my house for a dinner.” All in all, this means that say „hello‟ invi tation to dinner sometimes. In short, in cross-cultural communication, ignore the register of the national culture characteristics, is hard to avoid “culture clash”.
Conclusion
Language is closely related to culture,and language expresses and embodies cultural reality. They both cannot survive with each other. With the high speed of the globalization , the relationship between our country and other countries in the world will also become closer and closer.Various cross-cultural communications become more and more frequent, it makes the people from different countries have more opportunities to communicate than before.So we must pay much attention to cultural differences in the cross-cultural cummunication. In order to communicate effectively,all of us should have a good understanding of language and cultural differences between China and foreign countries. More importantly,we should know how communication is affected by language and cultural differences. If we do like that,I believe that we can get along with the people from different countries very well in the conversation.
At the same time, every country has its own culture formation and individuality.This special culture is one of the most important source of affinity and cohesion of a country. For this reason, we must protect and develop the culture of the various nation, country and region, keep variety of our global culture.