Language and Culture in a Global Perspective

Introduction: Inseparability of Language and Culture?

Since the 1990s, large sections of linguistics – including anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics and research into intercultural (language) communication, translation, language acquisition and language teaching – have to an increasing extent highlighted the relationship between language and culture. This has led to intensified research into how cultural differences express themselves and are created via various forms of linguistic practice and discourse, how culturally different conceptual systems and world views are contained in the semantic and pragmatic systems of the various languages, and how language development and socialisation contribute to the development of cultural identities and cultural models of the world.

This integrative view of language is one I share. The investigation of the interface between language and culture is necessary both for the theoretical understanding of language and linguistic practice as parts of larger wholes and for the development of the various areas of practice where language plays a central role. The increased focus on the relationship of language not only to the societal, structural context but also to the cultural meaning-conveying context is, in many ways, a promising sign.

There is, however, an aspect of this development that is problematic. There is often a too unambiguous focusing on the close relationship between language and culture, one that has a tendency to imply a simple identification of language and culture. The enthusiasm for working on uncovering the culturality of language quite often finds expression in such mottoes as: 'language and culture are inseparable'; 'language and culture are intimately linked'; 'language is culture and culture is language'. Such assertions are, for example, extremely frequent within the subject area that forms my point of departure here, i.e. language and culture pedagogy (represented by such people as Byram, 1989; Byram, Morgan and colleagues, 1994; Roberts et al., 2001). In recent years there have been researchers who more or less explicitly have turned against the simplified identification of language and culture and emphasised the complexity of the relationship between them, e.g. Byram (1997), Freadman (2001) and Kramsch (2002a, 2004). However, there still lacks a comprehensive analysis of the structure of this complexity, a lack that this book seeks to redress.

It was the widespread assertion of the inseparability between language and culture in culture pedagogy that originally provoked me to write this book. I wished to demonstrate that language and culture can in certain respects be separated. This does not mean that it is my intention to deny that in many respects there are clear links between language and culture. Nor is it my intention to oppose the practical efforts being made to integrate the linguistic and cultural sides of language teaching more successfully with each other throughout the entire educational programme. But I feel it is necessary for the further development of linguistics, including language and culture pedagogy, to examine and criticise the assertion concerning the inseparability of language and culture.

What I mean more concretely by the thesis that language and culture can be separated in certain respects will gradually emerge from the discussion as the book proceeds. This theoretical discussion consists mainly of a number of conceptual analyses. A discussion of the relationship between language and culture is synonymous with a particular construction of the concepts of language and culture and with the use of certain particular analytical angles of approach to the relation between these two constructions. Central concepts in the theoretical construction are 'languaculture', 'discourse' and 'language-culture nexus'. Even at this early stage, I can say that the analysis will involve a deconstruction of the concepts of language and culture.

My guiding principle in the following is, to put it briefly, the idea that languages spread across cultures, and cultures spread across languages. Linguistic and cultural practices change and spread through social networks along partially different routes, principally on the basis of transnational patterns of migration and markets. I am, then, adopting a view of language and culture that stresses transnational dynamics in a global perspective.

Language and Culture: Generic and Differential

In this book, the linguistic concept of language is the central focus, not the metaphorical uses of the language concept that one meets in other cultural and societal studies, not least those with a semiotic or formal orientation, and in everyday language (cf. concepts such as the language of bees, of film, of dance, of architecture, of advertising, of logic, of psychoanalysis, of power, of love, etc.). The Cultural Studies movement typically operates with an extended concept of language, as, for example, described by Stuart Hall:

How does language construct meanings? How does it sustain the dialogue between participants which enables them to build up a culture of shared understanding and so interpret the world in roughly the same ways? Language is able to do this because it operates as a representational system. In language, we use signs and symbols – whether they are sounds, written words, electronically produced images, musical notes, even objects – to stand for or represent to other people our concepts, ideas and feelings. (Hall, 1997: 1, italics in the original)

The metaphorical uses of the concept of language, which have been characteristic manifestations of modern and modernist developments since the turn of the 20th century, have been and are highly productive – and a stance has per se to be taken regarding them if one is interested in the relationship between language and culture from the point of view of Cultural Studies. In this book, however, I am adopting a perspective that derives from linguistics, not Cultural Studies, which is why I intend to restrict myself to dealing with human verbal language. When talking about language in the following, it is to this sense of the word that I am referring.

As mentioned, I am basing my theory on an integrative conception of language, which means my basic premise is that language is to be conceived as an integral part of culture and society and of the psyche, and that the study of language should have this understanding as its point...