Ø Explain widely the relationship between language and culture.
Culture is everything that exists in the world, and
which has been produced by the mind and the human hand. For example, festivals,
food, political systems, the way of thinking, the clothes and the fashions, the
means of coexistence, the damage to the environment, the way to play football,
war and arms, humanitarian acts all these are cultural products because they
have arisen from human creation and its way of understanding, feeling and
living the world, as well as the Internet, which in recent years has
revolutionized human behavior by changing the way of thinking and contributing
to global intercultural development at an unthinkable speed.
Language is a system of communication through which
individuals of the same community are related and understood. Like
communication, language has a social nature, since humans have the power to
make us understand by other means (sounds, mime, among others), although no
language will work if there was no human interaction.
Both are closed knit because in most the cases
people, societies and groups use cultural languages. By means of words that has
special meaning and context, they communicate, interact and express their own
ideas following a cultural code or customs full of values.
When you learn a language, you learn its culture
and its origins, so in a learning language process you learn how to use the
language structure and how to communicate and interact with native speakers to
understand meanings, the context in which it is said, what the speaker wants
people to understand, language functions among others.
The relationship between both situations, social
and cultural, is understood by considering language as a complete social
activity, an activity that carries within itself the dialectical relationship
between the regulator, imitator and coercionist and who submits or infringes
the controlling norms of each culture. In every cultural system, its practices,
patterns and codes are subject to a short or wide number of principles that are
expressed through language, which simultaneously exerts coercion on ideas,
practices and the patterns of each culture. It is in this dialectical
relationship that the language reflects and shapes the world, although to date
there is no clear identification of how to model and discern about this
phenomenon constitutes a philosophical challenge. Despite this conceptual
limitation, it is evident that there is a close relationship between language
and the expression of the world around us and that linguistic facts reveal,
along with the other cultural aspects, not only the structural and objective
aspects of the society but also
those of an abstract nature that constitute the world-dimension
in each of the stages of its historical and cultural development in which it is
possible to discover, through linguistic analysis, the equilibrium positions
between the external form of the language and the inner form of the culture.
In relation to this subject, we consider it
necessary to present and interpret those approaches of Michel Foucault that,
because of their deep approach to what language is in its cultural aspect,
constitute a theoretical basis of substantial interest to the approach that the
project on cultural identity sustains. in what corresponds to the importance of
language in the determination of cultural aspects, especially those related to
scientific knowledge.
