Language and culture

Language and culture

1. Language as sociocultural resource

   • A sociocultural perspective on human action locates the essence of social life in communication
   • we articulate and manage our individual identities, our interpersonal relationships, and memberships in our social groups and communities
   • Dialogue as the essence of language use
     • the linguistic resources we choose to use do not come to us as empty forms ready to be fi lled with our personal intentions
     • the meaning of language does not reside in the system of linguistic resources removed from their contexts of use and communities of users.
   • Single- and double-voiced utterances
     • consist of resources whose meanings are unquestioned, non-negotiable and thus resistant to change
     • These histories of meanings determine in part the degree of force that our voices will have in using the resources towards our own ends

2. Culture as sociocultural practice

   • The notion of culture has always been considered an important concept in applied linguistics
   • The basis of the system is assumed to be an abstract, universal structure for organising and generating the knowledge
   • Because we are members of multiple groups and communities, we take on and negotiate multiple cultural identities, and in our roles, participate in myriad cultural activities
   • To locate culture one must look not in individual mind, as an accumulated body of unchanging knowledge, but in the dialogue, the embodied actions

3. Linguistic relativity

   • This hypothesis proposes that patterned, structural components of specific languages regularly or habitually used by members of culture groups contain particular meanings that are systematically linked to the worldviews of the groups whose languages they are.
     • To state it another way, if individual thought is shaped by language, individuals with different languages are likely to have different understandings of the world

4. A socially constituted linguistics

   • A socially constituted approach to the study of language and culture
     • A great deal of research, particularly in the fi elds of linguistic anthropology, communication, and education, has used this approach to investigate a wide range of communicative events and activities of many different groups and communities.
   • The recent turn in studies of communicative activities
     • Of particular interest are the skills and strategies by which individuals use these technologies to make sense of and participate in their communities both within and across geographical boundaries.
   • From linguistic relativity to sociolinguistic relativity
     • That is, the language one uses helps shapes one’s conceptual understandings about the world
     • The language or languages that we learn in childhood are not neutral coding systems of an objective reality.

5. Systemic functional linguistics

   • To make these connections between language use and context visible, Halliday proposed an analytic framework consisting of a set of three interrelated functions.
     • The first function is the ideational, which is concerned with the propositional or representational dimensions of language
     • The second is the interpersonal, which is concerned with the social dimensions of language, and more specifi cally how interpersonal connections are made and sustained
     • The third function is the textual, which is concerned with the construction of coherent and cohesive discourse.