Argue either for or against the statement that Language is Culture and Culture is Language. Use specific theories, names, and empirical examples to make your argument clear.

The statement that “Language is Culture and Culture is Language” implies that there is a complex homologous relationship between language and culture. Franz Boas argued that one could not really understand another culture without having direct access to its language because of the intimate connection between culture and language. Language is so complexly intertwined with culture that language and culture must have evolved together, influencing one another in the process and ultimately shaping what it means to be human. According to A.L. Kroeber (1923), “Culture, then, began when speech was present; and from then on, the enrichment of either means the further development of the other.”

Language is a tool for doing things in the world, for reproducing as much as changing reality. From a Vygotskian perspective, language is the most important tool because it has both semiotic and communicative characteristics. If culture is a product of human interaction, then cultural manifestations are acts of communication that assume and build particular speech communities. “The totality of the messages we exchange with one another while speaking a given language constitutes a speech community, that is, the whole society understood from the point of view of speaking (Rossi-Landi 1973:83, Duranti’s translation).” Children learn language as members of a speech community, which lays down “rules” for appropriate use of language (p. 198). As children learn a language, they also learn their culture and develop their cognitive abilities.

It is not just culture that communicates through language, but also language that communicates through cultures. Michael Silverstein proposed that the communicative force of culture works not only in representing aspects of reality, but also in connecting one context with another. The concept of the indexical meaning of signs postulates that “communication is not only the use of symbols that ’stand for’ beliefs, feelings, identities, events, it is also a way of pointing to, presupposing or bringing into the present context beliefs, feelings, identities, events (p. 37).”

According to the linguistic relativity principle, the way in which we think about the world is directly influenced by the language we use to talk about it. As Edward Sapir (1929) put it, “…the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.” The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis emphasizes the inextricable relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it.

Language exists in the context of cultural practices which, in turn, depend on the linguistic practices necessary for competent participation in a community. Therefore, to speak is to assume a culture, and to know a culture is to know a language. Culture is as much a product of language as language is a product of culture. Language and culture are thus homologous mental realities. Cultural products are representations and interpretations of the world that must be communicated in order to be lived. “Control of linguistic means often translates into control over our relationship with the world just as the acceptance of linguistic forms and the rules for their use forces us to accept and reproduce particular ways of being in the world (p. 49).” Culture cannot exist without language and language cannot exist without culture.

Reference:
Duranti, Alessandro.
1997 Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

~Sophia Kunen