CHAPTER I

CULTURE AND LANGUAGE

Many people who go abroad encounter features in their host

culture that they may find disturbing. Reaction to these alien
aspects of the new culture can dampen the entire experience in
the country, resulting in various kinds of negative reactions.
Learning another culture, developing relationships with people
you meet, communicating efficiently, and adapting to the
environment is a complex task of cross-cultural understanding.
Cross-cultural understanding is concerned with understanding
people from different cultural backgrounds/culture of the people
so we can construct our attitudes and world view, more tolerable
and generous toward strange ways that may be shown by other
citizen of another country. If a person from an alien culture
misinterprets a complex pattern of culture, then cross cultural
misunderstanding arise.

A. Culture
1. Definition of Culture
Culture comes from Latin cultura, means cultivation.
British anthropologist Edward Tylor first gave the
definition of culture which is widely quoted: ―Culture is
that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs,

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 arts, morals, law, custom and any other capacities and
habits acquired by man as a member of society‖.
Newmark describes culture as a way of life of a
certain society which is expressed by certain language.
Clifford Geertz stated that culture is a symbolic meaning
system. It is semiotic system in which symbols function to
communicate meaning from one mind to another.
Cultural symbols encode a connection between a
signifying form and a signaled meaning. Culture might
also be defined as ideas, customs, skills, arts, and tools
which characterize a given group of people in a period of
time
Culture as described by Larson and Smalley is ―blue
print‖. It guides the behavior of people in a community
and is developed in family life and helps us to know what
we can do as individuals and what our responsibilities as a
member of a group.
From the standpoint of contemporary cultural
anthropologists, culture is characterized by the following
four basic features:
1) Culture is a kind of social inheritance instead of
biological heritage;
2) Culture is shared by the whole community, not
belonging to any particular individual;

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3) Culture is a symbolic meaning system in which
language is one of the most important ones;
4) Culture is a unified system, the integral parts of which
are closely related to one another.
In general, culture can be divided into three
categories:

- Material culture as the product of human

manufacture

- Social culture as the people‘s form of social

organization

- Ideological culture including people‘s belief and

values.
Culture itself is like an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg is
the smallest part. Most of the iceberg is submerged.

(Figure 1.1: the Iceberg Analogy of Culture)

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 The same is true for a culture. That which we can
easily see, the external part of a culture including
behavior, clothing, food, is the smallest part. Meanwhile
the internal part, including beliefs, values, norms, and
attitude, is beneath the water level of awareness. It is
inside people‘s heads.
In every society there is a set of cultural beliefs which
in large measure defines the implicit culture of that
society and set if off from another society. The belief
system of a society includes all the cognition namely
ideas, knowledge, superstitions, myths, and legend,
shared by most members of society.
Cultural norms are rules of standard behavior accepted
by members of society. Norms are divided into folkways
and mores. Norms are called folkways when conformity
to them is not considered vital to the welfare of the group
and when the means of enforcing conformity is not very
clearly defined. In American folkways specifies that on
formal occasion, a man should wears a tie. The
punishment of this conformity is that he may be flowned
upon,or talked about.
Mores are norms which specify behavior of vital
importance to the society and which embody its basic
moral values. The example of a more is that a man must
provide for his wife and children. When he fails to do so

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 can be a cause for a legal action. The mores are actively
enforced by the members of the society either through
legal action or through social sanction. Sanction is a
penalty, or some coercive measure, intended to ensure
compliance.
Value is a collection of guiding principles; what one
deems to be correct and desirable in life. Cultures have
values that are largely shared by their members, which
identify what should be judged as good or evil. Values
tend to influence attitudes and behavior. For example,
American values human equality. (Further discussion
about American values will be in the next chapter).

2. Cultural Universal
Cultural universals are elements common to all
human cultures, regardless of historical moment,
geography, or cultural origin. There is a tension in cultural
anthropology and cultural sociology between the claim
that culture is a universal (the fact that all human societies
have culture), and that it is also particular (culture takes a
tremendous variety of forms around the world).
Koentjoroningrat (1990) categorizes cultural universal
into seven, namely:
1. Language
2. Knowledge system

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 3. Social organizations
4. Life tool system
5. Livelihood system
6. Religion system
7. Art
The idea of cultural universals itself runs contrary to
cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is the idea that all
norms, beliefs, and values are dependent on their cultural
context, and should not be used in the study or
description of another culture. The way to deal with our
own assumptions is not to pretend that they don't exist
but rather to acknowledge them, and then use the
awareness that we are not neutral to inform our
conclusions.
Cultural relativism is, in part, a response to Western
ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is the tendency to look at
the world primarily from the perspective of one's own
culture. judging another culture solely by the values and
standards of one's own culture. Ethnocentrism may take
obvious forms, in which one consciously believes that one
people's arts are the most beautiful, values the most
virtuous, and beliefs the most truthful.

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3. Types of Culture
The word ―culture‖ doesn‘t mean just national
culture, but the whole range of different types of culture.
These include:
1. Corporate culture (for example, the culture of Apple,
Microsoft)
2. Professional culture (for example, the culture of
doctors, lawyers)
3. Gender (different cultures of men and women)
4. Age ( the different cultures of young, middle-aged, and
old-people)
5. Religious culture (for example, Catholicism, Islam,
Budha)
6. Regional culture (for example, Western, Eastern)
7. Class culture (for example, working class, middle class,
upper class)

4. Cultural Patterns of Behavior

Cultures have widely characteristics, but such patterns
for living according to some anthropologists have
universal characteristics. George Peter Murdock in
Tomasow (1986) mentions seven cultural patterns of
behavior, namely:
1. They originate in the human mind.
2. They facilitate human and environmental interactions.

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 3. They satisfy human basic needs.
4. They are cumulative and adjust to changes in external
and internal conditions.
5. They tend to form a consistent structure.
6. They are learned and shared by all members of the
society.
7. They are transmitted to new generations.

B. Language
According to Sapir (1921), ―language is a purely human
and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions
and desire by means of voluntarily produced symbols.‖
Language is a part of culture and a part of human behavior. It
is often held that the function of language is to express thought
and to communicate information. Language also fulfills many
other tasks such as greeting people, conducting religious
service, etc.
Language and culture are intertwined because language is
an outcome or result of a culture as a whole and also a vehicle
by which the other aspects of culture are shaped and
communicate.
Three major functions of language are:
1. Language is the primary vehicle of communication;

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 2. Language reflects both the personality of the individual and
the culture of his history. In turn, it helps shape both
personality and culture;
3. Language makes possible the growth and transmission of
culture, the continuity of societies, and the effective
functioning and control of social group.

C. The Relationship Between Language and Culture

It is obvious that language plays a paramount role in
developing, elaborating and transmitting culture and
language, enabling us to store meanings and experience to
facilitate communication.
The function of language is so important in
communication that it is even exaggerated by some scholars.
The most famous one is the hypothesis concerning the
relationship between language and culture, which Nida and
Taber (1982) regards as misconceptions constituting serious
difficulties for cross-cultural understanding.
Each culture has its own peculiarities and throws special
influence on the language system. For example, referring to
the same common domestic animal ―dog‖. A great deal of
cross-cultural misunderstanding occurs when the ―meanings‖
of words in two languages are assumed to be the same, but
actually reflect different cultural patterns. Some are
humorous as when a Turkish visitor to the U.S. refused to

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 eat a ―hot dog‖ because it was against his beliefs to eat dog
meat.
We can summarize the relationship between culture and
language as the following:

- language is a key component of culture. It is the

primary medium for transmitting much of culture.
Without language, culture would not be possible.

- Children learning their native language are learning

their own culture; learning a second language also
involves learning a second culture to varying degrees.

- Language is influenced and shaped by culture. It

reflects culture.

- Cultural differences are the most serious areas causing

misunderstanding, unpleasantness and even conflict
in cross-cultural communication.

EXERCISES
1. What is culture according to:
a. Larson & Smalley
b. Condon
c. Edward Taylor

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