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Language and Culture: George Yule

This document discusses how culture and language are connected. It explains that culture refers to the ideas and assumptions people learn as members of social groups. Languages provide categories like kinship terms and concepts of time that influence how people perceive and think about the world. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from the mid-20th century proposed that the structure and categories of a language shape how its speakers think.

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Vironeca Jardinico Peña
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739 views11 pages

Language and Culture: George Yule

This document discusses how culture and language are connected. It explains that culture refers to the ideas and assumptions people learn as members of social groups. Languages provide categories like kinship terms and concepts of time that influence how people perceive and think about the world. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from the mid-20th century proposed that the structure and categories of a language shape how its speakers think.

Uploaded by

Vironeca Jardinico Peña
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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LANGUAGE

and CULTURE
George Yule
Culture
We use the term culture to refer to all
the ideas and assumptions about the
nature of things and people that we
learn when we become members of
social groups. It can be defined as
“socially acquired knowledge."
CATEGORIES

A category is a group with certain


features in common and we can think of
the vocabulary we learn as an inherited
set of category labels. These are the
words for referring to concepts that
people in our social world have typically
needed to talk about.
Kinship terms

Some of the clearest examples of


lexicalized categories are words used to
refer to people who are members of the
same family, or kinship terms. All
languages have kinship terms (e.g. brother,
mother, grandmother), but they don’t all
put family members into categories in the
same way.
Time concepts
To take a more abstract example, when
we learn a word such as week or
weekend, we are inheriting a conceptual
system that operates with amounts of time
as common categories. Having words for
units of time such as “two days” or “seven
days” shows that we can think of time (i.e.
something abstract) in amounts.
Linguistic relativity
This is often discussed in terms of
linguistic relativity because it seems
that the structure of our language, with
its predetermined categories, must
have an influence on how we perceive
the world.
In its weak version, this idea simply
captures the fact that we not only talk, but
to a certain extent probably also think
about the world of experience, using the
categories provided by our language. Our
first language seems to have a definite role
in shaping “habitual thought,” that is, the
way we think about things as we go about
our daily lives, without analyzinghow we’re
thinking.
There is a stronger version of this
idea, called linguistic determinism,
which holds that “language
determines thought.” If language
does indeed determine thought,
then we will only be able to think in
the categories provided by our
language.
The Sapir–
Whorf
hypothesis
The general analytic perspective we are
considering is part of what became known as
the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis during the middle of
the twentieth century. At a time when American
linguistics was still mainly carried out by
scholars with strong backgrounds in
anthropology, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf
produced arguments that the languages of
Native Americans, such as the Hopi, led them to
view the world differently from those who spoke
European languages.
THANK YOU :)

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