Chapter 4: Language and culture.

Are language and culture related?

Language and culture are clearly related, fused and one reflects the other. We can study culture from 5 dimensions and language is present in all of them. Language is a window to the culture.

1. Language and cultural products

The members of a culture use language to manipulate or interact with the cultural products. We use language to describe products, make comparisons. Language is actually a cultural product.

2. Language and cultural practice

During cultural practices people talk and it requires the participation of language. The interaction with people will require of speaking and listening or reading and writing.

3. Language and cultural perspectives

Language is used to name and understand perceptions, values, attitudes and beliefs that govern our way of life. We use language to make tacit perspectives implicit for example the use of idioms and common phrases may have a special meaning according to the cultural perspectives.

4. Language and cultural communities

We can see variations in forms, use and meanings when we situate language in specific communities or groups. Communities adapt the language describe and carry out particular practices and products associated with their group and its activities. Communities also define norms for language use and an appropriate use of language is essential. 

For example English words may have different meaning depending on the culture, in this case American or British.

WORD	AMERICAN MEANING	BRITISH MEANING
Casket	The type of coffin with upholstery and a half-open lid, any coffin.	A small box, as for jewels, particularly an antique.
Crisp	A term to sunburning.	Fried potato slices with salt, sometimes with flavour (US: potato chips).
DI	Drill instructor (military).	Detective inspector (police).
First floor (of a building)	The floor at ground level (often, but not always, the same floor as a building's lobby) (UK: ground floor).	The floor above ground level (US: second floor).
Football	(usually) Association football (US: soccer).	American football.

Examples of language inside culture.

Language is an important aspect to take into account when talking about culture. We use language to participate and it has some functions like socializing, establishing relationships, influencing people, giving and responding to feedback, arguing or avoiding trouble. 

Some examples of language inside culture are:

• For instance in Costa Rica the use of the phrase "Pura Vida" has a cultural meaning, someone who doesn't know about Costa Rican culture will not get the real meaning of this phrase. The same with the popular word "mae".

• When we take some words from another language it affects our culture, for example nowadays we use many words that are use in English and that makes us get closer to the English culture.

Similarities and differences between Spanish and English. 

We can compare both languages and find many similarities and differences, for example:

Similarities: 

• Both languages have subject – verb- object structure.
• Both have common background (Indo-European).
• Words that end in –tion in English end in –ción in Spanish.
• Both languages have the same or similar words like: chocolate, capital, alcohol, vanilla/vainilla, special/especial, ecology/ecología, etc.
• Some prefixes means the same, for example: super-, anti-, bi-, etc. 

Differences:

• English alphabet has 26 letters while Spanish has one more including “Ñ”.
• English the letter H is pronounced while in Spanish is a silent letter.
• Quotation marks vs. dashes
• Spanish does not have Consonant digraphs: sh, th, wh, p
• Initial sounds: kn, qu, wr, sk that don't exist in Spanish.
• Spanish words have masculine and feminine articles and adjectives, English does not.
• Spanish exclamation/question marks at the beginning of the sentence.
• Adjectives come after noun in Spanish while in English adjectives come before noun.

Advice for North American people!

If a North American wants to learn Spanish, I would recommend the next things:

• He/she should learn a little bit about about culture at the same time he is learning grammar.

•  Should look for a native speaker so that he could practice what he has learned.

• Go to a country where Spanish is the main language

• Learn the most common idioms (Check out this video)

• And maybe the most important: analyze and think about the "five dimensions"  to analyze how culture and language are related.