Who on Earth are we? Part 3

Callum: Hello today we have the third programme in our series on culture and intercultural
communication: Who on Earth are we? In this programme Marc Beeby
looks at language and culture. Here’s Marc
Marc: Hello. Today we begin our look at the ‘building-blocks’ of culture – those
things which help give a culture and its people their character - those things
which can often be so very different from one culture to another.
We start with something which often seems to be the most obvious difference
of all: language.
Rebecca Fong
I think it was Professor David Crystal who said that there really ought to be a word
'languaculture' because language and culture are so fundamentally tied together. What we do
is we use language as a way of labelling things and we label them to reflect the way that we
see things in our culture and to make it easier for us to navigate our way through life and
understand each other. Because of the fact that we all understand these common labels that
we've put on things. So a language is symbolic - it's symbolic of the thoughts, the thought
patterns that we have and it represents the assumptions and the values that are standardised by
our own culture.
Mahmood Jamal
Urdu developed in the courts and very formalised atmosphere of urban India and Pakistan as a
result it's a language which has a lot of formality in it - the way you speak to let’s say -
someone you know well would be completely different from the way you speak to someone
you don't know well, or the way you speak to somebody junior to you would be very different to the way you speak to somebody who's senior to you. So these are distinctions which are
cultural and they have come into the language itself.
Marc: Mahmood Jamal from Pakistan, and earlier Rebecca Fong – a teacher of
intercultural communication at the University of the West of England. As they
both suggest, culture and language are tied together. Language isn’t just a tool
to help people from the same culture communicate effectively. It’s also a
window into the way people from that culture see the world.
But just a minute. Why should language tell us anything about a particular
culture? Surely we all look at the world in much the same way? After all, we’re
all human. Isn’t it natural to think that people from other cultures will use
language in exactly the same way that we do? Well, maybe not.
hundred years ago, language experts believed that you could say exactly the
same thing in two different languages just by accurately translating the
vocabulary and the grammar. But in the early 20th century, people began to
look at languages a bit more closely. One of these people was the amateur
linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorf went to study the language of the Hopi
people, in the south west of the United States of America. And he made some
interesting discoveries. For example, the area where the Hopi lived was very
cold – so they had many more different words for snow than, say, English has.
Whorf also learnt that the Hopi saw ‘time’ as one continuous event. It couldn’t
be broken up into units. So the language had no way of counting time - you
couldn’t say one o'clock or two o'clock. There were no words to distinguish
seasons like summer, autumn and winter – and there were no past or future
tenses. Facts like these lead Whorf to draw conclusions that revolutionised the
way people thought about language and culture - as Rebecca Fong explains.
Rebecca Fong
Whorf deduced from this that how you perceive the world affects the language that you speak
because the language that you speak arises from your needs as a culture...
Группа Learning English. Продолжение текста: [bad word] /downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/webcast/scripts/whoonearth/tae_whoonearth_03_080515.pdf