Language can have developed only in a social setting, however this may have been structured, and human society in any form even remotely resembling what is known today or is recorded in history could be maintained only among people utilizing and understanding a language in common use. Society and language are mutually indispensable. As thus defined and envisaged, culture covers a very wide area of human life and behaviour, and language is manifestly a part, probably the most important part, of it.Īlthough the faculty of language acquisition and language use is innate and inherited, and there is legitimate debate over the extent of this innateness, every individual’s language is “acquired by man as a member of society,” along with and at the same time as other aspects of that society’s culture in which people are brought up.
That they eat particular foods and refrain from eating other substances, though they may be perfectly edible and nourishing, and that they eat and drink at particular times of day and in certain places are matters of culture, something “acquired by man as a member of society,” according to the classic definition of culture by the English anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor. The fact that people eat or drink is not in itself cultural it is a biological necessity for the preservation of life. Culture is here being used, as it is throughout this article, in the anthropological sense, to refer to all aspects of human life insofar as they are determined or conditioned by membership in a society. It is indeed more in accordance with reality to consider language as a part of culture. This is true of all peoples and all languages it is a universal fact about language.Īnthropologists speak of the relations between language and culture.
In demonstrating the inadequacy and inappropriateness of such a view of language, attention has already been drawn to the ways in which one’s native language is intimately and in all sorts of details related to the rest of one’s life in a community and to smaller groups within that community. It has been seen that language is much more than the external expression and communication of internal thoughts formulated independently of their verbalization. Britannica Explains In these videos, Britannica explains a variety of topics and answers frequently asked questions.This Time in History In these videos, find out what happened this month (or any month!) in history.#WTFact Videos In #WTFact Britannica shares some of the most bizarre facts we can find.
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