how does language shape your your cultural identity? I don't speak my mother tongue very well while my friend(same ethnicity as me) does but both of us aren't very cultural. There was a discussion in my class on this issue of how not speaking your native language gives people a sense of losing their identity and from my experience language is not a very significant factor that determines how cultural(in the ethnic sense) you are. Or is it? Maybe only by speaking the language can you fully appreciate the literature and art of a culture but even if you spoke the language would not mean that you followed that culture although that is your ethnic one.

If this has been discussed before can someone provide a link? thanks!

I feel that language is perhaps the single most important indicator of cultural identity.

For example, in the building where I work there are a few different types of jobs. There are some faculty scientists, postdocs and graduate students, and also a lot of support staff. The support staff are >50% Hispanic/Latino; the researchers are mostly white and Asian. The Hispanic support staff are polite but not forthcoming to most of us; but with the Spanish postdocs, they are very outgoing and friendly. Now, these people come from different continents with completely different cultures. Their only commonality is the language.

Also, I am bicultural/bilingual, and I have many friends who are also. The degree to which they are considered to belong to their parents' culture is directly proportional to their facility with the language. One acquaintance of mine is half Thai; it's clear from looking at him that he is not fully Asian, and he says that in Thailand he is usually not considered Thai at first, but once he starts speaking, he is accepted as Thai. On the other hand, I have another friend who is full-blooded but speaks her parents' language quite poorly, and she is not usually considered to 'belong' in her parents' country.

Neve:
There was a discussion in my class on this issue of how not speaking your native language gives people a sense of losing their identity and from my experience language is not a very significant factor that determines how cultural(in the ethnic sense) you are.

Whether or not speaking a native language determines one's cultural identity is too subjective a judgement that it cannot be measured in a quantitative means.

Nevertheless, provided language is one of many cultural phenomena, not speaking one which you had had would surely amount to a loss of culture. Yet, I wonder how people from England would feel when they come to the US and start speaking like 'Americans'. I myself is not of UK origin but do speak English English (or 'queen's English' as Brtis call) and now I live in the US. Quite frankly, due to the unpleasant phonetic expression of American English (not to mention is repetitive slangs), I still maintain my English English accent and dialect.

how does language shape your your cultural identity?

At any rate, provided certain words exist only in a certain language, e.g., the equivalent semantic of a German word 'glauben' is non-existent in English language and that it is loosely translated to either 'believe', 'think' or 'have a faith in', etc.

Also, a difference in grammatical structure does change sound, nuance, impressions and even meaning of what is being said. For instnace, in English, you would probably say "I am hungry" when you are hungry; whereas in Geramn you would probably say "Ich habe hunger". If you translate the German version to Englishe equivalent word by word, you would get something like "I have hunger" and thus the meaning becomes closer to "I have a desire". Just in a practical conversation, would you say "I have a desire" when you are hungry? - I beleive not.

The point being - if you originally spoke your mother language and no longer speak the language, you probably lost some ways of saying which are inherent and unique in your origianl language, and the moment you realised that loss, you certainly feel a loss of your original culture there.

But the sense of 'loss' is very subjective. I highly doubt anyone would use the word 'loss' when you are willing to abandon (i.e., stop doing) something for the sake of something better, superior and useful. For instance, when you trash/replace your old 486 computer with a new pentium 4, would you feel a sense of 'loss' there (provided you have no sentimental attachement to your 486)? I myself was in the situation about 3 months ago and I in fact felt more of a 'gain' than a 'loss'.

That is, if you would have a certain value in your original culture, then, you would probably feel a 'loss' when you no longer use your mother language insofar as the language belongs to your original culture. On the other hand, if you have no value placed on your culture, you would probably feel more of a 'gain' by acquiring a new language.

So you have to ask yourself, how much of your original culture you value, then can you unequivocally answer as to how much of your mother language you value, and also how much of your language shapes your cultural identiy.

In my subjective view, I do maintain that language to a greater extent determines my cultural identity.

My recommendation to you is a book titiled: "On the Way to Language" by a German Philosopher Martin Heidegger. It includes a dialog between a Japanese thinker and Heidegger in which the limit of saying in language is posited. Very interesting indeed.
kind regards,

Language shapes thought. It's extremely difficult for humans to think about something they can't put into words. Obvious counterexamples are musicians and other artists, of course, but most of us don't fall into those groups.

My native language is English, but I learned to think in Mandarin courtesy of a Chinese girlfriend who diligently spoke it around the house with me after I'd taken a first year course. Even though my command of Mandarin is at about the three-year-old level, I am constantly amazed at how different problems and other situations appear when I think about them using Chinese words instead of English words.

I also have a similar modest ability to think in Spanish. But you can never appreciate how similar two Indo-European languages are until you study one from outside the family. Spanish and English both have adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, tense, number, and gender (to a certain extent). Chinese has none of those. You discover that you can express, say, relationships very precisely when you have an entire vocabulary of nouns and verbs at hand, rather than a pathetic set of prepositions left over from the Stone Age.

Btw, I think I might have posted this on another thread a while back, but recently there were two fascinating papers in Science supporting the Whorfian hypothesis (that language defines thought), at least with respect to arithmetic.

Two separate investigators, working with unrelated and geographically separate aboriginal tribes, had essentially the same finding. These peoples, whose languages lacked terms for numbers greater than two (in one case) or five (in the other), were completely incapable of doing (what we would consider) simple arithmetic with small numbers. For example, they couldn't subtract seven from twelve (using physical markers, like pebbles or counters) with any accuracy.

They did, however, retain a general sense of number in that they could estimate whether one group of pebbles was 'more' than another, provided the difference was sufficiently large. If the two groups looked about the same, they couldn't count to see which group contained more units.

Amazing, huh?

Btw, I think I might have posted this on another thread a while back, but recently there were two fascinating papers in Science supporting the Whorfian hypothesis (that language defines thought), at least with respect to arithmetic.


Wow. I've mentioned this somewhere before too.

It seems that the fewer the number of syllables in a number, the faster we can manipulate that number. Fortunately, all but two in the single digits pronounced in English don't contain any more than one syllable. So generally, we can do complex arithmetic fairly fast.

Even though my command of Mandarin is at about the three-year-old level

About the same here. I have about a 4 or 5-year-old's equivalent capability of Mandarin.

You discover that you can express, say, relationships very precisely when you have an entire vocabulary of nouns and verbs at hand, rather than a pathetic set of prepositions left over from the Stone Age.

I don't get this. What are you trying to say here?

Neve:


The point being - if you originally spoke your mother language and no longer speak the language, you probably lost some ways of saying which are inherent and unique in your origianl language, and the moment you realised that loss, you certainly feel a loss of your original culture there.

But the sense of 'loss' is very subjective. I highly doubt anyone would use the word 'loss' when you are willing to abandon (i.e., stop doing) something for the sake of something better, superior and useful. For instance, when you trash/replace your old 486 computer with a new pentium 4, would you feel a sense of 'loss' there (provided you have no sentimental attachement to your 486)? I myself was in the situation about 3 months ago and I in fact felt more of a 'gain' than a 'loss'.

That is, if you would have a certain value in your original culture, then, you would probably feel a 'loss' when you no longer use your mother language insofar as the language belongs to your original culture. On the other hand, if you have no value placed on your culture, you would probably feel more of a 'gain' by acquiring a new language.

So you have to ask yourself, how much of your original culture you value, then can you unequivocally answer as to how much of your mother language you value, and also how much of your language shapes your cultural identiy.


My recommendation to you is a book titiled: "On the Way to Language" by a German Philosopher Martin Heidegger. It includes a dialog between a Japanese thinker and Heidegger in which the limit of saying in language is posited. Very interesting indeed.


Yeah.. Its all based on personal choices mostly but it actually surprises me how many people actually do value language so much as part of their cultural identity. In a recent survey conducted by the local newspaper in Singapore, only 1 in 4 Singaporean Chinese believed that speaking Chinese was not important. That day a local radio was having this discussion and most people who called in believed speaikng their mother tongue was very much important. A few even found it a disgrace if one could not speak their own mother tongue and I think that is simply extreme and unreasonble.

I can still speak my mother tongue. Just that its at the level of a ten year old or maybe slightly worse but so far I havent had the need for it. Living where I do, Mandarin is more useful and I can't speak that. But I get by as English is spoken by most even if it is a little bit hard to communicate as the people tend to do a direct translation from their language to English rather than forming correct sentences in English. It would be like a German saying I have hunger instead of I am hungry.

And about how different languages shape one's thinking is true. Ive read that article on the tribal people and its the best example.

how does language shape your your cultural identity?
interesting question, (as a Chicano, a Mexican born in the US) I think language gives you insight into everything about the world around you, it forms the worldviews that your mind uses to express itself, it gives 'words' & 'meanings' to it, so in a sense, it forms 'you'.

knowing two languages (as I do), gives you more ways of looking into the world around you, if you are willing or able to 'see', that is.

It is only the bilingual that can see what can and cannot be said in communication between languages or cultures. Most often, problems with understanding and communicating with people of other cultures and belief systems is the absence of shared language conventions. These barriers between understanding can even exist within the same language itself.

It's not use arguing with someone unless you 'go native' in their culture and thought system. Since there are no universal standards of truth, there's no objective way to look at the other from your own perspective.

You can't understand cultural differences until you understand the differences in language. Even if its just different dialects- Newfies will talk and act like happy, hockey playing drunks. Brits try to exhude an air of superiority, australians like to grab attention with their loud boisterous voices. Then you have the grave and onerous Russians who seem to pull through against all odds.

Language and cultural identity are tied into the landscape, climate, population density, politics, food sources...I could go on

I know of some research that shows that certain cultures will associate different properties with objects based on the gender of the word. For example, when native German speakers are told to write words that associate with "key" in English, they write down words like hard, heavy and jagged; whereas, in Spanish they write words like golden, intricate, tiny and shiny.
As for the tribal experiment, I'm a little suspicious of it. I've heard of languages that differentiate between singular, dual and plural, but I've never heard of a population that didn't have a concept for dinstinct numbers above 2. Could you post a link?

... told to write words that associate with "key" in English, they write down words like ...
just think of the ideas that that word has in English....