Julianto Pratama

F041181513

English Languange and Culture Final Task

“How is the relationship between language and culture, especially in the case of English
language and culture?”

As we know, language is a communication tool that only humans have. More clearly,
humans can make sounds, symbols, and names to mark something, whereas animals are not able
to do that. Language is used by the human community to communicate with each other. In other
words, language reflects the culture that surrounds and determines the reflection of others about
that language. There is a certain kind of relationship between language and culture, especially in
English. But after all, both of these often define a person, their views, traditions, habits, and pretty
much almost everything about their daily life.

There is the most striking similarity between culture and language. Both emerge and develop
together long before people can write or realize themselves. Communication between humans is
always accompanied by interpretations that contain meaning. For discourse, the meaning is never
absolute, always determined by various contexts that always refer to the signs that contain in
human life in which there is culture. Therefore, language is never separated from the cultural
context and its existence is always overshadowed by culture. For example, the distinction between
the word "sibling" (people born from the same womb) by sex: brothers and sisters. When
compared with culture in Indonesia, the word "brother" is distinguished by age: the older is called
older siblings and the younger ones are called younger siblings. So that brothers and sisters in
English can mean brother and can also mean sister.

Moreover, recently it is very common for various cultures to interact with. Travel is a lot
more accessible than it used to be and a lot of people even choose to move to a different country
and spend their life in a culture originally foreign to them. This phenomenon has an interrelated
relationship with language. Moreover, it is very common for various cultures to interact with.
Travel is a lot more accessible than it used to be and a lot of people even choose to move to a
different country and spend their life in a culture originally foreign to them. This phenomenon
has an interrelated relationship with language because some languages may have concepts that
are absent in other languages, for example the word "puang" in bugis language will be difficult to
translate into English because the word contains cultural context in it . Such situations are also
influenced by the culture that is related to the specific language. Obviously, when two people
from two separate cultures try to converse, they may experience miscommunication.

Another issue that might be found in another country is the behavioral habits that a person
develops when growing up in a certain culture. As mentioned before, the body language is quite
varying around the globe, and there are differences that may influence the inter-cultural
interactions between people.

The linguistic varieties of a language can be categorized into geographical, social, and
functional. Geographical differences happen when a form of the language is used in certain parts
of a community. For example, the language spoken in the Eastern part of a country may differ
from the one spoken in the West. Social differences are influenced by gender, age, and
occupation. For example, a professor will talk differently from a politician or an office worker.
Functional differences stem from the function and situation that the language is used in. But
regardless of these dissimilarities, culture unifies people speaking variations of one language or
even speaking several languages. This is also true for a language unifying people from varying
cultural backgrounds.

There are also superlatives such as: killer, sick, sweet, or wicked. These words might not
make sense to everyone. People might use these kinds of words based on the situation and to
whom they are speaking. These words reflect the culture of U.S. and how words links them and
enables users to claim affiliation with these subcultures. Every word we speak is an example of
the beliefs, values and its origins. For instance, Japan was an agricultural society depended to its
nature. As a result we can see lots of phrases in Japan concerning to the nature and climate.

To sum it up, The words we speak might be language, but the way we speak it, is all part of
our culture that our parents and society has been teaching us from the day we are born. The
implications of the link between language and culture is very important to understand the values,
ideologies and history. One must be able to understand the cultural background of language to
truly learn the language.