Date: 1 May 2009

We will look at various ways in which language

and culture have been said to be related. A few words
are necessary concerning what we mean by ‘culture.’
Rather, I intend to use it in the sense of whatever a
person must know in order to function in a particular
society. As in Goodenough’s well-known definition
(1957, p. 167): “A society’s culture consists of whatever it
is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a
manner acceptable to its members, and to do so in any
role that they accept for any one of themselves.” Culture,
therefore, is the ‘know-how’ that a person must possess
to get through the task of daily living.
1) Whorf
2) Kinship
3) Color
4) Taxonomies
5) Prototypes
6) Taboo Words and Euphemisms
 One interesting way in which people use language in daily living
is to refer to various kinds of kin. It is not surprising, therefore,
that there is a considerable literature on kinship terminology,
describing how people in various parts of the world refer to
relatives by blood (or descent) and marriage. Kinship systems are
a universal feature of languages, because kinship is so important
in social organization. You can therefore relate them with
considerable confidence to the actual words that people use to
describe a particular kin relationship. It is important to remember
that when a term like father, brother, or older brother is used in a
kinship system, it carries with it ideas about how such people
ought to behave toward in the society that uses that system. They
are assumed to have certain rights and duties.
 As social conditions change, we can expect kinship systems to
change to reflect the new conditions.
 The terms people use to describe color give us another means
of exploring the relationships between different languages and
cultures. The color spectrum is a physical continuum showing no
breaks at all. Yet we parcel it out in bits and pieces and assign
names to the various component parts: green, blue, yellow, red, and
so on. We also find that we sometimes cannot directly translate
color words from one language to another without introducing
subtle changes in meaning, e.g., English brown and French brun. An
interesting issue is how colors are referred to in different languages.
 From their investigation they concluded that there are
eleven basic colours which occur in a specific
implicational order, for instance the authors claimed
that if a language had a word for ‘green’ then it had a
word for ‘red’, if ‘brown’ then ‘blue’, etc. The ordering
for their eleven colours is as follows.

 Implicational hierarchy of colours (items on right imply those on left)

 white red green blue brown purple
 black yellow pink
 orange
 grey
 Analyses into taxonomies and components are useful in that
they help us to organize data in ways that appear to indicate how
speakers use their language to organize the world around them. they
also show how systematic much of that behavior is and do so in a
rather surprising way. A folk taxonomy of disease is something that
develops with little or no conscious attention. That it can be shown to
have a complex hierarchical structure is therefore a rather surprising
finding.
 It leads to an easier account of how people learn to use
language, particularly linguistic concepts, from the
kinds of instances they come across.
 According to Hudson, prototype theory may even be
applied to the social situations in which speech occurs.
 Prototype theory, then, offers us a possible way of
looking not only at how concept may be formed, but
also at how we achieve our social competence in the
use of language.
Taboo Words:
 Certain words are “taboo” – they are not to be used, or
at least, not in polite company
 A reflection of the opinion that vocabulary used by the
upper classes is superior to that used by the lower
classes

Euphemisms:
 A word or phrase that replaces a taboo word or serves
to avoid frightening or unpleasant subjects.
Example:

Taboo Word Euphemism

die pass (on/away)
mortician funeral director
urinate / defecate go to the powder
room

The discussion of taboo words and euphemisms

shows that words of a language are not intrinsically good
or bad, but reflect individual or societal values.