If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside.
“If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside”, the saying from Afghan-born American author Khaled Hosseini perfectly sums up my opinion regarding language learning. In order to fully grasp one language, one must dive into the culture where the language comes from, as the relationship between the two varies. Within layers of complicated writing, grammar and vocabulary, comes deep iceberg of taboo, customs, and values of the language culture that dwells within, not only from the language variation itself. Informal language and dialects shows how the culture develop when they influenced by modernity, geography and outside interaction. So how can one understand culture through language learning?
Learning language is not only about learning how to use grammar properly, memorising vocabulary but also understanding how culture is related with it. For example, if you are familiar with Mandarin language or something akin to it, you must be wondering why there are tons of ways to refer to one flesh and blood relatives, even far off the family tree have their own terms. You might have an idea if you familiar with Chinese culture that very much emphasizes the family ties or filial piety. That is why we see that for the simple term ofgrandpa and grandma, you have multiple term to differentiate between mom side of grandma with the father sides. Understanding can help us become more appreciative and hopefully more absorb in understanding the language that we try to master.
Other than that, within the language we can also see layers of taboo, customs and values that one culture emphasizes within particular words, idioms or special slangs use for certain situation. One examples that I can relate to this is the use of keigo within Japanese language in which refers to the system of honorific speech use to emphasize ranks and it have multiple levels of politeness used depend on the situation and person we used on. In contrast to more individualistic nature of western culture that we can see in the use of term “you”, we can see how in Japanese culture, the collective nature is emphasized there on how you behave within the community and outside of it. To further complicate the matter, within Keigo also has other subcategory that we don’t need to dwell on. The matter of fact is that we can observe here how certain society communicate with each other through the language they speak, we can see how community emphasized certain values, do they prefer more direct sentence or they mask their intention by using double meaning words and phrase as to not offend the other party? By observing all of these it can made our learning process become even more interesting as it not only help in our learning progress but also widen our world view of the world we live in.
Lastly, the variation of the words use and the difference of the spelling in the certain words in different dialects can help us see how does the same culture develop and progress differently as it’s influence by the domestic factors, geography and so on. Chinese characters for example are quite different in China compared to Taiwan. Chinese characters in China has been simplified and while in Taiwan they use the original characters. This is due to the changes made by the central government in China to curb the issues of illiterate of the Chinese society at that time, they believe that these complicated shape of characters makes it hard for common people to become literate so they simplified the shape to ease the learning process, while Taiwan though there were effort to introduce the simplified version but due to the strong culture ties that the original characters have to the culture and in a way also influenced by the rivalry between these two China at that time, it were discouraged. The use of simplified version for now according to my latest knowledge is that Taiwan Government has delete them in their official website in 2011 according to BBC. As we can see here the culture progress differently and these reflect in the development of the language itself, The use of different version of character writings in Chinese language for me is perfect example of what we can understand about the culture of the language that we learn.
So in the end as you can see here learning language is not only learning about grammar, memorizing vocabulary and so on but it’s instead the learning to understand the culture in which will help us widen our world view. With the globalization, the world become borderless and it is important for us to widen our world views. Don’t simply learn for the sake of learning, explore and understand it so that you can benefit yourself more in the future.
Written by Ahmad Umar Ahmad Zafir