.
The Definition of Language
According
to Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, ”language is the system of
communication in speech and writing that is used by people of a particular
country or area.”[1]
Ronald states that a language is
what the members of
a particular society speak.[2]
According to T. E. Hulme Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is,
it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise –
that which is common to
you, me and everybody.[3]
Based on the
definitions above it can be conclude that language is a system of communication
which is used by a particular society to expresses a compromise which is common
to everybody.
B.
The definition of Sex (Gender)
A major topic in sociolinguistics is the connection, if
any, between the structures, vocabularies, and ways of using particular languages and the social roles
of the men and women who speak these languages.[4]
Some expert states that they prefer
to use word gender than sex because “sex is
to a very large extent biologically determined whereas gender is a social construct (but still one heavily
grounded in sex, as we
can see in recent publications that use the term ‘sexuality,’ e.g., Kulick,
2003,
and Cameron and Kulick, 2003) involving the whole gamut
of genetic, psychological, social, and cultural differences between males and females.”
Ronald (2006: 315). Wodak (1997) in Ronald (2006:315) says that gender is ‘not . . . a pool of attributes
“possessed” by a person, but . . . something a person “does.”.
Gender is also
something we cannot avoid; it is part of the way in which societies are ordered
around us, with each society doing that ordering differently.[5] Language can be seen as just one of
those conventionalised activities. This means that linguistic features that
probabilistically differentiate female and male speakers are seen in a
different light.[6]
C.
Manners of Male And Female Speech
a. Politeness
When we turn to certain grammatical matters in English,
we find that Brend (1975) claims that the intonation patterns of men and women
vary somewhat, women using certain patterns associated with surprise and
politeness more often than men, Ronald (2006:321). Politeness in
speech is described in terms of positive and negative face. Positive face
refers to one's desire to be liked and admired, while negative face
refers to one's wish to remain autonomous and not to suffer imposition.
b. Minimal
responses[7]
One of the ways in which the communicative
behavior of men and women differ is in their use of minimal responses, i.e., paralinguistic
features such as ‘mhm’ and ‘yeah’, which is behaviour associated with
collaborative language use. Men, on the other hand, generally use them less
frequently and where they do, it is usually to show agreement, as Don Zimmerman
and Candace West’s study of turn-taking in conversation indicates.
While the above can be true in some
contexts and situations, studies that dichotomize the communicative behavior of
men and women may run the risk of over-generalization. For example, "minimal
responses appearing "throughout streams of talk", such as
"mm" or "yeah", not only function to display active
listening and interest and are not always signs of "support work", as
Fishman (1978) claims. They can - as more detailed analysis of minimal
responses show—signal understanding, demonstrate agreement, indicate scepticism
or a critical attitude, demand clarification or show surprise". In other
words, both male and female participants in a conversation can employ these
minimal responses for interactive functions, rather than gender-specific
functions.
c.
Questions
Men and women differ in their use of questions in
conversations. For men, a question is usually a genuine request for information
whereas with women it can often be a rhetorical means of engaging the other’s
conversational contribution or of acquiring attention from others
conversationally involved, techniques associated with a collaborative approach
to language use. Therefore women use questions more frequently. In writing,
however, both genders use rhetorical questions as literary devices. For
example, Mark Twain used them in "A War Prayer"
to provoke the reader to question his actions and beliefs. In ronald (2006:321), Lakoff says that women may answer a
question with a statement that employs the rising intonation pattern usually
associated with a question rather than the falling intonation pattern associated
with making a firm statement.
According to Lakoff, women do this because they are less
sure about themselves and their opinions than are men, e.g., ‘They caught the
robber last week, didn’t they?’ These claims about tag questions and insecurity
have been tested by others (Dubois and Crouch, 1975, Cameron et al., 1989, and
Brower et al., 1979) and found wanting: experimental data do not necessarily
confirm intuitive judgments.
d. Turn-taking
As the work of Victoria DeFrancisco shows,
female linguistic behaviour characteristically encompasses a desire to take
turns in conversation with others, which is opposed to men’s tendency towards
centering on their own point or remaining silent when presented with such
implicit offers of conversational turn-taking as are provided by hedges such as "y’ know" and
"isn’t it". This desire for turn-taking gives rise to complex forms
of interaction in relation to the more regimented form of turn-taking commonly
exhibited by men.
e. Changing the topic of conversation
According to Bruce Dorval in his study of
same-sex friend interaction, males tend to change subject more frequently than
females. This difference may well be at the root of the conception that women
chatter and talk too much, and may still trigger the same thinking in some
males. In this way lowered estimation of women may arise. Incidentally, this
androcentric attitude towards women as chatterers arguably arose from the idea
that any female conversation was too much talking according to the patriarchal
consideration of silence as a womanly virtue common to many cultures. Goodwin
(1990) observes that girls and women link their utterances to previous speakers
and develop each other topics, rather than introducing new topics.
Female tendencies toward self-disclosure,
i.e., sharing their problems and experiences with others, often to offer
sympathy, contrasts with male tendencies to non-self disclosure and professing
advice or offering a solution when confronted with another’s problems.
Self-disclosure is not simply providing
information to another person. Instead, scholars define self-disclosure as
sharing information with others that they would not normally know or discover.
Self-disclosure involves risk and vulnerability on the part of the person
sharing the information. When it comes to genderlect, self-disclosure is
important because genderlect is defined as the differences in male and female
communication. Men and women they have completely different views of
self-disclosure. It typically is much easier to get to know a woman than it is
to get to know a man. It has been proven that women get to know
someone on a more personal level and they are more likely to desire to share
their feelings.
g. Verbal Aggression
Aggression can be defined by its three
intersecting counterparts: indirect, relational and social. Indirect aggression
occurs when the victim is attacked through covert and concealed attempts to
cause social suffering. Examples are gossiping, exclusion or ignoring of the
victim. Relational aggression, while similar to indirect, is more resolute in
its attentions. It can be a threat to terminate a friendship or spreading false
rumors. The third type of aggression, social aggression, "is directed
toward damaging another’s self-esteem, social status, or both, and may take
direct forms such as verbal rejection, negative facial expressions or body
movements, or more indirect forms such as slanderous rumors or social
exclusion." This third type has become more common in adolescent, both
male and female, behavior.
D.
The Definition of Culture
According to Oxford Advanced Learner
Dictionary, culture is “The customs and beliefes, art, way of life and social
organization of a particular country or group”.[8]
Middle English (denoting a cultivated piece of land):
the noun from French culture or directly from Latin cultura
'growing, cultivation'; the verb from obsolete French culturer or
medieval Latin culturare, both based on Latin colere 'tend,
cultivate' (see cultivate). In late Middle English the sense was 'cultivation
of the soil' and from this (early 16th century), arose 'cultivation (of the
mind, faculties, or manners'); sense 1 of
the noun dates from the early
19th century
In other hands, Culture is the arts and
other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively,
the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society.
Street (1993b: 25; emphasis in the
original) Culture is an active process of meaning making and contest over
definition, including its own definition. This, then, is what I mean by arguing
that Culture is a verb.
E. Correlation between Language and Culture
Differences between the cultures of communities make
it difficult or impossible for people to learn the language of another society?
Languages evidently do differ in the way they symbolically reflect the world,
that is, in the way they categorize or codify the experience of
their speakers. As we have seen, the way they do this reflects the
interests, needs, concerns and preoccupations of the community they serve.
Where language A has a single name for some phenomenon, language B has no such word and
has to resort to periphrasis to express the same notion. German has the term
“Gemütlichkeit”, English has to resort to a whole phrase or conjunction of
terms, such as: kindly, easy-going, good-natured. The linguist would say that
the semantic features which are realized in one language in one lexical item
are in the other “syntaxmatically” distributed. The upshot of this discussion
seems to be that languages vary, therefore, in the ease with which they permit
codification. We can also note, that what is lexically coded in one language
may require both lexical and grammatical means in another, since circumlocution
involves grammatical relations.
Following
Weinreich (1966) it should be pointed out that language contact or contact of
two languages might be considered as one of the aspects of culture contact. It
is necessary to mention that the relationship between the field of
language contact and the field of culture contact has not been properly
defined yet. Anyway when two languages are usually brought into contact,
idiosyncrasies in linguistic behaviour of speakers – representatives of
different cultures – tend to cancel each other, while socially determined
speech habits and processes characteristic of the cultures become significant.
It is clear that when two languages come into contact the dominance of one
of them is largely determined by the usefulness of this language, its role
in social advance and its cultural value. “A culture, as a preference for certain
modes of behaviour, involves a preference for certain personality
structures rather than others” [Weinreich 1966: 215].
When a language-contact situation is examined in
detail, the inter relation of cultural conditions and linguistic phenomena is
apparent. In a great majority of contacts between groups speaking different
languages, the groups constitute, at the same time, distinct ethnic or cultural
communities. Situations of congruent culture-and-language contact seem to
invite interference of a lexical-cultural type. The relationship of the
cultures to one another in a particular geographic habitat determines what
one group learns from the other and defines such gaps in the vocabulary of each
group as may need filling by borrowing.
Thus culture contact naturally produces the diffusion
of non-material as well as of material culture elements. The non-material side
of culture is particularly significant in explaining not only the borrowing of
abstract vocabulary, but the principles of selectivity and rejection of
vocabulary.
Hence said that
language is a social institution it both shapes and is shaped by society in
which it plays an important role. Language is not an “autonomous construct”
[Fairclough 1989: VI] but social practice both creating and created by the
structures and forces of the social institutions within which we live and
function. Certainly, language cannot exist in a vacuum; there is a kind
of “transfusion” between language and culture. Amongst those who have
dilated upon the affinity between language and culture, it is Duranti who
encapsulate show these two interpenetrate: “… to be part of a culture means to
share the propositional knowledge and the rules of inference necessary to
understand whether certain propositions are true (given certain premises).To
the propositional knowledge, one might add the procedural knowledge to
carry out tasks such as giving a formal speech, answering the phone, asking for
a favor, writing a letter for a job application” [Duranti 1997: 28 - 29]. In
such a way everyday language is “tinged” with cultural implications.
That language has a setting, in that the people who
speak it belong to a race or races and is incumbents of particular cultural
roles, is obvious. “Language does not exist apart from culture, that is, from
the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs that determines the
texture of our lives” [Sapir 1970: 207]. In a sense, it is “a key to the
cultural past of a society” [Salzmann 1998: 41], “a guide to “social reality”
[Sapir 1929: 209, cited in Salzmann 1998: 41].Fairly recently, many
ethnographers such as Buttjes (1990), Ochs &Schieffelin (1984), Poyatos,
(1985), and Peters & Boggs, (1986) have attempted to show that “language
and culture are from the start inseparably connected”. More specifically, he
summarises the reasons why this should be the case:1)
To go back to the relationship between language and
culture Samovar, Porter, & Jain [1981: 24] observe: “Culture and
communication are inseparable because culture not only dictates who talks
to whom, about what, and how the communication proceeds, it also helps to
determine how people encode messages, the meanings they have for messages, and
the conditions ad circumstances under which various messages may or may not be
sent, noticed, or interpreted... Culture...is the foundation of communication”.
Moreover, given Duranti's [Duranti 1997: 24] definition of culture as
“something learned, transmitted, passed down from one generation to the next,
through human actions, often in the form of face-to-face interaction, and,
of course, through linguistic communication”, it is obvious that language,
albeit a subpart of culture, plays a pivotal role. Bourdieu has emphasized the
importance of language not as an autonomous construct but as a system determined
by various socio-political processes. For him, a language exists as a
linguistic habitués [Bourdieu 1990: 52]: “… as a set of practices that imply
not only a particular system of words and grammatical rules, but also an
often forgotten or hidden struggle over the symbolic power of a particular
way of communicating, with particular systems of classification, address and
reference forms, specialized lexicons, and metaphors (for politics, medicine,
ethics)” [Bourdieu1982: 31, cited in Duranti 1997: 45].At any rate, “… to speak
means to choose a particular way of entering the world and a particular way of
sustaining relationships with those we come in contact with. It is often
through language use that we, to a large extent, are members of a community of
ideas and practices”. Consequently, as a complex system of classification of
experience and “an important window on the universe of thoughts” [Duranti 1997:
49], as a link between thought and behaviour and as “the prototypical tool
for interacting with the world”
Bruner [1996: 3] says that “although meanings are “in
the mind”, they have their origins and their significance in the culture in
which they are created”. And he adds, “human beings do not terminate at their
own skins; they are expressions of a culture” [Bruner 1990: 12].Furthermore,
lexical and grammatical categories of a language have been assumed to
determine how its speakers conceptualize the world around them. Let us consider
the case of metaphors, “which have been analyzed as providing conceptual
schemata through which we understand the world” [Duranti 1997: 64]. For
example, the metaphor understanding is seeing will generate such expressions as
“I see what you mean. To get the whole picture, I'll tell you…”, while the
metaphor ideas are food establishes similarities across two different domains
(thinking and eating) and generates the expression “It gives me food for
thought”.
What is more, culture seems to have a grammar
of its own, which superimposes itself upon, and is reflected in the language.
“A grammar of culture consists of rules for the generation, of patterns of
behaviour”[Howell & Vetter 1976: 376]. To achieve a deeper understanding of
what the grammar of culture” really consists in, we should adduce the following
example [Howell & Vetter 1976: 374]. When an American sees a bus coming, he
almost always uses the present progressive (“the bus is coming”),
in juxtaposition with a Japanese, who uses the present perfect (“the bus
has come”). In this case, the difference between the two cultures lies in the
conceptual organization of experience” [Henle 1970: 3] which they choose,
or rather are conditioned, to adhere to. As has been intimated above, to a
large extent, “… we can be conditioned to see and hear things in much the same
way as we can be conditioned to perform overt acts as knee jerking, eye
blinking, or salivating” [Bruner & Goodman 1947: 34, cited in Howell
& Vetter 1976].Hence it is of no doubt that culture is a “muddied concept”
[Hall 1981:20], elusive of any definitive definition, yet it is inextricably
and implicitly related to language and society.
Based on argumentation above we can
conclude that correlation of culture and language is necessary
to mention that the relationship between the field of language contact and
the field of culture contact has not been properly defined yet. Anyway
when two languages are usually brought into contact, idiosyncrasies in
linguistic behaviour of speakers – representatives of different cultures – tend
to cancel each other, while socially determined speech habits and processes
characteristic of the cultures become significant. It is clear that when two
languages come into contact the dominance of one of them is largely
determined by the usefulness of this language, its role in social advance and
its cultural value.
CHAPTER III
CONCLUSION
A. Conclusion
There are many differences between
men’s language and women’s language. We can see that by Politeness side, minimal response side,
Question side, Turn taking side, Changing
the topic of conversation side, Self-disclosure side, Verbal aggression side.
Culture and language is necessary
to mention that the relationship between the field of language contact and
the field of culture contact has not been properly defined yet. Anyway
when two languages are usually brought into contact, idiosyncrasies in
linguistic behaviour of speakers – representatives of different cultures – tend
to cancel each other, while socially determined speech habits and processes
characteristic of the cultures become significant.
REFFERENCES
As
Hornby, Oxford Advanced Learners
Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010.
Miriam Mayerhoff, Introducing
Sociolinguistics, Routledge, New York, 2006.
Wardhaugh, Ronald,
An
introduction to sociolinguistics: fifth Edition,
Blackwell Publishing,
Oxford, 2006
http://www.lingate.8k.com/serap.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_and_gender
http://www.academia.edu/2013149/LANGUAGE_SOCIETY_CULTURE._CONCEPT_OF_CULTURE_IN_LINGUISTICS
http://www.lexiophiles.com/topic/the-relationship-between-language-and-culture
[2] Wardhaugh,
Ronald, An introduction to sociolinguistics: fifth Edition, Blackwell
Publishing,
Oxford, 2006, p. 1.
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