Is Language Inseparable from Culture?

People often say you cannot learn a language without learning about the culture.

Here I usually want to ask what they mean by “can’t”: that it would be impossible or that it would be immoral?

Is language inseparable from culture?

It depends on what you mean by 'culture.'

For some people, culture is Bolshoi Theater performing Swan Lake

It also depends on what you mean by 'inseparable.'

And what you mean by 'language.'

What is culture anyway?

When I hear someone say that a certain language course/textbook/ teacher is better than another course/textbook/ teacher because it doesn't just teach the language, it also teaches you about the culture I usually get suspicious.

Twenty years ago, when I started learning Oji-Cree¹ (a native Canadian language of the Algonquian group that would become the focus of my academic research), the only available textbook tried hard to teach me about culture. That amounted to long lists of words for traditional activities (nanaantawencike ‘hunt’, mahkisin ‘moccasin/shoe’ aanahkonaa ‘bannock’, wiiyaahs ‘meat’, moos ‘moose’, waapoos ‘rabbit’…)

I don’t know how much culture I learned from those but I sure didn’t learn much language.

Later, when I got the opportunity to teach the language myself (to passive bilingual adults, e.g. people who grew up hearing the language but didn’t speak it) it was important to me to teach it in a way that would allow people to go out and use the language in their everyday life even if their everyday life did not involve moose hunting.

I wanted them to go out and be able to ask for directions in Oji-Cree (even if there was technically no one to ask them in Toronto) and to order their favorite dish in their imaginary favorite restaurant with onions on the side.

At the end of the year, people came up to me and said they’d never seen Oji-Cree taught like that because in mainstream schools they only teach you how to talk about traditional activities but nothing about the everyday.

All I did was adopt the revolutionary idea that language is primarily a means of communication. It’s not a depository of cultural artifacts to be guarded and preserved. It’s a conduit from one person’s mind to another’s. If you don’t learn anything that enables you to talk to a random interesting stranger, then what’s the point?

Some very uncultured language patterns

The fascinating thing about language is that, as much as it helps us organize ourselves into distinct linguistic and cultural groups, it can also be seen as something completely separate from culture. It defines us as humans, cuts across cultural and ethnic divisions, and shows the mind-boggling capabilities of the human brain.

It’s totally legal to get your high from completely culture-unrelated language patterns.

For example, from the fact that Portuguese has three words for ‘there’: aí, ali and lá.

aí means the thing you’re pointing at is far from you but close to the person you're speaking to.

ali means the thing is far from both of you but still within sight.

lá is used when you’re talking about something far away.

Or from the fact that Oji-Cree has two words for ‘we.’ One is called inclusive ‘we’ (meaning “I and you”) and the other is exclusive ‘we’ (“I and someone else but not you”)

E.g. kiwii-papaamohsemin ‘we’re going for a walk’ means ‘me and you’ and niwii-papaamohsemin ‘we’re going for a walk’ means ‘me and someone else but not you.’

Have you ever stopped to consider the fact that the English words for ‘there’ and ‘we’ package all these meanings (and more)?

Language is a window into a culture

Language is separable from culture. But language is inseparable from people who speak it, and people who speak it are inseparable from their culture. Except culture is not history or museums or moccasins. (Maybe that’s a very tiny part of culture).

Culture is the very particular way that one group of people sees the world that is indescribably different from the way another group of people sees the world.

In that sense, language is a powerful window into a culture.

One time when I spoke to Pius on Italki (a platform for language speaking practice), I asked him, in Swahili, umeolewa? ‘are you married?’ (we were just practicing), he laughed and said, “Oh my god never say it to a man, it sounds so offensive.” Apparently, in Swahili, when talking to a man you use the active form of the verb ‘marry’ — umeoa (literally “have you married?”), whereas the passive one umeolewa (literally “have you been married?”) is used only when talking to a woman.

A glimpse into the culture? Probably.

In Thai, people add a politeness particle at the end of every sentence, and the type of particle depends on the gender of the speaker: men add the particle ครับ kráp and women add คะ kâ. In addition (or in case that’s not polite enough) people tend to stick various additional politeness particles in the middle of a sentence to further ‘soften’ their sentences.

Thai also has special words to address people older than yourself. I know that the prefix phee- is added when addressing older friends and family members, but there are other ones for other types of authority figures.

Does that mean that Thai people are more formal / polite than other cultural groups? Maybe. I have no idea. Just knowing about the existence of politeness particles does not give me enough information about the culture. You have to experience the culture and not just the language to know for sure.

I do know that Russian, for example, has two forms of the second person pronoun “you”: the informal ty and the formal vy. The formal ‘you’ (vy) is used when talking to people older than yourself. Does that mean that Russians have a particular regard for elders? God, no.

On the other hand, Oji-Cree doesn’t have any specialized language for addressing elders but it’s the most elder-respecting society I’ve seen. It’s a culture where elders really and truly have the last word.

Maybe a culture’s respect for elders is not directly correlated with the number of politeness particles and formal pronouns in the language.

Lost in translation

And then there are words in every language that can’t be easily translated into other languages because the cultural construct they refer to doesn’t exist or is not that central in other cultures.

In Hebrew, one such word is gibush. Literally, it refers to the chemical process where the liquid is transformed into a solid structure, but it is most often used to mean something like “getting a group of people together to nurture team spirit and togetherness.”

The fact that Hebrew packages it into a single word has a cultural significance because togetherness is an important aspect of the society here. People who work in an office, every once in a while go out for a yom gibush (“a gibush day”), where they engage in some non-work activity (e.g. basket weaving or, I dunno, ballroom dancing) to further their togetherness.

Schools have regular gibush events (I have vague memories of hiking in the desert and taking turns carrying the giant water canister on your back) and parents of kindergarteners get together for picnics in the park for gibush afternoons.

This week Yannai and his class are going to Tel Aviv for a gibush day to mark the end of the school year and to nurture team spirit that I suppose will carry them through the last two weeks of middle school.

In that sense, language is inseparable from culture.

Just don’t confuse culture with moccasins that’s all.

1. Oji-Cree is a dialect of Ojibwe that is also known by the name of Aniihshiniinimowin. There has been some recent discussion about how Oji-Cree people want to be referred to. I use the term ‘Oji-Cree’ because that’s what that’s the term that was used by people in the native community I worked with years ago, but it might be that a different name is more appropriate now.