how do language and culture influence each other essay

Along with Stanford news and stories, show me:

• Student information
• Faculty/Staff information

We want to provide announcements, events, leadership messages and resources that are relevant to you. Your selection is stored in a browser cookie which you can remove at any time using “Clear all personalization” below.

Speaking, writing and reading are integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language – what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine – can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

“Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human,” said Dan Jurafsky , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford . “Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity.”

The stories below represent some of the ways linguists have investigated many aspects of language, including its semantics and syntax, phonetics and phonology, and its social, psychological and computational aspects.

Understanding stereotypes

Stanford linguists and psychologists study how language is interpreted by people. Even the slightest differences in language use can correspond with biased beliefs of the speakers, according to research.

One study showed that a relatively harmless sentence, such as “girls are as good as boys at math,” can subtly perpetuate sexist stereotypes. Because of the statement’s grammatical structure, it implies that being good at math is more common or natural for boys than girls, the researchers said.

Language can play a big role in how we and others perceive the world, and linguists work to discover what words and phrases can influence us, unknowingly.

How well-meaning statements can spread stereotypes unintentionally

New Stanford research shows that sentences that frame one gender as the standard for the other can unintentionally perpetuate biases.

Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.S. Census data.

Exploring what an interruption is in conversation

Stanford doctoral candidate Katherine Hilton found that people perceive interruptions in conversation differently, and those perceptions differ depending on the listener’s own conversational style as well as gender.

Cops speak less respectfully to black community members

Professors Jennifer Eberhardt and Dan Jurafsky, along with other Stanford researchers, detected racial disparities in police officers’ speech after analyzing more than 100 hours of body camera footage from Oakland Police.

How other languages inform our own

People speak roughly 7,000 languages worldwide. Although there is a lot in common among languages, each one is unique, both in its structure and in the way it reflects the culture of the people who speak it.

Jurafsky said it’s important to study languages other than our own and how they develop over time because it can help scholars understand what lies at the foundation of humans’ unique way of communicating with one another.

“All this research can help us discover what it means to be human,” Jurafsky said.

Stanford PhD student documents indigenous language of Papua New Guinea

Fifth-year PhD student Kate Lindsey recently returned to the United States after a year of documenting an obscure language indigenous to the South Pacific nation.

Students explore Esperanto across Europe

In a research project spanning eight countries, two Stanford students search for Esperanto, a constructed language, against the backdrop of European populism.

Chris Manning: How computers are learning to understand language​

A computer scientist discusses the evolution of computational linguistics and where it’s headed next.

Stanford research explores novel perspectives on the evolution of Spanish

Using digital tools and literature to explore the evolution of the Spanish language, Stanford researcher Cuauhtémoc García-García reveals a new historical perspective on linguistic changes in Latin America and Spain.

Language as a lens into behavior

Linguists analyze how certain speech patterns correspond to particular behaviors, including how language can impact people’s buying decisions or influence their social media use.

For example, in one research paper, a group of Stanford researchers examined the differences in how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online to better understand how a polarization of beliefs can occur on social media.

“We live in a very polarized time,” Jurafsky said. “Understanding what different groups of people say and why is the first step in determining how we can help bring people together.”

Analyzing the tweets of Republicans and Democrats

New research by Dora Demszky and colleagues examined how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online in an attempt to understand how polarization of beliefs occurs on social media.

Examining bilingual behavior of children at Texas preschool

A Stanford senior studied a group of bilingual children at a Spanish immersion preschool in Texas to understand how they distinguished between their two languages.

Predicting sales of online products from advertising language

Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky and colleagues have found that products in Japan sell better if their advertising includes polite language and words that invoke cultural traditions or authority.

Language can help the elderly cope with the challenges of aging, says Stanford professor

By examining conversations of elderly Japanese women, linguist Yoshiko Matsumoto uncovers language techniques that help people move past traumatic events and regain a sense of normalcy.

Relationship Between Language and Culture Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

What is culture, relationship between language and culture, role of language in cultural diversity, reference list.

How does culture influence language? An essay isn’t enough to answer this question in detail. The purpose of the paper is to clearly highlight the issue of intercultural communication with reference to language and identity.

Language and culture are intertwined. One cannot define or identify cultural orientations without citing variations in how we speak and write. Thus, to explore the relationship between language and culture, this essay will start by defining the terms separately.

Culture describes variations in values, beliefs, as well as differences in the way people behave (DeVito 2007). Culture encompasses everything that a social group develops or produces.

Element of culture are not genetically transmitted and as such, they have to be passed down from one generation the next through communication. This explains why it is easy to adopt a certain language depending on the shared beliefs, attitudes and values.

The existence of different cultures can be explained using the cultural relativism approach which stipulates that although cultures tend to vary, none is superior to the other (DeVito 2007).

Learning of cultural values can be done through enculturation whereby individuals learn the culture of their birth. Alternatively, one can be acculturated into a culture that is divergent from their basic culture (DeVito 2007).

Language is the verbal channel of communication by articulating words that an individual is conversant with. This is aimed at relaying information. In other words, it is the expression of one’s culture verbally (Jandt 2009).

Language is the first element that helps an individual to distinguish the cultural orientations of individuals. Through language, we are able to differentiate between for example, a Chinese national and a Briton. The main functions of language are generally for information purposes and for the establishment of relationships.

Different cultures perceive the use of language differently. Whereas an American regards it as a useful communication tool, a Chinese will use their language to relay their feelings and to establish relationships.

It is through such variances of language that different cultures have placed on the usage of their language show the link between the two study variables (Jandt 2009).

Intercultural communication refers to communication between people from different cultural backgrounds. Due to the differences in cultures, there is a high probability that a message will be misunderstood and distorted.

Difference in languages leads to challenges in the interpretation of for example, politeness, acts of speech and interaction management. Normally, differences in languages lead to impediments in understanding. This is due to the difference in perception in as far as values are concerned.

Language shapes our lines of thought and as such, it is the core element that shapes how people perceive the world. The way people communicate is largely due to their cultures of origin. Language increases the rate of ethnocentrism in individuals thus furthering their self-centeredness in culture.

As a result, they are less responsive to the different means of communication that are not similar to their own values and beliefs (McGregor eta al 2007).

Language further heightens the aspect of accelerating cultural differences as it openly showcases the variations in communication. In turn, this view tends to impede negatively on intercultural efforts, thereby having a negative impact on the communication between individuals of different cultural orientations.

There is need for individuals to evaluate the usage of language in order to effectively interpret the shared meanings that are meant to be communicated. It is important therefore that individuals from a multi cultural context look at each other beyond their differences in order to enable effective communication.

DeVito, J A. (2006) Human communication the basic course, 10 th edition. Boston, Mass: Pearson / Allyn and Bacon.

Jandt, F E. (2007) An introduction to intercultural communication: identities in global community . Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc.

Mohan, T, McGregor, M T, Saunders, H & Archee, S. (2008) Communicating as a professional . Sydney, Australia: Cengage Learning.

• Hmong Americans and Traditional Practices of Healing
• Foolishness: Psychological Perspective
• Relationship Between Ethnocentrism and Intercultural Communication
• Appropriation of Black Culture Life by Whites
• Cultural Differences: Individualism vs. Collectivism
• Americanization of Russia and its Impact on Young Generation
• Smoking Culture in Society
• The Main Distinctions of Popular Culture and Its Growth
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, July 2). Relationship Between Language and Culture Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/relationship-between-language-and-culture/

"Relationship Between Language and Culture Essay." IvyPanda , 2 July 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/relationship-between-language-and-culture/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Relationship Between Language and Culture Essay'. 2 July.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Relationship Between Language and Culture Essay." July 2, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/relationship-between-language-and-culture/.

1. IvyPanda . "Relationship Between Language and Culture Essay." July 2, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/relationship-between-language-and-culture/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Relationship Between Language and Culture Essay." July 2, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/relationship-between-language-and-culture/.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

3.4 Language, Society, and Culture

Learning objectives.

• Discuss some of the social norms that guide conversational interaction.
• Identify some of the ways in which language varies based on cultural context.
• Explain the role that accommodation and code-switching play in communication.
• Discuss cultural bias in relation to specific cultural identities.

Society and culture influence the words that we speak, and the words that we speak influence society and culture. Such a cyclical relationship can be difficult to understand, but many of the examples throughout this chapter and examples from our own lives help illustrate this point. One of the best ways to learn about society, culture, and language is to seek out opportunities to go beyond our typical comfort zones. Studying abroad, for example, brings many challenges that can turn into valuable lessons. The following example of such a lesson comes from my friend who studied abroad in Vienna, Austria.

Although English used to employ formal ( thou , thee ) and informal pronouns ( you ), today you can be used when speaking to a professor, a parent, or a casual acquaintance. Other languages still have social norms and rules about who is to be referred to informally and formally. My friend, as was typical in the German language, referred to his professor with the formal pronoun Sie but used the informal pronoun Du with his fellow students since they were peers. When the professor invited some of the American exchange students to dinner, they didn’t know they were about to participate in a cultural ritual that would change the way they spoke to their professor from that night on. Their professor informed them that they were going to duzen , which meant they were going to now be able to refer to her with the informal pronoun—an honor and sign of closeness for the American students. As they went around the table, each student introduced himself or herself to the professor using the formal pronoun, locked arms with her and drank (similar to the champagne toast ritual at some wedding ceremonies), and reintroduced himself or herself using the informal pronoun. For the rest of the semester, the American students still respectfully referred to the professor with her title, which translated to “Mrs. Doctor,” but used informal pronouns, even in class, while the other students not included in the ceremony had to continue using the formal. Given that we do not use formal and informal pronouns in English anymore, there is no equivalent ritual to the German duzen , but as we will learn next, there are many rituals in English that may be just as foreign to someone else.

Language and Social Context

We arrive at meaning through conversational interaction, which follows many social norms and rules. As we’ve already learned, rules are explicitly stated conventions (“Look at me when I’m talking to you.”) and norms are implicit (saying you’ve got to leave before you actually do to politely initiate the end to a conversation). To help conversations function meaningfully, we have learned social norms and internalized them to such an extent that we do not often consciously enact them. Instead, we rely on routines and roles (as determined by social forces) to help us proceed with verbal interaction, which also helps determine how a conversation will unfold. Our various social roles influence meaning and how we speak. For example, a person may say, “As a longtime member of this community…” or “As a first-generation college student…” Such statements cue others into the personal and social context from which we are speaking, which helps them better interpret our meaning.

One social norm that structures our communication is turn taking. People need to feel like they are contributing something to an interaction, so turn taking is a central part of how conversations play out (Crystal, 2005). Although we sometimes talk at the same time as others or interrupt them, there are numerous verbal and nonverbal cues, almost like a dance, that are exchanged between speakers that let people know when their turn will begin or end. Conversations do not always neatly progress from beginning to end with shared understanding along the way. There is a back and forth that is often verbally managed through rephrasing (“Let me try that again,”) and clarification (“Does that make sense?”) (Crystal, 2005)

We also have certain units of speech that facilitate turn taking. Adjacency pairs are related communication structures that come one after the other (adjacent to each other) in an interaction (Crystal, 2005). For example, questions are followed by answers, greetings are followed by responses, compliments are followed by a thank you, and informative comments are followed by an acknowledgment. These are the skeletal components that make up our verbal interactions, and they are largely social in that they facilitate our interactions. When these sequences don’t work out, confusion, miscommunication, or frustration may result, as you can see in the following sequences:

Travis: “How are you?”

Wanda: “Did someone tell you I’m sick?”

Darrell: “I just wanted to let you know the meeting has been moved to three o’clock.”

Leigh: “I had cake for breakfast this morning.”

Some conversational elements are highly scripted or ritualized, especially the beginning and end of an exchange and topic changes (Crystal, 2005). Conversations often begin with a standard greeting and then proceed to “safe” exchanges about things in the immediate field of experience of the communicators (a comment on the weather or noting something going on in the scene). At this point, once the ice is broken, people can move on to other more content-specific exchanges. Once conversing, before we can initiate a topic change, it is a social norm that we let the current topic being discussed play itself out or continue until the person who introduced the topic seems satisfied. We then usually try to find a relevant tie-in or segue that acknowledges the previous topic, in turn acknowledging the speaker, before actually moving on. Changing the topic without following such social conventions might indicate to the other person that you were not listening or are simply rude.

Social norms influence how conversations start and end and how speakers take turns to keep the conversation going.

Felipe Cabrera – conversation – CC BY 2.0.

Ending a conversation is similarly complex. I’m sure we’ve all been in a situation where we are “trapped” in a conversation that we need or want to get out of. Just walking away or ending a conversation without engaging in socially acceptable “leave-taking behaviors” would be considered a breach of social norms. Topic changes are often places where people can leave a conversation, but it is still routine for us to give a special reason for leaving, often in an apologetic tone (whether we mean it or not). Generally though, conversations come to an end through the cooperation of both people, as they offer and recognize typical signals that a topic area has been satisfactorily covered or that one or both people need to leave. It is customary in the United States for people to say they have to leave before they actually do and for that statement to be dismissed or ignored by the other person until additional leave-taking behaviors are enacted. When such cooperation is lacking, an awkward silence or abrupt ending can result, and as we’ve already learned, US Americans are not big fans of silence. Silence is not viewed the same way in other cultures, which leads us to our discussion of cultural context.

Language and Cultural Context

Culture isn’t solely determined by a person’s native language or nationality. It’s true that languages vary by country and region and that the language we speak influences our realities, but even people who speak the same language experience cultural differences because of their various intersecting cultural identities and personal experiences. We have a tendency to view our language as a whole more favorably than other languages. Although people may make persuasive arguments regarding which languages are more pleasing to the ear or difficult or easy to learn than others, no one language enables speakers to communicate more effectively than another (McCornack, 2007).

From birth we are socialized into our various cultural identities. As with the social context, this acculturation process is a combination of explicit and implicit lessons. A child in Colombia, which is considered a more collectivist country in which people value group membership and cohesion over individualism, may not be explicitly told, “You are a member of a collectivistic culture, so you should care more about the family and community than yourself.” This cultural value would be transmitted through daily actions and through language use. Just as babies acquire knowledge of language practices at an astonishing rate in their first two years of life, so do they acquire cultural knowledge and values that are embedded in those language practices. At nine months old, it is possible to distinguish babies based on their language. Even at this early stage of development, when most babies are babbling and just learning to recognize but not wholly reproduce verbal interaction patterns, a Colombian baby would sound different from a Brazilian baby, even though neither would actually be using words from their native languages of Spanish and Portuguese (Crystal, 2005).

The actual language we speak plays an important role in shaping our reality. Comparing languages, we can see differences in how we are able to talk about the world. In English, we have the words grandfather and grandmother , but no single word that distinguishes between a maternal grandfather and a paternal grandfather. But in Swedish, there’s a specific word for each grandparent: morfar is mother’s father, farfar is father’s father, farmor is father’s mother, and mormor is mother’s mother (Crystal, 2005). In this example, we can see that the words available to us, based on the language we speak, influence how we talk about the world due to differences in and limitations of vocabulary. The notion that language shapes our view of reality and our cultural patterns is best represented by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Although some scholars argue that our reality is determined by our language, we will take a more qualified view and presume that language plays a central role in influencing our realities but doesn’t determine them (Martin & Nakayama, 2010).

Culturally influenced differences in language and meaning can lead to some interesting encounters, ranging from awkward to informative to disastrous. In terms of awkwardness, you have likely heard stories of companies that failed to exhibit communication competence in their naming and/or advertising of products in another language. For example, in Taiwan, Pepsi used the slogan “Come Alive with Pepsi” only to later find out that when translated it meant, “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead” (Kwintessential Limited, 2012). Similarly, American Motors introduced a new car called the Matador to the Puerto Rico market only to learn that Matador means “killer,” which wasn’t very comforting to potential buyers (Kwintessential, 2012). At a more informative level, the words we use to give positive reinforcement are culturally relative. In the United States and England, parents commonly positively and negatively reinforce their child’s behavior by saying, “Good girl” or “Good boy.” There isn’t an equivalent for such a phrase in other European languages, so the usage in only these two countries has been traced back to the puritan influence on beliefs about good and bad behavior (Wierzbicka, 2004). In terms of disastrous consequences, one of the most publicized and deadliest cross-cultural business mistakes occurred in India in 1984. Union Carbide, an American company, controlled a plant used to make pesticides. The company underestimated the amount of cross-cultural training that would be needed to allow the local workers, many of whom were not familiar with the technology or language/jargon used in the instructions for plant operations to do their jobs. This lack of competent communication led to a gas leak that immediately killed more than two thousand people and over time led to more than five hundred thousand injuries (Varma, 2012).

Accents and Dialects

The documentary American Tongues , although dated at this point, is still a fascinating look at the rich tapestry of accents and dialects that makes up American English. Dialects are versions of languages that have distinct words, grammar, and pronunciation. Accents are distinct styles of pronunciation (Lustig & Koester, 2006). There can be multiple accents within one dialect. For example, people in the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States speak a dialect of American English that is characterized by remnants of the linguistic styles of Europeans who settled the area a couple hundred years earlier. Even though they speak this similar dialect, a person in Kentucky could still have an accent that is distinguishable from a person in western North Carolina.

American English has several dialects that vary based on region, class, and ancestry.

Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 4.0.

Dialects and accents can vary by region, class, or ancestry, and they influence the impressions that we make of others. When I moved to Colorado from North Carolina, I was met with a very strange look when I used the word buggy to refer to a shopping cart. Research shows that people tend to think more positively about others who speak with a dialect similar to their own and think more negatively about people who speak differently. Of course, many people think they speak normally and perceive others to have an accent or dialect. Although dialects include the use of different words and phrases, it’s the tone of voice that often creates the strongest impression. For example, a person who speaks with a Southern accent may perceive a New Englander’s accent to be grating, harsh, or rude because the pitch is more nasal and the rate faster. Conversely, a New Englander may perceive a Southerner’s accent to be syrupy and slow, leading to an impression that the person speaking is uneducated.

Customs and Norms

Social norms are culturally relative. The words used in politeness rituals in one culture can mean something completely different in another. For example, thank you in American English acknowledges receiving something (a gift, a favor, a compliment), in British English it can mean “yes” similar to American English’s yes, please , and in French merci can mean “no” as in “no, thank you” (Crystal, 2005). Additionally, what is considered a powerful language style varies from culture to culture. Confrontational language, such as swearing, can be seen as powerful in Western cultures, even though it violates some language taboos, but would be seen as immature and weak in Japan (Wetzel, 1988).

Gender also affects how we use language, but not to the extent that most people think. Although there is a widespread belief that men are more likely to communicate in a clear and straightforward way and women are more likely to communicate in an emotional and indirect way, a meta-analysis of research findings from more than two hundred studies found only small differences in the personal disclosures of men and women (Dindia & Allen, 1992). Men and women’s levels of disclosure are even more similar when engaging in cross-gender communication, meaning men and woman are more similar when speaking to each other than when men speak to men or women speak to women. This could be due to the internalized pressure to speak about the other gender in socially sanctioned ways, in essence reinforcing the stereotypes when speaking to the same gender but challenging them in cross-gender encounters. Researchers also dispelled the belief that men interrupt more than women do, finding that men and women interrupt each other with similar frequency in cross-gender encounters (Dindia, 1987). These findings, which state that men and women communicate more similarly during cross-gender encounters and then communicate in more stereotypical ways in same-gender encounters, can be explained with communication accommodation theory.

Communication Accommodation and Code-Switching

Communication accommodation theory is a theory that explores why and how people modify their communication to fit situational, social, cultural, and relational contexts (Giles, Taylor, & Bourhis, 1973). Within communication accommodation, conversational partners may use convergence , meaning a person makes his or her communication more like another person’s. People who are accommodating in their communication style are seen as more competent, which illustrates the benefits of communicative flexibility. In order to be flexible, of course, people have to be aware of and monitor their own and others’ communication patterns. Conversely, conversational partners may use divergence , meaning a person uses communication to emphasize the differences between his or her conversational partner and his or herself.

Convergence and divergence can take place within the same conversation and may be used by one or both conversational partners. Convergence functions to make others feel at ease, to increase understanding, and to enhance social bonds. Divergence may be used to intentionally make another person feel unwelcome or perhaps to highlight a personal, group, or cultural identity. For example, African American women use certain verbal communication patterns when communicating with other African American women as a way to highlight their racial identity and create group solidarity. In situations where multiple races interact, the women usually don’t use those same patterns, instead accommodating the language patterns of the larger group. While communication accommodation might involve anything from adjusting how fast or slow you talk to how long you speak during each turn, code-switching refers to changes in accent, dialect, or language (Martin & Nakayama, 2010). There are many reasons that people might code-switch. Regarding accents, some people hire vocal coaches or speech-language pathologists to help them alter their accent. If a Southern person thinks their accent is leading others to form unfavorable impressions, they can consciously change their accent with much practice and effort. Once their ability to speak without their Southern accent is honed, they may be able to switch very quickly between their native accent when speaking with friends and family and their modified accent when speaking in professional settings.

People who work or live in multilingual settings may engage in code-switching several times a day.

Eltpics – Welsh – CC BY-NC 2.0.

Additionally, people who work or live in multilingual settings may code-switch many times throughout the day, or even within a single conversation. Increasing outsourcing and globalization have produced heightened pressures for code-switching. Call center workers in India have faced strong negative reactions from British and American customers who insist on “speaking to someone who speaks English.” Although many Indians learn English in schools as a result of British colonization, their accents prove to be off-putting to people who want to get their cable package changed or book an airline ticket. Now some Indian call center workers are going through intense training to be able to code-switch and accommodate the speaking style of their customers. What is being called the “Anglo-Americanization of India” entails “accent-neutralization,” lessons on American culture (using things like Sex and the City DVDs), and the use of Anglo-American-sounding names like Sean and Peggy (Pal, 2004). As our interactions continue to occur in more multinational contexts, the expectations for code-switching and accommodation are sure to increase. It is important for us to consider the intersection of culture and power and think critically about the ways in which expectations for code-switching may be based on cultural biases.

Language and Cultural Bias

In the previous example about code-switching and communication accommodation in Indian call centers, the move toward accent neutralization is a response to the “racist abuse” these workers receive from customers (Nadeem, 2012). Anger in Western countries about job losses and economic uncertainty has increased the amount of racially targeted verbal attacks on international call center employees. It was recently reported that more call center workers are now quitting their jobs as a result of the verbal abuse and that 25 percent of workers who have recently quit say such abuse was a major source of stress (Gentleman, 2005). Such verbal attacks are not new; they represent a common but negative way that cultural bias explicitly manifests in our language use.

Cultural bias is a skewed way of viewing or talking about a group that is typically negative. Bias has a way of creeping into our daily language use, often under our awareness. Culturally biased language can make reference to one or more cultural identities, including race, gender, age, sexual orientation, and ability. There are other sociocultural identities that can be the subject of biased language, but we will focus our discussion on these five. Much biased language is based on stereotypes and myths that influence the words we use. Bias is both intentional and unintentional, but as we’ve already discussed, we have to be accountable for what we say even if we didn’t “intend” a particular meaning—remember, meaning is generated; it doesn’t exist inside our thoughts or words. We will discuss specific ways in which cultural bias manifests in our language and ways to become more aware of bias. Becoming aware of and addressing cultural bias is not the same thing as engaging in “political correctness.” Political correctness takes awareness to the extreme but doesn’t do much to address cultural bias aside from make people feel like they are walking on eggshells. That kind of pressure can lead people to avoid discussions about cultural identities or avoid people with different cultural identities. Our goal is not to eliminate all cultural bias from verbal communication or to never offend anyone, intentionally or otherwise. Instead, we will continue to use guidelines for ethical communication that we have already discussed and strive to increase our competence. The following discussion also focuses on bias rather than preferred terminology or outright discriminatory language, which will be addressed more in Chapter 8 “Culture and Communication” , which discusses culture and communication.

People sometimes use euphemisms for race that illustrate bias because the terms are usually implicitly compared to the dominant group (Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 2010). For example, referring to a person as “urban” or a neighborhood as “inner city” can be an accurate descriptor, but when such words are used as a substitute for racial identity, they illustrate cultural biases that equate certain races with cities and poverty. Using adjectives like articulate or well-dressed in statements like “My black coworker is articulate” reinforces negative stereotypes even though these words are typically viewed as positive. Terms like nonwhite set up whiteness as the norm, which implies that white people are the norm against which all other races should be compared. Biased language also reduces the diversity within certain racial groups—for example, referring to anyone who looks like they are of Asian descent as Chinese or everyone who “looks” Latino/a as Mexicans. Some people with racial identities other than white, including people who are multiracial, use the label person/people of color to indicate solidarity among groups, but it is likely that they still prefer a more specific label when referring to an individual or referencing a specific racial group.

Language has a tendency to exaggerate perceived and stereotypical differences between men and women. The use of the term opposite sex presumes that men and women are opposites, like positive and negative poles of a magnet, which is obviously not true or men and women wouldn’t be able to have successful interactions or relationships. A term like other gender doesn’t presume opposites and acknowledges that male and female identities and communication are more influenced by gender, which is the social and cultural meanings and norms associated with males and females, than sex, which is the physiology and genetic makeup of a male and female. One key to avoiding gendered bias in language is to avoid the generic use of he when referring to something relevant to males and females. Instead, you can informally use a gender-neutral pronoun like they or their or you can use his or her (Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 2010). When giving a series of examples, you can alternate usage of masculine and feminine pronouns, switching with each example. We have lasting gendered associations with certain occupations that have tended to be male or female dominated, which erase the presence of both genders. Other words reflect the general masculine bias present in English. The following word pairs show the gender-biased term followed by an unbiased term: waitress/server, chairman / chair or chairperson, mankind/people, cameraman / camera operator, mailman / postal worker, sportsmanship / fair play. Common language practices also tend to infantilize women but not men, when, for example, women are referred to as chicks , girls , or babes . Since there is no linguistic equivalent that indicates the marital status of men before their name, using Ms. instead of Miss or Mrs. helps reduce bias.

Language that includes age bias can be directed toward older or younger people. Descriptions of younger people often presume recklessness or inexperience, while those of older people presume frailty or disconnection. The term elderly generally refers to people over sixty-five, but it has connotations of weakness, which isn’t accurate because there are plenty of people over sixty-five who are stronger and more athletic than people in their twenties and thirties. Even though it’s generic, older people doesn’t really have negative implications. More specific words that describe groups of older people include grandmothers/grandfathers (even though they can be fairly young too), retirees , or people over sixty-five (Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 2010). Referring to people over the age of eighteen as boys or girls isn’t typically viewed as appropriate.

Age bias can appear in language directed toward younger or older people.

Davide Mauro – Old and young – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sexual Orientation

Discussions of sexual and affectional orientation range from everyday conversations to contentious political and personal debates. The negative stereotypes that have been associated with homosexuality, including deviance, mental illness, and criminal behavior, continue to influence our language use (American Psychological Association, 2012). Terminology related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and asexual (LGBTQA+) people can be confusing, so let’s spend some time raise our awareness about preferred labels. First, sexual orientation is the term preferred to sexual preference . Preference suggests a voluntary choice, as in someone has a preference for cheddar or American cheese, which doesn’t reflect the experience of most LGBTQA+ people or research findings that show sexuality is more complex. You may also see affectional orientation included with sexual orientation because it acknowledges that LGBTQA+ relationships, like heterosexual relationships, are about intimacy and closeness (affection) that is not just sexually based. Most people also prefer the labels gay , lesbian , or bisexual to homosexual , which is clinical and doesn’t so much refer to an identity as a sex act. Language regarding romantic relationships contains bias when heterosexuality is assumed. Keep in mind that individuals are not allowed to marry someone of the same gender in most states in the United States. For example, if you ask a gay man who has been in a committed partnership for ten years if he is “married or single,” how should he answer that question? Comments comparing LGBTQA+ people to “normal” people, although possibly intended to be positive, reinforces the stereotype that LGBTQA+ people are abnormal. Don’t presume you can identify a person’s sexual orientation by looking at them or talking to them. Don’t assume that LGBTQA+ people will “come out” to you. Given that many LGBTQA+ people have faced and continue to face regular discrimination, they may be cautious about disclosing their identities. However, using gender neutral terminology like partner and avoiding other biased language mentioned previously may create a climate in which a LGBTQA+ person feels comfortable disclosing his or her sexual orientation identity. Conversely, the casual use of phrases like that’s gay to mean “that’s stupid” may create an environment in which LGBTQA+ people do not feel comfortable. Even though people don’t often use the phrase to actually refer to sexual orientation, campaigns like “ThinkB4YouSpeak.com” try to educate people about the power that language has and how we should all be more conscious of the words we use.

People with disabilities make up a diverse group that has increasingly come to be viewed as a cultural/social identity group. People without disabilities are often referred to as able-bodied . As with sexual orientation, comparing people with disabilities to “normal” people implies that there is an agreed-on definition of what “normal” is and that people with disabilities are “abnormal.” Disability is also preferred to the word handicap . Just because someone is disabled doesn’t mean he or she is also handicapped. The environment around them rather than their disability often handicaps people with disabilities (Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 2010). Ignoring the environment as the source of a handicap and placing it on the person fits into a pattern of reducing people with disabilities to their disability—for example, calling someone a paraplegic instead of a person with paraplegia. In many cases, as with sexual orientation, race, age, and gender, verbally marking a person as disabled isn’t relevant and doesn’t need spotlighting. Language used in conjunction with disabilities also tends to portray people as victims of their disability and paint pictures of their lives as gloomy, dreadful, or painful. Such descriptors are often generalizations or completely inaccurate.

“Getting Critical”

Hate Speech

Hate is a term that has many different meanings and can be used to communicate teasing, mild annoyance, or anger. The term hate , as it relates to hate speech, has a much more complex and serious meaning. Hate refers to extreme negative beliefs and feelings toward a group or member of a group because of their race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or ability (Waltman & Haas, 2011). We can get a better understanding of the intensity of hate by distinguishing it from anger, which is an emotion that we experience much more regularly. First, anger is directed toward an individual, while hate is directed toward a social or cultural group. Second, anger doesn’t prevent a person from having sympathy for the target of his or her anger, but hate erases sympathy for the target. Third, anger is usually the result of personal insult or injury, but hate can exist and grow even with no direct interaction with the target. Fourth, anger isn’t an emotion that people typically find pleasure in, while hatred can create feelings of self-righteousness and superiority that lead to pleasure. Last, anger is an emotion that usually dissipates as time passes, eventually going away, while hate can endure for much longer (Waltman & Haas, 2011). Hate speech is a verbal manifestation of this intense emotional and mental state.

Hate speech is usually used by people who have a polarized view of their own group (the in-group) and another group (the out-group). Hate speech is then used to intimidate people in the out-group and to motivate and influence members of the in-group. Hate speech often promotes hate-based violence and is also used to solidify in-group identification and attract new members (Waltman & Haas, 2011). Perpetrators of hate speech often engage in totalizing, which means they define a person or a group based on one quality or characteristic, ignoring all others. A Lebanese American may be the target of hate speech because the perpetrators reduce him to a Muslim—whether he actually is Muslim or not would be irrelevant. Grouping all Middle Eastern- or Arab-looking people together is a dehumanizing activity that is typical to hate speech.

Incidents of hate speech and hate crimes have increased over the past fifteen years. Hate crimes, in particular, have gotten more attention due to the passage of more laws against hate crimes and the increased amount of tracking by various levels of law enforcement. The Internet has also made it easier for hate groups to organize and spread their hateful messages. As these changes have taken place over the past fifteen years, there has been much discussion about hate speech and its legal and constitutional implications. While hate crimes resulting in damage to a person or property are regularly prosecuted, it is sometimes argued that hate speech that doesn’t result in such damage is protected under the US Constitution’s First Amendment, which guarantees free speech. Just recently, in 2011, the Supreme Court found in the Snyder v. Phelps case that speech and actions of the members of the Westboro Baptist Church, who regularly protest the funerals of American soldiers with signs reading things like “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “Fag Sin = 9/11,” were protected and not criminal. Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the decision, “We cannot react to [the Snyder family’s] pain by punishing the speaker. As a nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate” (Exploring Constitutional Conflicts, 2012).

• Do you think the First Amendment of the Constitution, guaranteeing free speech to US citizens, should protect hate speech? Why or why not?
• Visit the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Hate Map” (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2012) (http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map) to see what hate groups they have identified in your state. Are you surprised by the number/nature of the groups listed in your state? Briefly describe a group that you didn’t know about and identify the target of its hate and the reasons it gives for its hate speech.

Key Takeaways

• Getting integrated: Social context influences the ways in which we use language, and we have been socialized to follow implicit social rules like those that guide the flow of conversations, including how we start and end our interactions and how we change topics. The way we use language changes as we shift among academic, professional, personal, and civic contexts.
• The language that we speak influences our cultural identities and our social realities. We internalize norms and rules that help us function in our own culture but that can lead to misunderstanding when used in other cultural contexts.
• We can adapt to different cultural contexts by purposely changing our communication. Communication accommodation theory explains that people may adapt their communication to be more similar to or different from others based on various contexts.
• We should become aware of how our verbal communication reveals biases toward various cultural identities based on race, gender, age, sexual orientation, and ability.
• Recall a conversation that became awkward when you or the other person deviated from the social norms that manage conversation flow. Was the awkwardness at the beginning, end, or during a topic change? After reviewing some of the common norms discussed in the chapter, what do you think was the source of the awkwardness?
• Describe an accent or a dialect that you find pleasing/interesting. Describe an accent/dialect that you do not find pleasing/interesting. Why do you think you evaluate one positively and the other negatively?
• Review how cultural bias relates to the five cultural identities discussed earlier. Identify something you learned about bias related to one of these identities that you didn’t know before. What can you do now to be more aware of how verbal communication can reinforce cultural biases?

American Psychological Association, “Supplemental Material: Writing Clearly and Concisely,” accessed June 7, 2012, http://www.apastyle.org/manual/supplement/redirects/pubman-ch03.13.aspx .

Crystal, D., How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning, and Languages Live or Die (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2005), 155.

Dindia, K., “The Effect of Sex of Subject and Sex of Partner on Interruptions,” Human Communication Research 13, no. 3 (1987): 345–71.

Dindia, K. and Mike Allen, “Sex Differences in Self-Disclosure: A Meta Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 112, no. 1 (1992): 106–24.

Exploring Constitutional Conflicts , “Regulation of Fighting Words and Hate Speech,” accessed June 7, 2012, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/hatespeech.htm .

Gentleman, A., “Indiana Call Staff Quit over Abuse on the Line,” The Guardian , May 28, 2005, accessed June 7, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/may/29/india.ameliagentleman .

Giles, H., Donald M. Taylor, and Richard Bourhis, “Toward a Theory of Interpersonal Accommodation through Language: Some Canadian Data,” Language and Society 2, no. 2 (1973): 177–92.

Kwintessential Limited , “Results of Poor Cross Cultural Awareness,” accessed June 7, 2012, http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/cultural-services/articles/Results of Poor Cross Cultural Awareness.html .

Lustig, M. W. and Jolene Koester, Intercultural Competence: Interpersonal Communication across Cultures , 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Pearson, 2006), 199–200.

Martin, J. N. and Thomas K. Nakayama, Intercultural Communication in Contexts , 5th ed. (Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, 2010), 222–24.

McCornack, S., Reflect and Relate: An Introduction to Interpersonal Communication (Boston, MA: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2007), 224–25.

Nadeem, S., “Accent Neutralisation and a Crisis of Identity in India’s Call Centres,” The Guardian , February 9, 2011, accessed June 7, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/09/india-call-centres-accent-neutralisation .

Pal, A., “Indian by Day, American by Night,” The Progressive , August 2004, accessed June 7, 2012, http://www.progressive.org/mag_pal0804 .

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2010), 71–76.

Southern Poverty Law Center , “Hate Map,” accessed June 7, 2012, http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map.

Varma, S., “Arbitrary? 92% of All Injuries Termed Minor,” The Times of India , June 20, 2010, accessed June 7, 2012, http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-06-20/india/28309628_1_injuries-gases-cases .

Waltman, M. and John Haas, The Communication of Hate (New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 2011), 33.

Wetzel, P. J., “Are ‘Powerless’ Communication Strategies the Japanese Norm?” Language in Society 17, no. 4 (1988): 555–64.

Wierzbicka, A., “The English Expressions Good Boy and Good Girl and Cultural Models of Child Rearing,” Culture and Psychology 10, no. 3 (2004): 251–78.

Communication in the Real World Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

• Follow Us:

• Document Translation Services
• Certified Translation Services
• Proofreading Services
• Audio Transcription Services
• Website Translation and Localisation Services
• Translation Memory Management and Alignment Services
• Terminology Management Services
• Polish Medical Translation Services
• Polish Technical Translation Services
• Polish Legal Translation Services
• English Translation Services
• Polish Translation Services
• Spanish Translation Services

• How does culture influence language?

This question resurfaces time and time again throughout history, spawning many theories and hypotheses that lead to a true rabbit hole. Let’s try to tackle the subject in a short and comprehensive manner.

What exactly is culture?

The simplest definition of culture is the ways of life of a given society . But this doesn’t tell us much, does it? Culture itself is a very broad subject that can be interpreted in many ways. This is largely due to its lack of defined boundaries and constant changes.

The most common and largely agreed upon concept describes it as the sum of acquired knowledge passed from generation to generation that’s used for interpreting experiences and shaping behaviours .

Culture consists of many elements such as beliefs, dress-codes, norms of behaviour, art and many more. But for today’s topic, the most important part of culture is language.

The relationship between culture and language

It’s safe to say that each society that grew independently has its own language. This tendency is best represented by small clusters of indigenous people whose culture is confined to just one village. Even if their languages have common roots, their dialects would evolve independently to the point they will seem like a foreign language to one another. Dialects can develop in relatively small areas, a good example of this for the English language is the so-called cockney. This dialect was originally confined to a single district of London, East End, and was spoken solely by the working class that lived there.

But let’s take a step back and look at what lies in the core of a language. Simply put, it’s nothing more or less than a tool to describe the world that surrounds us and express our thoughts and culture. That’s right, culture gives meaning to the words we speak . So without cultural context, words would be just noises without any significance. For example, a society that developed in the middle of an African savannah wouldn’t have a word for snow, while Eskimos that live surrounded by it have over 20 different words for it. This means that even if you have a good grasp on a second language, it might be difficult to communicate your thoughts to a native speaker due to different cultural background, especially in a written form. So while conveying your important content into different languages, make sure to employ localisation services , this way you can be sure that it will end up culturally appropriate and bring intended effect.

Furthermore, culture determines if a given word carries positive or negative meaning . A good example of such cultural language differences is the word ‘jealous’. In Greek ( Zήλεια ) it’s derived from the word Ζέω that means hot/warm and is associated with the word meaning life/to live ( Ζωή ), thus carrying a positive connotation and means ‘to be in a hot/warm state’. On the other hand, we have Swedish, in which its equivalent is svartsjuk . It combines two words – ‘black’ ( svart ) and ‘ill’ ( sjuk ), both with strong negative overtone. So to someone from the Scandinavian culture, jealousy is considered an illness.

As already mentioned, culture is rather fluid and prone to changes. And language promptly follows – changes in culture are reflected in the language . The changes can be subtle, e.g., slightly altering the pronunciation of some words, and sprung from accidental events, but over time they can transform a given language into something far different from its initial form. We don’t have to look far for an example of such a makeover – modern English is so far off from its old iteration, that the latter is mostly incomprehensible to the proverbial average Joe. For people that don’t speak English as their first language, it just sounds like gibberish. Single changes in the vocabulary can also greatly influence communication – let’s venture into Polish for such an example. In the times of yore, the word ‘kutas’ meant a decorative tassel that adorned belts of the nobility and clergy, while today… well, it’s a rather vulgar name for the male reproductive organ. Big difference right there.

We had a handful of examples of culture influencing language, but what about the other way around? How does language affect cultural norms? Well, people that speak the same language tend to think alike, which in turn affects their way of communicating with others . Let’s take Spanish and Japanese speakers. Spanish natives tend to be flamboyant and full of emotions, and the language itself can be considered as antagonistic as it doesn’t stray from conflicts – the arguments between Spaniards can be really heated. The Japanese speakers fall on the other side of this spectrum, they are rather reserved and seldom let their emotions out. Their conversations are very polite and tend to avoid conflicts, as the language is considered conformist.

Another instance of how language affects culture can be this, the vocabulary we use affects the way others perceive us and our status in the society . A foul-mouthed person would have lower social status in the eye of the beholder than someone expressing themselves in a socially accepted manner. So language affects society in a big way.

Are you looking for other languages to expand your business? Take a look at our post on most spoken languages in Europe and learn, which of them have the most promising business potential.

Can a language function without culture?

Judging by the fact, that culture is the source of language, this seems highly unlikely. Even the most wide-spread languages have their roots in a specific culture and are rather strongly based on it. Sure, we have Latin with its long-dead culture, but nowadays, it’s rarely used outside scientific purposes.

What about ‘artificial’ languages based on universal grammar, such as Esperanto? They, too, borrow from already established cultures.

How to communicate properly with other cultures?

Getting your point across to a different culture requires a deeper understanding of a given language. This is especially important in business and legal dealings. To avoid any embarrassing error, use professional translation services , here at TEXTOLOGY we can provide you with highly qualified native-speaking translators that can handle medical, technical, and legal translations for many popular languages. So don’t wait and request a free quote today!

Our website uses cookies in order to improve your browsing experience, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. By continuing to use our website, you agree to the use of cookies that are stored on your device's memory. For more information about the cookies we use, please see our cookie policy.

You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser or activate Google Chrome Frame to improve your experience.

The 8 Main Ways Language and Culture Are Related

Learning about different cultures helps us approach languages with new insight. It allows us to delve deeper into the meaning of  words and expressions  and helps us feel more connected to each other.

Read on to explore the relationship between language and culture more deeply. Hopefully, when you’re done, you’ll have a new appreciation for the language you’re currently studying as well as the culture it comes from. 

What Does Language Have to Do with Culture?

1. language reflects the values and beliefs of a culture, 2. language reflects our perception of the world, 3. language gives us a away to express our culture, 4. language allows for transmission of culture, 5. language shapes perceptions, 6. language gives us identity and belonging, 7. language holds cultural norms and etiquette, 8. language reflects cultural innovation and change, historical perspective: the link between the history of a culture and its language, use ancient terms as cultural examples, look for footprints left by other cultures on a language, note the ever-evolving meaning of words, how this understanding affects your language learning journey, and one more thing....

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

To answer this question, let’s think about the purpose of language .

Language allows us to express our thoughts and feelings as well as communicate and share knowledge with one another.

You won’t fully master a language unless you understand the culture, just like you’ll never fully understand a culture until you’ve immersed yourself in a study of their language. This is because language is constantly in flux and largely dependent on the ever-evolving views, values and customs of its speakers.

Let’s look at just how connected they really are.

The differences between two cultures are reflected in their languages . Mastering the nuances of a language means really being able to understand people who (more than likely) grew up with an entirely different set of values and beliefs. 

Taking a look at common expressions and idioms gives you a glimpse into what a society deems important.

• Thousands of learner friendly videos (especially beginners)
• Handpicked, organized, and annotated by FluentU's experts
• Integrated into courses for beginners

For example, the vast number of Chinese idioms relating to family demonstrates the value they place on this relationship and tells us a little about the family construct.

You can find lots of examples of the historical and cultural values reflected in typical English expressions and idioms by just listening to an episode of NPR’s radio program “A Way with Words.”

Have you ever heard the phrase “A Whistle in the Dark” or noticed any of the other words and expressions for the word courage ? Such observations would lead an English learner to believe that bravery is a highly coveted attribute in English-speaking societies.

But that’s not the only connection between language and culture.

Language affects the way we perceive the world and therefore, how we choose to interact with it.

When discussing language and perception, most linguists will probably point you to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , which states that the limits and structure of language determines their user’s thoughts and actions. This hypothesis is supported by professor Lera Boroditsky who wrote a whole paper on the topic of linguistic relativity .

• Interactive subtitles: click any word to see detailed examples and explanations
• Slow down or loop the tricky parts
• Show or hide subtitles
• Review words with our powerful learning engine

Those who study linguistic relativity often explore the concept of time and space between languages. Boroditsky found that while English speakers view time horizontally (i.e., the past is behind us or to the left and the future is ahead or to the right), Mandarin speakers are more likely to view time vertically (i.e. the order of events is viewed from top to bottom).

Others have studied the connection between  bilingualism and personality , finding that when people switch languages they also seem to “switch” their personality to fit the language, shifting their way of thinking to reflect that of the people who speak the respective language. 

Language reflects perception, but also the history of a culture and explains why certain ideas and beliefs are so prominent and profound.

A great way to expose yourself to a culture’s unique perspective and values is to engage with native media produced by people from that culture . One way you can do this is by using an immersion program such as FluentU .

FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.

You can try FluentU for free for 2 weeks. Check out the website or download the iOS app or Android app.

P.S. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)

Try FluentU for FREE!

Language is a medium for artistic expression, including literature, poetry, music and theater, so it’s not a stretch to say that language literally allows us to express our culture in all its forms.

These forms of cultural expression not only enrich the language but also provide insights into the values, aesthetics and creativity of a culture.

Language is the primary vehicle for transmitting culture from one generation to the next.

• Learn words in the context of sentences
• Swipe left or right to see more examples from other videos
• Go beyond just a superficial understanding

Through language, traditions, stories, rituals and historical accounts are passed down , helping to maintain cultural identity and cohesion.

Think of the lessons, morals and stories that your grandparents and parents gave to you through language, and soon you’ll realize that language is a delivery device for all things culture.

The language we speak shapes our perceptions and worldview.

Different languages have unique ways of expressing concepts and experiences , influencing how speakers perceive and interpret the world around them.

For example, in Turkish, the past tense changes depending on whether the speaker has actually seen the action with their own eyes, or if they merely heard about the action taking place.

Language is a fundamental aspect of personal and group identity.

Speaking a particular language can foster a sense of belonging to a specific cultural community, while language loss or suppression can lead to feelings of alienation and cultural disconnection.

• FluentU builds you up, so you can build sentences on your own
• Start with multiple-choice questions and advance through sentence building to producing your own output
• Go from understanding to speaking in a natural progression.

Just think of the Native American tribes that have lost their languages through various processes including the introduction of English and Spanish. These tribes, on average, have higher rates of poverty and shorter lifespans, compared with tribes whose language is prospering.

Language often contains implicit cultural norms and etiquette.

Understanding the nuances of language usage, such as appropriate forms of address, greetings and expressions of politeness , is essential for effective communication within a cultural context.

For example, if you walked up to a Japanese person you never met, said hello, told them about your day and then kissed them, they might be totally freaked out. If you did the same to a French person, they’d accept it as normal.

Language is dynamic and continually evolves, often influenced by cultural changes and interactions.

New words, expressions and linguistic conventions emerge as cultures evolve, reflecting shifts in societal values, technology, and global influences.

• Images, examples, video examples, and tips
• Covering all the tricky edge cases, eg.: phrases, idioms, collocations, and separable verbs
• No reliance on volunteers or open source dictionaries
• 100,000+ hours spent by FluentU's team to create and maintain

This also tells us a lot about cultural power dynamics. Think of the word “internet” for example. Many languages use this word even though it originated in English, where much of the internet-related businesses were founded.

Understanding a culture’s history allows you to form some idea of how and why certain words came to mean what they do. For example, in Mandarin, 心 (Xīn)  is often directly translated to “heart” in English. However, the word also refers to the mind and one’s emotions.

The meaning of the word is an important concept in Daoist teachings and makes those teachings much more accessible to Mandarin speakers.

The history of a culture explains the power a term or idea can carry in a language, but it also explains the existence of certain linguistic elements.

To really understand a language, you also have to ask yourself about the influence of other cultures on it.

The English language is a perfect example of mixing cultures and language. The Germanic Anglo-Normans and Latin-based French essentially planted the seed for English as we know it to grow.

Learning all about its history will help you understand the meaning behind certain words and phrases with Latin roots , as well as other words of foreign language descent .

English isn’t the only example of a language with a rich history. If you’re studying one of the Romance languages, it helps to learn about European history and the spread of Latin.

Maybe you’re learning Spanish and wondering why there are so many words that start with  al ? Spanish has many words of Arabic origin due to the  Islamic conquest of Spain , such as al fombra  (rug, carpet),  al mohada  (pillow) and  al godón (cotton).

Knowing the history of a culture is not just a way to get clarification, it also shows how words have evolved to reflect the current cultural climate.

When looking at etymology (the study of word origins and development), you’ll find that many words once meant one thing but now mean something else entirely.

In the past, it was almost impossible to pinpoint the redefining moments for these words. The broadening or dissolution of their original meanings tended to just happen slowly over time with usage. Nowadays, we can study this much more closely.

Words can evolve in various ways. Sometimes they can start out as harmless phrases but evolve to be quite rude, like the word “bimbo” which has its roots in the Italian word  “bambino” (little child). In English, this originally referred to an unintelligent man, but over time it came to be quite a derogatory term for an attractive, but not very bright, woman.

Another example is the word “awesome.” Its root is “awe” which used to be synonymous with “dread.” The word maintained that connotation until around the late 1970s when people started using it to describe great things.

As you can see, our ever-developing culture forces language to develop alongside it . 

Being able to understand the culture behind a language can help immeasurably in understanding the connotations of a word , especially when there’s no equivalency in your own language. Not doing so can cause some embarrassing or offensive situations.

Take a language like Japanese that has words that are closely tied to the culture. The Japanese don’t just have formal and informal forms, but honorific and humble forms as well. This is referred to as keigo .

When trying to master another language, the best thing to do is to go in without any expectations or preconceived notions and focus on understanding the culture behind it.

Now that you’ve learned about the deep connection between language and culture, you may be interested in watching this super interesting TEDx talk on the subject:

When you take that understanding of culture and apply it as you learn the language, you start to have a whole new appreciation for the language you’re studying.

If you dig the idea of learning on your own time from the comfort of your smart device with real-life authentic language content, you'll love using FluentU .

With FluentU, you'll learn real languages—as they're spoken by native speakers. FluentU has a wide variety of videos as you can see here:

FluentU App Browse Screen.

FluentU has interactive captions that let you tap on any word to see an image, definition, audio and useful examples. Now native language content is within reach with interactive transcripts.

Didn't catch something? Go back and listen again. Missed a word? Hover your mouse over the subtitles to instantly view definitions.

Interactive, dual-language subtitles.

You can learn all the vocabulary in any video with FluentU's "learn mode." Swipe left or right to see more examples for the word you’re learning.

FluentU Has Quizzes for Every Video

And FluentU always keeps track of vocabulary that you’re learning. It gives you extra practice with difficult words—and reminds you when it’s time to review what you’ve learned. You get a truly personalized experience.

Start using the FluentU website on your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU app from the iTunes or Google Play store. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)

Related posts:

Enter your e-mail address to get your free pdf.

We hate SPAM and promise to keep your email address safe

• Bipolar Disorder
• Therapy Center
• When To See a Therapist
• Types of Therapy
• Best Online Therapy
• Best Couples Therapy
• Best Family Therapy
• Managing Stress
• Sleep and Dreaming
• Understanding Emotions
• Self-Improvement
• Healthy Relationships
• Student Resources
• Personality Types
• Guided Meditations
• Verywell Mind Insights
• 2024 Verywell Mind 25
• Mental Health in the Classroom
• Editorial Process
• Meet Our Review Board
• Crisis Support

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: How Language Influences How We Express Ourselves

Rachael is a New York-based writer and freelance writer for Verywell Mind, where she leverages her decades of personal experience with and research on mental illness—particularly ADHD and depression—to help readers better understand how their mind works and how to manage their mental health.

Thomas Barwick / Getty Images

What to Know About the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Real-world examples of linguistic relativity, linguistic relativity in psychology.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativity, refers to the idea that the language a person speaks can influence their worldview, thought, and even how they experience and understand the world.

While more extreme versions of the hypothesis have largely been discredited, a growing body of research has demonstrated that language can meaningfully shape how we understand the world around us and even ourselves.

Keep reading to learn more about linguistic relativity, including some real-world examples of how it shapes thoughts, emotions, and behavior.  

The hypothesis is named after anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf. While the hypothesis is named after them both, the two never actually formally co-authored a coherent hypothesis together.

This Hypothesis Aims to Figure Out How Language and Culture Are Connected

Sapir was interested in charting the difference in language and cultural worldviews, including how language and culture influence each other. Whorf took this work on how language and culture shape each other a step further to explore how different languages might shape thought and behavior.

Since then, the concept has evolved into multiple variations, some more credible than others.

Linguistic Determinism Is an Extreme Version of the Hypothesis

Linguistic determinism, for example, is a more extreme version suggesting that a person’s perception and thought are limited to the language they speak. An early example of linguistic determinism comes from Whorf himself who argued that the Hopi people in Arizona don’t conjugate verbs into past, present, and future tenses as English speakers do and that their words for units of time (like “day” or “hour”) were verbs rather than nouns.

From this, he concluded that the Hopi don’t view time as a physical object that can be counted out in minutes and hours the way English speakers do. Instead, Whorf argued, the Hopi view time as a formless process.

This was then taken by others to mean that the Hopi don’t have any concept of time—an extreme view that has since been repeatedly disproven.

There is some evidence for a more nuanced version of linguistic relativity, which suggests that the structure and vocabulary of the language you speak can influence how you understand the world around you. To understand this better, it helps to look at real-world examples of the effects language can have on thought and behavior.

Different Languages Express Colors Differently

Color is one of the most common examples of linguistic relativity. Most known languages have somewhere between two and twelve color terms, and the way colors are categorized varies widely. In English, for example, there are distinct categories for blue and green .

Blue and Green

But in Korean, there is one word that encompasses both. This doesn’t mean Korean speakers can’t see blue, it just means blue is understood as a variant of green rather than a distinct color category all its own.

In Russian, meanwhile, the colors that English speakers would lump under the umbrella term of “blue” are further subdivided into two distinct color categories, “siniy” and “goluboy.” They roughly correspond to light blue and dark blue in English. But to Russian speakers, they are as distinct as orange and brown .

In one study comparing English and Russian speakers, participants were shown a color square and then asked to choose which of the two color squares below it was the closest in shade to the first square.

The test specifically focused on varying shades of blue ranging from “siniy” to “goluboy.” Russian speakers were not only faster at selecting the matching color square but were more accurate in their selections.

The Way Location Is Expressed Varies Across Languages

This same variation occurs in other areas of language. For example, in Guugu Ymithirr, a language spoken by Aboriginal Australians, spatial orientation is always described in absolute terms of cardinal directions. While an English speaker would say the laptop is “in front of” you, a Guugu Ymithirr speaker would say it was north, south, west, or east of you.

As a result, Aboriginal Australians have to be constantly attuned to cardinal directions because their language requires it (just as Russian speakers develop a more instinctive ability to discern between shades of what English speakers call blue because their language requires it).

So when you ask a Guugu Ymithirr speaker to tell you which way south is, they can point in the right direction without a moment’s hesitation. Meanwhile, most English speakers would struggle to accurately identify South without the help of a compass or taking a moment to recall grade school lessons about how to find it.

The concept of these cardinal directions exists in English, but English speakers aren’t required to think about or use them on a daily basis so it’s not as intuitive or ingrained in how they orient themselves in space.

Just as with other aspects of thought and perception, the vocabulary and grammatical structure we have for thinking about or talking about what we feel doesn’t create our feelings, but it does shape how we understand them and, to an extent, how we experience them.

Words Help Us Put a Name to Our Emotions

For example, the ability to detect displeasure from a person’s face is universal. But in a language that has the words “angry” and “sad,” you can further distinguish what kind of displeasure you observe in their facial expression. This doesn’t mean humans never experienced anger or sadness before words for them emerged. But they may have struggled to understand or explain the subtle differences between different dimensions of displeasure.

In one study of English speakers, toddlers were shown a picture of a person with an angry facial expression. Then, they were given a set of pictures of people displaying different expressions including happy, sad, surprised, scared, disgusted, or angry. Researchers asked them to put all the pictures that matched the first angry face picture into a box.

The two-year-olds in the experiment tended to place all faces except happy faces into the box. But four-year-olds were more selective, often leaving out sad or fearful faces as well as happy faces. This suggests that as our vocabulary for talking about emotions expands, so does our ability to understand and distinguish those emotions.

But some research suggests the influence is not limited to just developing a wider vocabulary for categorizing emotions. Language may “also help constitute emotion by cohering sensations into specific perceptions of ‘anger,’ ‘disgust,’ ‘fear,’ etc.,” said Dr. Harold Hong, a board-certified psychiatrist at New Waters Recovery in North Carolina.

As our vocabulary for talking about emotions expands, so does our ability to understand and distinguish those emotions.

Words for emotions, like words for colors, are an attempt to categorize a spectrum of sensations into a handful of distinct categories. And, like color, there’s no objective or hard rule on where the boundaries between emotions should be which can lead to variation across languages in how emotions are categorized.

Emotions Are Categorized Differently in Different Languages

Just as different languages categorize color a little differently, researchers have also found differences in how emotions are categorized. In German, for example, there’s an emotion called “gemütlichkeit.”

While it’s usually translated as “cozy” or “ friendly ” in English, there really isn’t a direct translation. It refers to a particular kind of peace and sense of belonging that a person feels when surrounded by the people they love or feel connected to in a place they feel comfortable and free to be who they are.

Harold Hong, MD, Psychiatrist

The lack of a word for an emotion in a language does not mean that its speakers don't experience that emotion.

You may have felt gemütlichkeit when staying up with your friends to joke and play games at a sleepover. You may feel it when you visit home for the holidays and spend your time eating, laughing, and reminiscing with your family in the house you grew up in.

In Japanese, the word “amae” is just as difficult to translate into English. Usually, it’s translated as "spoiled child" or "presumed indulgence," as in making a request and assuming it will be indulged. But both of those have strong negative connotations in English and amae is a positive emotion .

Instead of being spoiled or coddled, it’s referring to that particular kind of trust and assurance that comes with being nurtured by someone and knowing that you can ask for what you want without worrying whether the other person might feel resentful or burdened by your request.

You might have felt amae when your car broke down and you immediately called your mom to pick you up, without having to worry for even a second whether or not she would drop everything to help you.

Regardless of which languages you speak, though, you’re capable of feeling both of these emotions. “The lack of a word for an emotion in a language does not mean that its speakers don't experience that emotion,” Dr. Hong explained.

What This Means For You

“While having the words to describe emotions can help us better understand and regulate them, it is possible to experience and express those emotions without specific labels for them.” Without the words for these feelings, you can still feel them but you just might not be able to identify them as readily or clearly as someone who does have those words. 

Rhee S. Lexicalization patterns in color naming in Korean . In: Raffaelli I, Katunar D, Kerovec B, eds. Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics. Vol 78. John Benjamins Publishing Company; 2019:109-128. Doi:10.1075/sfsl.78.06rhe

Winawer J, Witthoft N, Frank MC, Wu L, Wade AR, Boroditsky L. Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination . Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2007;104(19):7780-7785.  10.1073/pnas.0701644104

Lindquist KA, MacCormack JK, Shablack H. The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism . Front Psychol. 2015;6. Doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00444

By Rachael Green Rachael is a New York-based writer and freelance writer for Verywell Mind, where she leverages her decades of personal experience with and research on mental illness—particularly ADHD and depression—to help readers better understand how their mind works and how to manage their mental health.

To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?

For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?  By Lera Boroditsky

LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University, who looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think.

Lera Boroditsky's Edge Bio Page

Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?

These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and religion. Yet despite nearly constant attention and debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until recently. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

I often start my undergraduate lectures by asking students the following question: which cognitive faculty would you most hate to lose? Most of them pick the sense of sight; a few pick hearing. Once in a while, a wisecracking student might pick her sense of humor or her fashion sense. Almost never do any of them spontaneously say that the faculty they'd most hate to lose is language. Yet if you lose (or are born without) your sight or hearing, you can still have a wonderfully rich social existence. You can have friends, you can get an education, you can hold a job, you can start a family. But what would your life be like if you had never learned a language? Could you still have friends, get an education, hold a job, start a family? Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it's hard to imagine life without it. But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts?

Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let's take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, "Bush read Chomsky's latest book." Let's focus on just the verb, "read." To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like "red" and not like "reed." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you'd also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you'd use a different form of the verb than if he'd diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you'd have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you'd use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you'd use a different verb form.

Clearly, languages require different things of their speakers. Does this mean that the speakers think differently about the world? Do English, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish speakers end up attending to, partitioning, and remembering their experiences differently just because they speak different languages? For some scholars, the answer to these questions has been an obvious yes. Just look at the way people talk, they might say. Certainly, speakers of different languages must attend to and encode strikingly different aspects of the world just so they can use their language properly.

Scholars on the other side of the debate don't find the differences in how people talk convincing. All our linguistic utterances are sparse, encoding only a small part of the information we have available. Just because English speakers don't include the same information in their verbs that Russian and Turkish speakers do doesn't mean that English speakers aren't paying attention to the same things; all it means is that they're not talking about them. It's possible that everyone thinks the same way, notices the same things, but just talks differently.

Believers in cross-linguistic differences counter that everyone does not pay attention to the same things: if everyone did, one might think it would be easy to learn to speak other languages. Unfortunately, learning a new language (especially one not closely related to those you know) is never easy; it seems to require paying attention to a new set of distinctions. Whether it's distinguishing modes of being in Spanish, evidentiality in Turkish, or aspect in Russian, learning to speak these languages requires something more than just learning vocabulary: it requires paying attention to the right things in the world so that you have the correct information to include in what you say.

Such a priori arguments about whether or not language shapes thought have gone in circles for centuries, with some arguing that it's impossible for language to shape thought and others arguing that it's impossible for language not to shape thought. Recently my group and others have figured out ways to empirically test some of the key questions in this ancient debate, with fascinating results. So instead of arguing about what must be true or what can't be true, let's find out what is true.

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.

To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?

The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

People's ideas of time differ across languages in other ways. For example, English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., "The best is ahead of us," "The worst is behind us"), whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the next month is the "down month" and the last month is the "up month"). Mandarin speakers talk about time vertically more often than English speakers do, so do Mandarin speakers think about time vertically more often than English speakers do? Imagine this simple experiment. I stand next to you, point to a spot in space directly in front of you, and tell you, "This spot, here, is today. Where would you put yesterday? And where would you put tomorrow?" When English speakers are asked to do this, they nearly always point horizontally. But Mandarin speakers often point vertically, about seven or eight times more often than do English speakers.4

Even basic aspects of time perception can be affected by language. For example, English speakers prefer to talk about duration in terms of length (e.g., "That was a short talk," "The meeting didn't take long"), while Spanish and Greek speakers prefer to talk about time in terms of amount, relying more on words like "much" "big", and "little" rather than "short" and "long" Our research into such basic cognitive abilities as estimating duration shows that speakers of different languages differ in ways predicted by the patterns of metaphors in their language. (For example, when asked to estimate duration, English speakers are more likely to be confused by distance information, estimating that a line of greater length remains on the test screen for a longer period of time, whereas Greek speakers are more likely to be confused by amount, estimating that a container that is fuller remains longer on the screen.)5

An important question at this point is: Are these differences caused by language per se or by some other aspect of culture? Of course, the lives of English, Mandarin, Greek, Spanish, and Kuuk Thaayorre speakers differ in a myriad of ways. How do we know that it is language itself that creates these differences in thought and not some other aspect of their respective cultures?

One way to answer this question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think. In our lab, we've taught English speakers different ways of talking about time. In one such study, English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble that of Greek or Mandarin speakers. This suggests that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think.6 In practical terms, it means that when you're learning a new language, you're not simply learning a new way of talking, you are also inadvertently learning a new way of thinking. Beyond abstract or complex domains of thought like space and time, languages also meddle in basic aspects of visual perception — our ability to distinguish colors, for example. Different languages divide up the color continuum differently: some make many more distinctions between colors than others, and the boundaries often don't line up across languages.

To test whether differences in color language lead to differences in color perception, we compared Russian and English speakers' ability to discriminate shades of blue. In Russian there is no single word that covers all the colors that English speakers call "blue." Russian makes an obligatory distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Does this distinction mean that siniy blues look more different from goluboy blues to Russian speakers? Indeed, the data say yes. Russian speakers are quicker to distinguish two shades of blue that are called by the different names in Russian (i.e., one being siniy and the other being goluboy) than if the two fall into the same category.

For English speakers, all these shades are still designated by the same word, "blue," and there are no comparable differences in reaction time.

Further, the Russian advantage disappears when subjects are asked to perform a verbal interference task (reciting a string of digits) while making color judgments but not when they're asked to perform an equally difficult spatial interference task (keeping a novel visual pattern in memory). The disappearance of the advantage when performing a verbal task shows that language is normally involved in even surprisingly basic perceptual judgments — and that it is language per se that creates this difference in perception between Russian and English speakers.

When Russian speakers are blocked from their normal access to language by a verbal interference task, the differences between Russian and English speakers disappear.

Even what might be deemed frivolous aspects of language can have far-reaching subconscious effects on how we see the world. Take grammatical gender. In Spanish and other Romance languages, nouns are either masculine or feminine. In many other languages, nouns are divided into many more genders ("gender" in this context meaning class or kind). For example, some Australian Aboriginal languages have up to sixteen genders, including classes of hunting weapons, canines, things that are shiny, or, in the phrase made famous by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, "women, fire, and dangerous things."

What it means for a language to have grammatical gender is that words belonging to different genders get treated differently grammatically and words belonging to the same grammatical gender get treated the same grammatically. Languages can require speakers to change pronouns, adjective and verb endings, possessives, numerals, and so on, depending on the noun's gender. For example, to say something like "my chair was old" in Russian (moy stul bil' stariy), you'd need to make every word in the sentence agree in gender with "chair" (stul), which is masculine in Russian. So you'd use the masculine form of "my," "was," and "old." These are the same forms you'd use in speaking of a biological male, as in "my grandfather was old." If, instead of speaking of a chair, you were speaking of a bed (krovat'), which is feminine in Russian, or about your grandmother, you would use the feminine form of "my," "was," and "old."

Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key" — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny." To describe a "bridge," which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful," "elegant," "fragile," "peaceful," "pretty," and "slender," and the Spanish speakers said "big," "dangerous," "long," "strong," "sturdy," and "towering." This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people's ideas of concrete objects in the world.7

In fact, you don't even need to go into the lab to see these effects of language; you can see them with your own eyes in an art gallery. Look at some famous examples of personification in art — the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.

The fact that even quirks of grammar, such as grammatical gender, can affect our thinking is profound. Such quirks are pervasive in language; gender, for example, applies to all nouns, which means that it is affecting how people think about anything that can be designated by a noun. That's a lot of stuff!

I have described how languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses.8 Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

1 S. C. Levinson and D. P. Wilkins, eds., Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

2 Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

3 B. Tversky et al., “ Cross-Cultural and Developmental Trends in Graphic Productions,” Cognitive Psychology 23(1991): 515–7; O. Fuhrman and L. Boroditsky, “Mental Time-Lines Follow Writing Direction: Comparing English and Hebrew Speakers.” Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (2007): 1007–10.

4 L. Boroditsky, "Do English and Mandarin Speakers Think Differently About Time?" Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (2007): 34.

5 D. Casasanto et al., "How Deep Are Effects of Language on Thought? Time Estimation in Speakers of English, Indonesian Greek, and Spanish," Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (2004): 575–80.

6 Ibid., "How Deep Are Effects of Language on Thought? Time Estimation in Speakers of English and Greek" (in review); L. Boroditsky, "Does Language Shape Thought? English and Mandarin Speakers' Conceptions of Time." Cognitive Psychology 43, no. 1(2001): 1–22.

7 L. Boroditsky et al. "Sex, Syntax, and Semantics," in D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow, eds., Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 61–79.

8 L. Boroditsky, "Linguistic Relativity," in L. Nadel ed., Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (London: MacMillan, 2003), 917–21; B. W. Pelham et al., "Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82, no. 4(2002): 469–86; A. Tversky & D. Kahneman, "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice." Science 211(1981): 453–58; P. Pica et al., "Exact and Approximate Arithmetic in an Amazonian Indigene Group." Science 306(2004): 499–503; J. G. de Villiers and P. A. de Villiers, "Linguistic Determinism and False Belief," in P. Mitchell and K. Riggs, eds., Children's Reasoning and the Mind (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, in press); J. A. Lucy and S. Gaskins, "Interaction of Language Type and Referent Type in the Development of Nonverbal Classification Preferences," in Gentner and Goldin-Meadow, 465–92; L. F. Barrett et al., "Language as a Context for Emotion Perception," Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11(2007): 327–32.

What's Related

Beyond Edge

Conversations at edge.

• home  
• science wire
• search a job in science and research
• ☕ post a job offer on myScience
• how to apply for a job
• other science job markets
• starting a phd
• starting a postdoc
• becoming a professor
• evaluation of research
• scientific information
• administration
• associations
• distance universities
• industrial research
• information
• medical research
• personal websites
• private universities
• private universities of applied sciences
• research associations
• research institutions
• research networks
• universities
• universities of applied sciences
• universities of arts and design
• search  
• register  

The power of language: How words shape people, culture

Speaking, writing and reading is integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language - what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine - can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

"Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human," said Dan Jurafsky , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford. "Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity."

The stories below represent some of the ways linguists have investigated many aspects of language, including its semantics and syntax, phonetics and phonology, and its social, psychological and computational aspects.

Stanford linguists and psychologists study how language is interpreted by people. Even the slightest differences in language use can correspond with biased beliefs of the speakers, according to research.

One study showed that a relatively harmless sentence, such as "girls are as good as boys at math," can subtly perpetuate sexist stereotypes. Because of the statement’s grammatical structure, it implies that being good at math is more common or natural for boys than girls, the researchers said.

Language can play a big role in how we and others perceive the world, and linguists work to discover what words and phrases can influence us, unknowingly.

People speak roughly 7,000 languages worldwide. Although there is a lot in common among languages, each one is unique, both in its structure and in the way it reflects the culture of the people who speak it.

Jurafsky said it’s important to study languages other than our own and how they develop over time because it can help scholars understand what lies at the foundation of humans’ unique way of communicating with one another.

"All this research can help us discover what it means to be human," Jurafsky said.

Linguists analyze how certain speech patterns correspond to particular behaviors, including how language can impact people’s buying decisions or influence their social media use.

For example, in one research paper, a group of Stanford researchers examined the differences in how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online to better understand how a polarization of beliefs can occur on social media.

"We live in a very polarized time," Jurafsky said. "Understanding what different groups of people say and why is the first step in determining how we can help bring people together."

• Stanford University
• Science Wire
• News from the Lab - news . myScience

Jobmail & Alerts

How does culture influence language acquisition? An expert exploration

Saga Briggs

Recently, a Spanish friend of mine started taking German courses while living in Berlin. Instead of signing up for a class with a native-speaking German instructor, she chose to take a class taught by a German-speaking Italian woman.

My friend’s reasoning was that she connected more with the personality of the Italian instructor, because of overlaps between Spanish and Italian culture, and that made enough of a difference in her motivation to learn German that she would sacrifice the opportunity to learn from a native speaker.

“Without culture,” write linguistics scholars Ming-Mu Kuo and Cheng-Chieh Lai in the Journal of Foreign Language Instruction , “we can not understand the lives and motivations of others and connect with their concerns and interests.” This statement encapsulates why culture is such an important factor in all educational contexts, including language instruction and learning.

In this post, we outline a few ways culture influences foreign language learning, drawing on the latest research.

How do you define culture?

Culture refers to learned norms around values, beliefs, and behavior in a community of anywhere from two people to the population of an entire continent. Culture may also include factors like:

• Ethnic background;
• Nationality;
• Gender and sexuality; and

Language is inherently cultural, as it reflects these norms and factors in both subtle and explicit ways. A language may develop sayings that reflect cultural norms, slang terminology that reflects cultural trends, or even syntax that reflects cultural beliefs.

For instance, the Algonquin languages of North America do not follow the Subject-Verb-Object or Subject-Object-Verb order that eighty percent of the world’s languages follow. Algonquin sentences are heavily verb-focused, reflecting the Algonquin culture’s ontological focus on process over fixed state of being. Members of Algonquin tribes do not see the physical world as objects in interaction with one another but rather as process and transformation which happens to include objects. So they might say, “Singing is happening” rather than “She sings to him.” Culture influences language and language influences culture.

Can culture influence language instruction?

Kuo and Lai recommend that foreign language instructors draw from six strategies to teach within a cultural framework:

1. Provide cultural learning materials

Use films, news broadcasts, television shows, websites, magazines, newspapers, menus, and other printed materials

2. Use common proverbs as transfer tools

Using proverbs as a transfer tool to explore two different cultures can guide students to analyze the similarities and dissimilarities of cultures

3. Apply role play as a sociocultural approach

Students can dramatize an incident that happened to them and caused cross-cultural misunderstanding. In this way, it will enable them to develop communicative strategies to overcome similar problems in real second language communication.

4. Encourage students to use culture capsules

Present a brief description of some aspects of the target language culture alongside contrasting information from the students’ native language cultures. “The contrasting information can be provided by the teacher,” Kuo and Lai write, “but it is usually more effective to have the students themselves point out the contrasts.”

5. View students as cultural resources

Teachers can invite exchange students, immigrant students, or international students into the classroom as expert sources to present aspects of their own cultures.

6. Use tech to help students gain cultural knowledge

“The use of computer technology can provide multicultural interactivities without students having to leave the classroom,” Kuo and Lai explain. “It is easy to use computers to create various virtual spaces in order to meet each learner’s needs.”

Can culture influence language learning?

“If children are given cultural knowledge, immersed in a culturally rich environment, and exposed to culturally basic material, they may learn the second language with more ease because their background knowledge about the second-language culture will make comprehension less difficult,” write Kuo and Lai.

One reason for this may be cognitive: the brain has an easier time learning and remembering if it can make more associations and connections between the new material and other material. When we learn a new word and then see it used in context, in the real world, we have all the sensations that come with that experience to help us integrate the word into our long-term memory store. It’s also more personal: when we’ve had a meaningful experience in a certain culture, it makes us more curious about the language spoken in it.

In the case of my friend, background culture influenced motivation and learning style. There will be ways in which some students have different needs, interests, and expectations compared to others. Instructors can gauge these differences at the beginning of a course by handing out surveys to better understand how to cater their instruction to a diverse group of students.

According to socio-cultural theorist Vygotsky, language “comes out from cultural and social activity and only later becomes reconstructed as an individual, psychological phenomenon.” That means our brains are wired to learn languages within a cultural context. The more emphasis we place on embedding our studies within a cultural context, the better.

“Studying a foreign language should always be strongly connected to studying the respective culture since it can increase awareness of the context of communication and help in the study of pragmatics,” says linguistic scholar Irina-Ana Drobot. She points out that cultural awareness has benefits beyond language learning: “Having knowledge of other languages and, implicitly, of cultures, can help increase awareness and empathy with other cultural values and mindsets. As a result, adaptation to the ways and values of other cultures can be easier and faster for multilinguals.”

Again, it goes both ways. To enhance your language learning, get to know the culture. To get to know the culture, dive into the language. Spending a little more time in each area can help you reach your goals twice as fast.

Related Articles

March 23, 2022

5 of the best practical polyglot tips for learning languages

March 18, 2022

What is linguistics and can it help you learn a language?

February 07, 2022

How to be more mindful to boost your language learning success

1-866-423-7548, find out more.

Fill in the form below and we’ll contact you to discuss your learning options and answer any questions you may have.

I have read the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

• Privacy Policy
• Terms Of Use

How Does Language Affect Culture? Explaining the Connection

Sally is a prolific non-fiction and fiction writer, who has appeared in multiple print and digital publications.

Learn about our Editorial Policy .

How does language affect culture and how does it affect your life? You can find the answers to these and other questions when you examine the importance language and culture have on each other and your everyday life.

How Does Language Affect Culture?

It is nearly impossible to disentangle the influences language and culture have on each other. Language is born out of a culture. The language develops as a way to express the culture.

How Does Culture Influence Language?

Why is culture important ? It influences the language that is spoken within its constraints as a society, such as how certain words are used in support of the culture. It's through language that members of a specific culture communicate with each other and create bonds with each other. Language is a way that others identify specific cultures, be it based on a geographical regional culture, or a social culture based on ideology. The culture develops its own language and has nuances accompanied by forms of group body language and voice inflections.

Language and Specific Cultural Words

The influence of culture on language is seen through instances of certain words specific to a region that defines its culture. A prime example can be found in the United States with the use of words that mean, you all . Each variation of this phrase is a dialect that readily identifies the region.

• South: Y'all (you all or ye awe, Scots-Irish deriv.)
• Appalachian: You'uns (you ones)
• Pennsylvania: Yinz (morphed from the phrase you ones)
• North: Youse (created a plural out of the pronoun, you)
• North: You guys (simplest form that's inclusive)

People of a Culture Speak Same Language

Beyond phrases and expressions of a culture, it is easy to see how cultures don't stray from their own language. For example, you wouldn't hear a Southerner say, "Youse missed a great ball game last night" any more than you'd hear a New Yorker ask, "Ya'll going to the game tonight?"

Expectations Within a Culture

It's safe to assume that a culture has its own set of expectations and traditions, such as the type of language used within it. Like other nuances within a culture, language isn't something each person thinks about, it is simply part of their culture. As the culture evolves, the language grows to accommodate cultural changes and vice versa.

How Blended Cultures Create New Languages

In the morphing of the phrase, you all , the blending of different languages appear, in part, responsible for how the phrase emerged as an expression of the Southern culture. Ya'll was the result of the blending of the Scottish , Irish, and African American cultures.

Examples of Blended Cultures and Languages

Various regions within the South developed other cultural languages, such as Cajun, which was a mix of Spanish Basque, Louisiana French, and Spanish Canary Islanders. Another language that developed to express a blended culture is Gullah. The Gullah word for you all is oonuh (the plural of you). The Gullah culture is found along the islands and coastlines of South Carolina and Georgia. The Gullah language is a blend of English, Central African and West African. It is very distinctive from other Southern culture languages.

What Does Language Reveal About Culture?

Language and culture are dependent upon each other. When events and experiences occur within a culture, language is used to express them. To an outsider, the words that evolved from the cultural experience have no meaning, but to insiders, the words resonate in an oral tradition not unlike storytelling. This example impresses the necessity of having an understanding of a culture, not just its language.

Intricacies of Language and Culture

If you learn a foreign language, it will help you understand what is being said, but if you bypass learning the culture, you can miss the subtle nuances. For example, if you don't know the cultural value and history of a phrase or word, you could misuse it and end up offended those you're trying to accommodate with your communication.

What Is Communication Accommodation?

Communication accommodation is the practice of altering or modifying the way you communicate with specific groups or cultures. Communication accommodation is often done in an effort to reduce difficulty in understanding different accents or dialects. A good example is a Southern worker who calls into a New York office on a regular basis. If the Southerner must use numbers on their regular phone call, they might alter the way they pronounce specific numbers, such as nine and five to sound more like their northern counterpart.

Fitting in With a Culture Through Language

Communication accommodation is done not just to fit in, but to better communicate, especially when there are cultural barriers. This can be something as simple as eliminating words or phrases the person would normally use to better blend in with a culture. This type of communication is believed to make everyone feel more at ease and comfortable with each other. The type of communication undertaken is usually dependent on the larger group of people communicating. For example, if a group of Southerners are talking, an outsider might adopt the use of ya'll just to keep from standing out and minimize the awkwardness that they feel from not being part of the culture. In many cases, if the person has moved to the South, adopting the lingo becomes a natural blending of cultural language.

Art of Code-Switching for Cultural Acceptance

Code-switching is trickier than communication accommodation since it involves changing your accent or switching to a different dialect. It can also mean speaking a foreign language. The tricky part is being authentic when you engage in code-switching. For example, if you have an agenda, such as a political candidate, and you suddenly adopt a Southern drawl, you can come off sounding condescending and inauthentic.

Knowing When to Use Code-Switching

That means you must know when to use code-switching. This requires knowledge of the culture you wish to engage in. If you're a foreigner and tackle communicating in a foreign language, most cultures will be appreciative of your efforts and view your attempt as an act of respect.

How Does Language Affect Who You Are?

Social mores can affect who you are through the use of language, such as politically correct language. In a society that displaces individuality with cultural/social identity, language becomes a tipping point and more importantly, often a battleground. Group think mentality of such societies threaten the independent thinking, individual development and personal growth.

How Language Can Force Conformity

In restrictive social cultures, individuals are taught and often bullied into conforming to the groups' specific ideology. Anyone daring to step out of these strict boundaries is ostracized and shamed into conforming once more. This kind of control over behavior is seen in language and is carefully manipulated as a control device. Peer pressure is applied to those who think or express their own uniqueness that isn't in line with the group think.

Gender, Race or Religious Bias

Gender, race or religious bias is another aspect of language and culture. Depending on the culture, there can be a bias toward a specific gender or gender neutral identity. A prejudice within the culture of a specific race that is passed on from one generation to another is fraught with language aimed at degrading another race. The same thing can be seen in a culture of religious bias. All of these have one thing in common, their language affects their culture and keeps it in a certain status that makes it difficult to break out of or to effect change.

Understanding How Language Can Affect Culture

It is only by understanding how language can affect culture that you can learn the best way to use language when communicating with a different culture. The influence of language is intertwined with its culture and provides a sense of stability and continuity among a group of people.

• school Campus Bookshelves
• menu_book Bookshelves
• perm_media Learning Objects
• login Login
• how_to_reg Request Instructor Account
• hub Instructor Commons

Margin Size

• Download Page (PDF)
• Download Full Book (PDF)
• Periodic Table
• Physics Constants
• Scientific Calculator
• Reference & Cite
• Tools expand_more
• Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

4.1: Language and Culture

• Last updated
• Save as PDF
• Page ID 54515

• Butte College

\( \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)

\( \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \)

\( \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)

( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\)

\( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\)

\( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\)

\( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\)

\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)

\( \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\)

\( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\)

\( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\)

\( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\)

\( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\)

\( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\)

\( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\)

\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\AA}{\unicode[.8,0]{x212B}}\)

\( \newcommand{\vectorA}[1]{\vec{#1}}      % arrow\)

\( \newcommand{\vectorAt}[1]{\vec{\text{#1}}}      % arrow\)

\( \newcommand{\vectorB}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)

\( \newcommand{\vectorC}[1]{\textbf{#1}} \)

\( \newcommand{\vectorD}[1]{\overrightarrow{#1}} \)

\( \newcommand{\vectorDt}[1]{\overrightarrow{\text{#1}}} \)

\( \newcommand{\vectE}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash{\mathbf {#1}}}} \)

How do you communicate? How do you think? We use language as a system to create and exchange meaning with one another, and the types of words we use influence both our perceptions and others interpretation of our meanings. Language is one of the more conspicuous expressions of culture. As such, the role of language is central to our understanding of intercultural communication.

The Study of Language

Linguistics is the study of language and its structure. Linguistics deals with the study of particular languages and the search for general properties common to all languages. It also includes explorations into language variations (i.e. dialects), how languages change over time, how language is stored and processed in the brain, and how children learn language. The study of linguistics is an important part of intercultural communication. Areas of research for linguists include phonetics (the study of the production, acoustics, and hearing speech sounds), phonology (the patterning of sounds), morphology (the patterning of words), syntax (the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (language in context). When you study linguistics, you gain insight into one of the most fundamental parts of being human—the ability to communicate. You can understand how language works, how it is used, plus how it is developed and changes over time. Since language is universal to all human interactions, the knowledge attained through linguistics is fundamental to understanding cultures.

World Languages

Languages differ in a number of ways. Not all languages, for example, have a written form. Those that do use a variety of writing systems. Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, while Hindi uses Devanagari. Chinese has a particularly ancient and rich written language, with many thousands of pictographic characters. Because of the complexity and variety of Chinese characters, there is a simplified equivalent called Pinyin, which enables Chinese characters to be referenced using the Latin alphabet. This is of particular usefulness in electronic communication. The arrival of touch-enabled smartphones has been of great benefit to languages with alternative writing systems such as Chinese or Arabic (Godwin-Jones, 2017d). Smartphones and word processors can now support writing systems that write right to left such as Hebrew.

Sample text in Korean (Hangeul)

모든 인간은 태어날 때부터 자유로우며 그 존엄과 권리에 있어 동등하다. 인간은 천부척으로 이성과 양싱을 부여받았으며 서로 형첸개의 청신으로 헹동하여야 한다.

Translation:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Languages evolve over time. Historical linguists trace these changes and describe how languages relate to one another. Language families group languages together, according to similarities in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Languages within a same family derive from a common ancestor, called a proto-language (Nowak & Krakauer, 1999). Membership in a given family is determined through comparative linguistics , i.e., studying and comparing the characteristics of the languages in question. Linguists use the metaphor of a family tree to depict the relationships among languages. One of the largest families is Indo-European , with more than 4000 languages or dialects represented. Indo-European languages include Spanish, English, Hindi/Urdu, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million speakers, followed by German, French and Persian. Nearly half the human population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language (Skirgård, 2017). How the languages are related can be shown in the similar terms for "mother" (see sidebar).

Mother in Indo-European languages

• Sanskrit matar
• Greek mater

Some regions have particularly rich linguistic traditions, such as is the case for Africa and India. In India, there are not only Indo-European languages spoken (Hindi, Punjabi), but also languages from other families such as Dravidian (Telugu, Tamil), Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai, and a few other minor language families. Papua/New Guinea has a particularly rich vareity of languages; with over 850 languages, it is the most linguistically diverse place on earth. In such cultures, most people are multilingual, often speaking 3 or more languages, along with a lingua franca - a common denominator -, such as Swahili in parts of Africa, English in India, or Tok Pisin, an English-based creole, in New Guinea.

There are languages which do not belong to families, known as language isolates (Campbell, 2010). Well-known examples include Basque, a language spoken in the border area between France and Spain, and Korean. Language isolates tend to develop in geographical isolation, separated from other regions, for example, through mountain ranges or the sea. In some cases, geographical features such as dense forests may result in different dialects or even languages spoken in areas which are actually quite close to one another. A dialect refers to a variety of a language that is used by particular group of speakers, defined normally regionally, but could be related to social class or ethnicity as well. Dialects are closely related to one another and normally mutually intelligible.

Language Is Arbitrary and Symbolic

Words, by themselves, do not have any inherent meaning. Humans give meaning to them, and their meanings change across time. For example, there is no inherent, logical connection between "cat" or (or the German Katze or Chinese猫) and the feline animal. We negotiate the meaning of the word “kat,” and define it, through visual images or dialog, in order to communicate with our audience.

Words have two types of meanings: denotative and connotative . Attention to both is necessary to reduce the possibility of misinterpretation. The denotative meaning is the common meaning, often found in the dictionary. The connotative meaning is often not found in the dictionary but in the community of users itself. It can involve an emotional association with a word, positive or negative, and can be individual or collective, but is not universal. An example of this could be the term “rugged individualism” which comes from “rugged” or capable of withstanding rough handling and “individualism” or being independent and self-reliant. In the United States, describing someone in this way would have a positive connotation, but for people from a collectivistic orientation, it might be the opposite.

Language Evolves

Many people view language as fixed, but in fact, language constantly changes. As time passes and technology changes, people add new words to their language, repurpose old ones, and discard archaic ones. New additions to American English in the last few decades include blog , sexting , and selfie . Repurposed additions to American English include cyberbullying , tweet , and app (from application). Whereas affright , cannonade , and fain are becoming extinct in modern American English. Other times, speakers of a language borrow words and phrases from other languages and incorporate them into their own. Wisconsin, Oregon, and Wyoming were all borrowed from Native American languages. Typhoon is from Mandarin Chinese, and influenza is from Italian.

Language Shapes Our Thought

What would your life be like if you had been raised in a country other than the one where you grew up? Or suppose you had been born male instead of female, or vice versa. You would have learned another set of customs, values, traditions, other language patterns, and ways of communicating. You would be a different person who communicated in different ways. The link between language and culture and the idea that language shapes how we think about our world was famously described in the work of Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis postulates that your native language has a profound influence on how you see the world, that you perceive reality in the context of the language you have available to describe it. According to Sapir (1929), "The 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. The world in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached" (p. 162). From this perspective, all language use – from the words we use to describe objects to the way sentences are structured – is tied closely to the culture in which it is spoken. In 1940, Whorf wrote:

The background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for people's mental activity, for their analysis of impressions, for their synthesis of their mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar and differs, from slightly to greatly, among different grammars...We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages (p. 231).

Whorf studied native American languages such as Hopi and was struck by differences to English which pointed to different ways of viewing the world, for example, how the Hopi language has no present, past, or future tense verbs. Instead, it divides the world into what Whorf called the manifested and unmanifest domains. The manifested domain deals with the physical universe, including the present, the immediate past and future; the verb system uses the same basic structure for all of them. The unmanifest domain involves the remote past and the future, as well as the world of desires, thought, and life forces. The set of verb forms dealing with this domain are consistent for all of these areas, and are different from the manifested ones. Also, there are no words for hours, minutes, or days of the week.

Taken to its extreme, this kind of linguistic determinism would prevent native speakers of different languages from having the same thoughts or sharing a worldview. This idea suggests that we cannot conceive of that for which we lack a vocabulary or that language quite literally defines the boundaries of our thinking. More widely accepted today is the concept of linguistic relativity , meaning that language shapes our views of the world but is not an absolute determiner of how or what we think. After all, translation is in fact possible, and bilingualism exists, both of which phenomena should be problematic in a strict interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It is also the case that many cultures are multilingual, with children growing up exposed to multiple languages.

• Linguistic determinism: language controls thought in culture.
• Linguistic relativity: language influences thought in culture, and therefore differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers. Hua (2014), p. 176

No matter what linguistic theory one may hold to be valid, there is little argument that the vocabulary of a language does in fact reflect important aspects of everyday life. Linguist Anna Wierzbicka (2013) provides interesting examples of expressions from the Australian aboriginal language of Warlpiri:

• japi — "entrance to sugar ant’s nest"
• laja — "hole or burrow of lizard"
• kuyu — "meat; meated animal" [including edible birds, but not other birds]
• karnpi — "fat under the skin of emu"
• papapapa-ma — "to make the sound of a male emu calling to its chicks"
• yulu — "limp, relaxed—of slain kangaroo whose hindleg have been broken (in preparation for cooking)"

From a Warlpiri speaker’s point of view, these single words point to important features of the environment, as potential sources of shelter and food, but there are no corresponding words in European languages or in most other languages. Wierzbicka comments:

As these examples illustrate, the words of a language reflect the speakers’ special interests. For the speakers of a particular language, their words "fit the world" as they see it—but how they see it depends, to some extent, on what they want to see and what they pay attention to. This is true also of European languages, and English is no exception, either. The conviction that the words of our native language fit the world as it really is, is deeply rooted in the thinking of many people, particularly those who have never been forced to move, existentially, from one language into another and to leave the certainties of their home language (p. 6).

Learning a second language leads one early on to appreciate the fact that there may not be a one-to-one correspondence between words in one language and those in another. While the dictionary definitions (denotation) may be the same, the actual usage in any given context (connotation) may be quite different. The word amigo in Spanish is the equivalent of the word friend in English, but the relationships described by that word can be quite different. During my travels in Guatemala, I experienced " hola amigo, " as a common greeting, even among strangers. Just as in English, a Facebook "friend" is quite different from a childhood "friend". The German word Bier , refers as does the English "beer", to an alcoholic drink made from barley, hops, and water. In a German context, the word is used to describe an everyday drink commonly consumed with meals or in other social situations. In the American English context, usage of the word, "beer," immediately brings to the fore its status as alcohol, thus a beverage that is strictly regulated and its consumption restricted.

Differences in available words to describe everyday phenomena is immediately evident when one compares languages or examines vocabulary used in particular situations. That might include a specific small culture, such as dog lovers or sailing enthusiasts, for example, who use a much more extensive vocabulary to describe, respectively, dog breeds or parts of a ship, than would be familiar to most people, no matter whether they are native speakers of the language or not. Sometimes, a special language is developed by a group, sometimes labeled a jargon , which often references a specialized technical language. A related term is an argot , a kind of secret language designed to exclude outsiders, such as the language used by criminal gangs.

Less immediately evident than vocabulary differences in comparing languages are differences in grammatical structures. If, for example, a language has different personal pronouns for direct address, such as the informal tu in French and the formal vous , both meaning ‘you’, that distinction is a reflection of one aspect of the culture. It indicates that there is a built-in awareness and significance to social differentiation and that a more formal level of language use is available. Native speakers of English may have difficulty in learning how to use the different forms of address in French, or as they exist in other languages such as German or Spanish. Speakers of American English, in particular, are inclined towards informal modes of address, moving to a first-name basis as soon as possible. Using informal address inappropriately can cause considerable social friction. It takes a good deal of language socialization to acquire this kind of pragmatic ability, that is to say, sufficient exposure to the forms being used correctly. While native speakers of English may deplore the formality of vous or its equivalent in other languages, in cultures where these distinctions exist, they provide a valuable device for maintaining relational distance when desired, for clearly distinguishing friends from acquaintances, and for preserving social harmony in institutional settings. Expanding on this notion, Students of Korean learn early on in their studies that there is not just a distinction between familiar and formal "you", as exists in many languages, but that the code of respect and politeness of Korean culture dictates different vocabulary, intonation, and speech patterns depending on one's relationship to the addressee. This can extend to nonverbal conventions as well, such as bowing or increasing personal space.

Contributors and Attributions

Language and Culture in Context: A Primer on Intercultural Communication , by Robert Godwin-Jones. Provided by LibreTexts. License: CC-BY-NC

Intercultural Communication for the Community College , by Karen Krumrey-Fulks. Provided by LibreTexts. License: CC-BY-NC-SA

Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology , by Brown, McIlwraith & Gonzalez. Provided by LibreTexts. License CC-BY-NC.

ESL Activities

ESL Games, Activities, Lesson Plans, Jobs & More

in Listening · Reading · Speaking · Writing

What is the Relationship Between Language and Culture?

When people talk about language, the topic of culture normally comes out. The same thing happens when the topic of culture is the center of a discussion, it typically touches on language. If you’re still confused about how these two concepts are related to each out, then continue reading so you’ll have an idea about the connection between these two rather different concepts.

Relationships between language and culture

Language and Culture: How are they Connected? 

But before we go into their relationship, so to speak, we have to define language and culture. Then, we’ll get into all the details you need to know about culture and language and what influence they have upon each other.

What is Language?

Different sources have different definitions of language . Despite being different from each other, they also have some similarities. These sources all agree that language is a system of communication. It expresses ideas or feelings, and it is understood by a particular group of people living in a certain area, region, or country.

With this in mind, language can be defined as a system of communication that expresses an idea or feeling and is understood by a specific group of people. It can also be spoken, written , or gesticulated. It also distinguishes humans from animals.

What is Culture?

Culture , as defined in a dictionary, is the customary beliefs, material traits, and social forms of a religious, racial, or social group. It is also the characteristic features of the daily existence shared by a group of people in a specific place or time.

Culture is essentially the customs and traditions of a certain group of people during a certain era and place. It defines the identity of that group of people and sets them apart from others. Additionally, the culture of a people defines who they are.

How is Language Connected to Culture?

The concepts of language and culture seem different from each other. Language focuses on spoken and written expressions while culture focuses on the identity of a certain group of people. But these concepts are homologous to each other. Both of them share the realities, behaviors, and human values of a specific group of people.

As these two concepts evolve, they influence each other in a way that they become inseparable. Culture is the result of people interacting with each other while language is the cultural manifestation of a certain group of people. If you take out one concept, the other may not survive.

Simply put, language is not limited to conveying ideas and concepts. It is considered a symbolic system that creates and shapes realities. These realities include identities, perceptions, and values, which are, in fact, a part of a culture.

On the other hand, culture can also be considered a communicative event. For instance, art conveys the message of the artist to his or her audience. Dance also communicates a message to the audience, such as the ritual dances of native Americans. Art and dance are part of the culture of a group of people and they contain a message the people want to convey to other groups of people.

Confused? Well, let’s try to explain the concept further.

Linguistic Relativity

The relationship between the two can also be explained through a concept called linguistic relativity. A simple explanation of this concept is that language determines the way a person views the world. Or the person’s perception of the world corresponds to the person’s spoken language.

For instance, the description of snow when talking about the weather . For ordinary English speakers, snow is simply snow. But for Eskimos, snow can be defined in different ways when they use the Inuit language. When translated to English, snow can be frosty snow, wet snow, or even clinging snow. So, language has a direct effect on the culture of a person.

If you want to understand a certain culture better, you should learn to speak the language of a group of people. Once you speak the language, you’ll have a different outlook on the culture of a person. Communication is essential to know how a person interprets or views the world.

Transmission of Language and Culture

Since language is learned, it can be culturally transmitted. Children typically learn a language when they are young. The language they learn normally carries with it the culture the language is associated with. For instance, when they learn their mother tongue or the language of their parent, they will learn their parent’s culture. On the other hand, when they learn a second language, they will assimilate the culture of different people.

In this way, you will take note that when people learn English from natural-English speakers, they will end up learning the culture of their teacher. And if the students are young and impressionable, they may end up assimilating the culture of their teachers rather than their own native culture. Unless their parents ensure they are still educated in their native culture.

Relationship between culture and language

Assimilation of a Foreign Culture Through Language

This is an important point to consider for English teaching schools since young learners may end up losing their native culture if the school does not implement measures to counter the possible transmission of a foreign culture into the mindset of the children.

While this may be some cause for concern, taking the necessary steps can prevent this from happening. But it’s still possible that part of the foreign culture will still become a part of the psyche of the children.

In the end, teaching a foreign language can be beneficial for a young student since it will open their eyes to a culture different from their native culture. It will also allow them to be open to learn about these cultures and eventually take in the good aspects and incorporate them into their own culture.

FAQs about Cultural and Language

There are a number of common questions that people have about this topic. Here are the answers to some of the most popular ones.

How does culture influence language?

Culture influences language by shaping the topics of conversation, the way people communicate, the use of greetings, politeness norms, and the expressions and gestures considered appropriate or taboo.

Can language barriers hinder intercultural communication?

Yes, language barriers can hinder effective intercultural communication. When individuals do not share a common language, misunderstandings can occur, and it becomes more challenging to exchange ideas and express oneself accurately.

How does learning a new language contribute to cultural understanding?

Learning a new language provides insights into the cultural practices, beliefs, and perspectives of the speakers. It helps develop empathy, fosters cross-cultural communication and facilitates a deeper understanding and appreciation of different cultures.

Can cultural norms affect language learning and teaching?

Yes, cultural norms can influence language learning and teaching. Different cultures may have varying expectations regarding communication styles, politeness, and language use, which may impact language learners’ strategies and teachers’ instructional approaches.

How can language learners navigate cultural differences effectively?

Language learners can navigate cultural differences effectively by being open-minded, respectful, and willing to learn about and adapt to the cultural practices and communication styles of the target language community.

Why is it important to consider culture when translating or interpreting?

Considering culture during translation or interpretation is crucial because meanings, expressions, and nuances can vary across cultures. Translators and interpreters need to convey not only the words but also the cultural context and intended message accurately.

Should I Teach Culture Along With Language?

Yes, teaching culture along with a language can greatly enhance the language learning experience for students. Here are some reasons why it is beneficial to incorporate cultural elements into language instruction.

Enhances communication skills

Language and culture are closely intertwined. Understanding cultural norms, customs, and gestures can help students communicate more effectively and appropriately in real-life situations. Cultural knowledge allows learners to interpret language nuances, idioms, and non-verbal cues, leading to better comprehension and fluency.

Fosters cultural awareness and understanding

Learning about different cultures promotes open-mindedness, empathy, and appreciation for diversity. It helps students develop a broader worldview and a deeper understanding of the perspectives, values, and beliefs of people from different backgrounds. This cultural competence is essential in our increasingly interconnected world.

Encourages authentic language use

Culture is an integral part of language, and teaching culture allows students to engage in authentic language use. By learning about customs, traditions, and cultural practices, students can apply their language skills in real-world contexts and understand the cultural context in which the language is used.

Facilitates meaningful connections

Incorporating culture in language instruction provides opportunities for students to establish connections with native speakers of the language. It allows them to relate to and engage with cultural materials such as literature, films, music, and art, fostering a deeper appreciation for the language and its speakers.

Enhances motivation and engagement

Cultural content adds interest and relevance to language learning, making it more engaging for students. It allows them to explore and discover new aspects of the target language beyond grammar and vocabulary, creating a richer and more meaningful learning experience.

Preparing for global citizenship

In today’s globalized world, proficiency in a language alone is not enough. By integrating cultural learning, students develop the skills needed to navigate intercultural interactions, work collaboratively in diverse environments, and become responsible global citizens.

Language and Culture: Join the Conversation

What are your thoughts about the relationship between these two things? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think. We’d love to hear from you.

Also, be sure to give this article a share on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter. It’ll help other people, like yourself who are interested in the relationship between them.

How is culture related to language?

About Jackie

Jackie Bolen has been teaching English for more than 15 years to students in South Korea and Canada. She's taught all ages, levels and kinds of TEFL classes. She holds an MA degree, along with the Celta and Delta English teaching certifications.

Jackie is the author of more than 60 books for English teachers and English learners, including Business English Vocabulary Builder and 39 No-Prep/Low-Prep ESL Speaking Activities for Teenagers and Adults . She loves to share her ESL games, activities, teaching tips, and more with other teachers throughout the world.

You can find her on social media at: YouTube Facebook Pinterest TikTok LinkedIn Instagram

Top Selling ESL Activity Book

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

More ESL Activities and Games

List of English Words with Silent Letters

Top 15 Tongue Twister for Kids (Easy/Hard/Funny)

Negative Character Traits (List in English, with Pictures)

Flower Names in English | Names of Different Flower Types

About, contact, privacy policy.

Best-selling author and English teacher Jackie Bolen has been talking ESL activities and games since 2015. The goal is to bring you the best ideas, lesson plans, and activity recommendations for your TEFL classes.

Get in touch: About + Contact

Privacy Policy and Terms of Use

Email: [email protected]

Address: 2436 Kelly Ave, Port Coquitlam, Canada

Human Relations Area Files

Cultural information for education and research, language, culture & society.

Return to Teaching eHRAF: Tile View | Table View

View exercise overview

Francine barone, human relations area files at yale university, language and culture.

Human culture and language are deeply intertwined. Anthropologists would have difficulty understanding a culture without becoming familiar with its language and vice versa. In fact, neither one can exist without the other.

A distinguishing aspect of human communication is that it is symbolic . In order to convey meaning, language uses arbitrary signs to stand for concepts. Whether spoken, written, or via gestures, people continually communicate with others throughout their lives. Yet the power and meaning of language goes far beyond its signs or symbols. Through language, humans are able to share beliefs, worries, perceptions, expectations, experiences and knowledge. These are the building blocks of communicating culture.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – or linguistic relativity – suggests that a language and its overarching categories or structures used to classify the world directly shape one’s perceptions, so much so that speakers of distinct languages are likely to view the world differently.

Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the study of language as it relates to social structure and contexts such as gender, age, religion, geography, social class and status, education, occupation, ethnicity, nationality, and identity. Like culture, language is continually changing. Societal norms and practices impact the ways that people communicate with each other. Thus, by looking at how people speak to each other, we can deduce certain things about their relationships and relative status in society.

The power of language

Language use and patterns of speaking can tell us a great deal about power and agency in society. For example, ritual and religion are domains in which words are endowed with performative qualities, such as speaking a prayer aloud to ward off evil spirits. Saying “I’m sorry” can mend a strained relationship, while refusing to apologize can just as easily break it. Oratory is another category of expression that can “make things happen”, such as the speech from a charismatic leader that inspires a revolution.

Sometimes people are restricted from speaking in certain situations, such as based on gender or age. Sociolinguists pay attention to this contestable nature of language, including how more than one exclusive variant of a language can exist among its speakers.

Diglossia refers to the existence of two different ways of speaking (or “registers”) within a single language, typically with a “high” or formal variety and a “low” or informal, everyday variety. Speakers consciously select which register to used based on accepted social conditions. For example, one might speak differently when chatting with friends versus when addressing a college professor.

Bilingual, multilingual and plurilingual people may likewise switch from one language to another in the course of a conversation with one or more participants, known as code-switching . The motivations for switching codes in mid-conversation can range from a polite attempt to include nearby speakers of other languages, to a deliberate political act of defiance.

Activity 1: Ethnographic examples

Read the following ethnographic accounts of language use in different cultures and answer the questions provided.

Tukano (SQ19)

Sorensen (1967) – “Multilingualism in the Northwest Amazon”

https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=sq19-007

“Multilingualism”, pages 677-678 on language exogamy

• How are language, gender, and kinship connected in Tukano society?
• How does this connection influence marriage patterns?
• How many languages may be spoken in a single Tukano longhouse?
• How does a Tukano decide which language to speak?

Highland Scots (ES10)

Coleman (1984) – Language Shift in a Bilingual Hebridean Crofting Community

https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=es10-015 .

Pages 84-88 on speaking Gaelic vs. English

• What impression is given when a local person chooses to speak English over Gaelic?
• How does age and location factor into Gaelic language identity?
• Under what conditions do young people prefer to use English?
• What other aspects of culture is Gaelic language use associated with?

Wolof (MS30)

Swigart (1994) – “Cultural Creolisation and Language Use in Post-Colonial Africa: The Case of Senegal”

https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ms30-059

Pages 177-178 on urban vernacular language

• How do bilingual French and Wolof speakers combine the two languages?
• What is the difference between an urban variety and a creole language?
• What cultural status does mixing a vernacular language with a European language confer the urban Wolof speaker?

Taiwan Hokkien (AD05)

Barnett (1971) – An Ethnographic Description of Sanlei Ts’un, Taiwan, with Emphasis on Women’s Roles.

https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ad05-004

“Languages”, pages 77-78 on plurilingualism, gender, and age

• What languages are spoken in Sanlei and for what purposes?
• How does language use vary by age group?
• What inhibits Taiwanese speakers from learning and speaking Mandarin?
• What other language is most likely spoken by older men?

Serbs (EF06)

Pavlovic (1973) – Folk Life and Customs in the Kragujevac Region of the Jasenica in Sumdaija

https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ef06-019

“Swearwords, Curses, and Oaths”, pages 131-133 on power and speech

• How common or uncommon is swearing?
• What differences are there between how men and women curse?
• How are curses invoked, and who might be cursed?
• What are oaths used for?

Activity 2: Language and Culture Essay

Use eHRAF World Cultures to research how language intersects with another aspect of culture such as class, ethnicity, race, age, religion, occupation, gender, nationality.

Try to find at least 2 ethnographic examples from different world regions of language use as it relates to your chosen aspect of culture.

Write a short paper of 2-4 pages summarizing your findings and comparing and contrasting any similarities or differences you have found across the cultures you selected.

Consider how language use or patterns of speaking can be powerful, performative, or how they might reinforce or contest societal divisions.

You may wish to add one or more of the following subject categories to an Advanced Search:

• Sociolinguistics (195)
• Language (190)
• Oratory (537)
• Gender status (562)
• Classes (565)
• Status, role, and prestige (554)

Barnett, William Kester. 1971. An Ethnographic Description of Sanlei Ts’un, Taiwan, with Emphasis on Women’s Roles: Overcoming Research Problems Caused by the Presence of a Great Tradition. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ad05-004 .

Coleman, Jack David Bo. 1984. Language Shift in a Bilingual Hebridean Crofting Community. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Xerox University Microfilms. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=es10-015 .

Pavlovic, Jeremija M. 1973. Folk Life and Customs in the Kragujevac Region of the Jasenica in Sumdaija. New Haven, Conn.: Human Relations Area Files. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ef06-019 .

Sorensen Jr, Arthur P. 1967. “Multilingualism in the Northwest Amazon.” American Anthropologist Vol. 69 (no. 6): 670–84. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=sq19-007 .

Swigart, Leigh. 1994. “Cultural Creolisation and Language Use in Post-Colonial Africa: The Case of Senegal.” Africa Vol. 64 (no. 2): 175–89. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ms30-059 .

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Communication and Culture
• Communication and Social Change
• Communication and Technology
• Communication Theory
• Critical/Cultural Studies
• Gender (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies)
• Health and Risk Communication
• Intergroup Communication
• International/Global Communication
• Interpersonal Communication
• Journalism Studies
• Language and Social Interaction
• Mass Communication
• Media and Communication Policy
• Organizational Communication
• Political Communication
• Rhetorical Theory
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Language and power.

• Sik Hung Ng Sik Hung Ng Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China
•  and  Fei Deng Fei Deng School of Foreign Studies, South China Agricultural University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.436
• Published online: 22 August 2017

Five dynamic language–power relationships in communication have emerged from critical language studies, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, and the social psychology of language and communication. Two of them stem from preexisting powers behind language that it reveals and reflects, thereby transferring the extralinguistic powers to the communication context. Such powers exist at both the micro and macro levels. At the micro level, the power behind language is a speaker’s possession of a weapon, money, high social status, or other attractive personal qualities—by revealing them in convincing language, the speaker influences the hearer. At the macro level, the power behind language is the collective power (ethnolinguistic vitality) of the communities that speak the language. The dominance of English as a global language and international lingua franca, for example, has less to do with its linguistic quality and more to do with the ethnolinguistic vitality of English-speakers worldwide that it reflects. The other three language–power relationships refer to the powers of language that are based on a language’s communicative versatility and its broad range of cognitive, communicative, social, and identity functions in meaning-making, social interaction, and language policies. Such language powers include, first, the power of language to maintain existing dominance in legal, sexist, racist, and ageist discourses that favor particular groups of language users over others. Another language power is its immense impact on national unity and discord. The third language power is its ability to create influence through single words (e.g., metaphors), oratories, conversations and narratives in political campaigns, emergence of leaders, terrorist narratives, and so forth.

• power behind language
• power of language
• intergroup communication
• World Englishes
• oratorical power
• conversational power
• leader emergence
• al-Qaeda narrative
• social identity approach

Introduction

Language is for communication and power.

Language is a natural human system of conventionalized symbols that have understood meanings. Through it humans express and communicate their private thoughts and feelings as well as enact various social functions. The social functions include co-constructing social reality between and among individuals, performing and coordinating social actions such as conversing, arguing, cheating, and telling people what they should or should not do. Language is also a public marker of ethnolinguistic, national, or religious identity, so strong that people are willing to go to war for its defense, just as they would defend other markers of social identity, such as their national flag. These cognitive, communicative, social, and identity functions make language a fundamental medium of human communication. Language is also a versatile communication medium, often and widely used in tandem with music, pictures, and actions to amplify its power. Silence, too, adds to the force of speech when it is used strategically to speak louder than words. The wide range of language functions and its versatility combine to make language powerful. Even so, this is only one part of what is in fact a dynamic relationship between language and power. The other part is that there is preexisting power behind language which it reveals and reflects, thereby transferring extralinguistic power to the communication context. It is thus important to delineate the language–power relationships and their implications for human communication.

This chapter provides a systematic account of the dynamic interrelationships between language and power, not comprehensively for lack of space, but sufficiently focused so as to align with the intergroup communication theme of the present volume. The term “intergroup communication” will be used herein to refer to an intergroup perspective on communication, which stresses intergroup processes underlying communication and is not restricted to any particular form of intergroup communication such as interethnic or intergender communication, important though they are. It echoes the pioneering attempts to develop an intergroup perspective on the social psychology of language and communication behavior made by pioneers drawn from communication, social psychology, and cognate fields (see Harwood et al., 2005 ). This intergroup perspective has fostered the development of intergroup communication as a discipline distinct from and complementing the discipline of interpersonal communication. One of its insights is that apparently interpersonal communication is in fact dynamically intergroup (Dragojevic & Giles, 2014 ). For this and other reasons, an intergroup perspective on language and communication behavior has proved surprisingly useful in revealing intergroup processes in health communication (Jones & Watson, 2012 ), media communication (Harwood & Roy, 2005 ), and communication in a variety of organizational contexts (Giles, 2012 ).

The major theoretical foundation that has underpinned the intergroup perspective is social identity theory (Tajfel, 1982 ), which continues to service the field as a metatheory (Abrams & Hogg, 2004 ) alongside relatively more specialized theories such as ethnolinguistic identity theory (Harwood et al., 1994 ), communication accommodation theory (Palomares et al., 2016 ), and self-categorization theory applied to intergroup communication (Reid et al., 2005 ). Against this backdrop, this chapter will be less concerned with any particular social category of intergroup communication or variant of social identity theory, and more with developing a conceptual framework of looking at the language–power relationships and their implications for understanding intergroup communication. Readers interested in an intra- or interpersonal perspective may refer to the volume edited by Holtgraves ( 2014a ).

Conceptual Approaches to Power

Bertrand Russell, logician cum philosopher and social activist, published a relatively little-known book on power when World War II was looming large in Europe (Russell, 2004 ). In it he asserted the fundamental importance of the concept of power in the social sciences and likened its importance to the concept of energy in the physical sciences. But unlike physical energy, which can be defined in a formula (e.g., E=MC 2 ), social power has defied any such definition. This state of affairs is not unexpected because the very nature of (social) power is elusive. Foucault ( 1979 , p. 92) has put it this way: “Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” This view is not beyond criticism but it does highlight the elusiveness of power. Power is also a value-laden concept meaning different things to different people. To functional theorists and power-wielders, power is “power to,” a responsibility to unite people and do good for all. To conflict theorists and those who are dominated, power is “power over,” which corrupts and is a source of social conflict rather than integration (Lenski, 1966 ; Sassenberg et al., 2014 ). These entrenched views surface in management–labor negotiations and political debates between government and opposition. Management and government would try to frame the negotiation in terms of “power to,” whereas labor and opposition would try to frame the same in “power over” in a clash of power discourses. The two discourses also interchange when the same speakers reverse their power relations: While in opposition, politicians adhere to “power over” rhetorics, once in government, they talk “power to.” And vice versa.

The elusive and value-laden nature of power has led to a plurality of theoretical and conceptual approaches. Five approaches that are particularly pertinent to the language–power relationships will be discussed, and briefly so because of space limitation. One approach views power in terms of structural dominance in society by groups who own and/or control the economy, the government, and other social institutions. Another approach views power as the production of intended effects by overcoming resistance that arises from objective conflict of interests or from psychological reactance to being coerced, manipulated, or unfairly treated. A complementary approach, represented by Kurt Lewin’s field theory, takes the view that power is not the actual production of effects but the potential for doing this. It looks behind power to find out the sources or bases of this potential, which may stem from the power-wielders’ access to the means of punishment, reward, and information, as well as from their perceived expertise and legitimacy (Raven, 2008 ). A fourth approach views power in terms of the balance of control/dependence in the ongoing social exchange between two actors that takes place either in the absence or presence of third parties. It provides a structural account of power-balancing mechanisms in social networking (Emerson, 1962 ), and forms the basis for combining with symbolic interaction theory, which brings in subjective factors such as shared social cognition and affects for the analysis of power in interpersonal and intergroup negotiation (Stolte, 1987 ). The fifth, social identity approach digs behind the social exchange account, which has started from control/dependence as a given but has left it unexplained, to propose a three-process model of power emergence (Turner, 2005 ). According to this model, it is psychological group formation and associated group-based social identity that produce influence; influence then cumulates to form the basis of power, which in turn leads to the control of resources.

Common to the five approaches above is the recognition that power is dynamic in its usage and can transform from one form of power to another. Lukes ( 2005 ) has attempted to articulate three different forms or faces of power called “dimensions.” The first, behavioral dimension of power refers to decision-making power that is manifest in the open contest for dominance in situations of objective conflict of interests. Non-decision-making power, the second dimension, is power behind the scene. It involves the mobilization of organizational bias (e.g., agenda fixing) to keep conflict of interests from surfacing to become public issues and to deprive oppositions of a communication platform to raise their voices, thereby limiting the scope of decision-making to only “safe” issues that would not challenge the interests of the power-wielder. The third dimension is ideological and works by socializing people’s needs and values so that they want the wants and do the things wanted by the power-wielders, willingly as their own. Conflict of interests, opposition, and resistance would be absent from this form of power, not because they have been maneuvered out of the contest as in the case of non-decision-making power, but because the people who are subject to power are no longer aware of any conflict of interest in the power relationship, which may otherwise ferment opposition and resistance. Power in this form can be exercised without the application of coercion or reward, and without arousing perceived manipulation or conflict of interests.

Language–Power Relationships

As indicated in the chapter title, discussion will focus on the language–power relationships, and not on language alone or power alone, in intergroup communication. It draws from all the five approaches to power and can be grouped for discussion under the power behind language and the power of language. In the former, language is viewed as having no power of its own and yet can produce influence and control by revealing the power behind the speaker. Language also reflects the collective/historical power of the language community that uses it. In the case of modern English, its preeminent status as a global language and international lingua franca has shaped the communication between native and nonnative English speakers because of the power of the English-speaking world that it reflects, rather than because of its linguistic superiority. In both cases, language provides a widely used conventional means to transfer extralinguistic power to the communication context. Research on the power of language takes the view that language has power of its own. This power allows a language to maintain the power behind it, unite or divide a nation, and create influence.

In Figure 1 we have grouped the five language–power relationships into five boxes. Note that the boundary between any two boxes is not meant to be rigid but permeable. For example, by revealing the power behind a message (box 1), a message can create influence (box 5). As another example, language does not passively reflect the power of the language community that uses it (box 2), but also, through its spread to other language communities, generates power to maintain its preeminence among languages (box 3). This expansive process of language power can be seen in the rise of English to global language status. A similar expansive process also applies to a particular language style that first reflects the power of the language subcommunity who uses the style, and then, through its common acceptance and usage by other subcommunities in the country, maintains the power of the subcommunity concerned. A prime example of this type of expansive process is linguistic sexism, which reflects preexisting male dominance in society and then, through its common usage by both sexes, contributes to the maintenance of male dominance. Other examples are linguistic racism and the language style of the legal profession, each of which, like linguistic sexism and the preeminence of the English language worldwide, has considerable impact on individuals and society at large.

Space precludes a full discussion of all five language–power relationships. Instead, some of them will warrant only a brief mention, whereas others will be presented in greater detail. The complexity of the language–power relations and their cross-disciplinary ramifications will be evident in the multiple sets of interrelated literatures that we cite from. These include the social psychology of language and communication, critical language studies (Fairclough, 1989 ), sociolinguistics (Kachru, 1992 ), and conversation analysis (Sacks et al., 1974 ).

Figure 1. Power behind language and power of language.

Power Behind Language

Language reveals power.

When negotiating with police, a gang may issue the threatening message, “Meet our demands, or we will shoot the hostages!” The threatening message may succeed in coercing the police to submit; its power, however, is more apparent than real because it is based on the guns gangsters posses. The message merely reveals the power of a weapon in their possession. Apart from revealing power, the gangsters may also cheat. As long as the message comes across as credible and convincing enough to arouse overwhelming fear, it would allow them to get away with their demands without actually possessing any weapon. In this case, language is used to produce an intended effect despite resistance by deceptively revealing a nonexisting power base and planting it in the mind of the message recipient. The literature on linguistic deception illustrates the widespread deceptive use of language-reveals-power to produce intended effects despite resistance (Robinson, 1996 ).

Language Reflects Power

Ethnolinguistic vitality.

The language that a person uses reflects the language community’s power. A useful way to think about a language community’s linguistic power is through the ethnolinguistic vitality model (Bourhis et al., 1981 ; Harwood et al., 1994 ). Language communities in a country vary in absolute size overall and, just as important, a relative numeric concentration in particular regions. Francophone Canadians, though fewer than Anglophone Canadians overall, are concentrated in Quebec to give them the power of numbers there. Similarly, ethnic minorities in mainland China have considerable power of numbers in those autonomous regions where they are concentrated, such as Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Collectively, these factors form the demographic base of the language community’s ethnolinguistic vitality, an index of the community’s relative linguistic dominance. Another base of ethnolinguistic vitality is institutional representations of the language community in government, legislatures, education, religion, the media, and so forth, which afford its members institutional leadership, influence, and control. Such institutional representation is often reinforced by a language policy that installs the language as the nation’s sole official language. The third base of ethnolinguistic vitality comprises sociohistorical and cultural status of the language community inside the nation and internationally. In short, the dominant language of a nation is one that comes from and reflects the high ethnolinguistic vitality of its language community.

An important finding of ethnolinguistic vitality research is that it is perceived vitality, and not so much its objective demographic-institutional-cultural strengths, that influences language behavior in interpersonal and intergroup contexts. Interestingly, the visibility and salience of languages shown on public and commercial signs, referred to as the “linguistic landscape,” serve important informational and symbolic functions as a marker of their relative vitality, which in turn affects the use of in-group language in institutional settings (Cenoz & Gorter, 2006 ; Landry & Bourhis, 1997 ).

World Englishes and Lingua Franca English

Another field of research on the power behind and reflected in language is “World Englishes.” At the height of the British Empire English spread on the back of the Industrial Revolution and through large-scale migrations of Britons to the “New World,” which has since become the core of an “inner circle” of traditional native English-speaking nations now led by the United States (Kachru, 1992 ). The emergent wealth and power of these nations has maintained English despite the decline of the British Empire after World War II. In the post-War era, English has become internationalized with the support of an “outer circle” nations and, later, through its spread to “expanding circle” nations. Outer circle nations are made up mostly of former British colonies such as India, Pakistan, and Nigeria. In compliance with colonial language policies that institutionalized English as the new colonial national language, a sizeable proportion of the colonial populations has learned and continued using English over generations, thereby vastly increasing the number of English speakers over and above those in the inner circle nations. The expanding circle encompasses nations where English has played no historical government roles, but which are keen to appropriate English as the preeminent foreign language for local purposes such as national development, internationalization of higher education, and participation in globalization (e.g., China, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Egypt, Israel, and continental Europe).

English is becoming a global language with official or special status in at least 75 countries (British Council, n.d. ). It is also the language choice in international organizations and companies, as well as academia, and is commonly used in trade, international mass media, and entertainment, and over the Internet as the main source of information. English native speakers can now follow the worldwide English language track to find jobs overseas without having to learn the local language and may instead enjoy a competitive language advantage where the job requires English proficiency. This situation is a far cry from the colonial era when similar advantages had to come under political patronage. Alongside English native speakers who work overseas benefitting from the preeminence of English over other languages, a new phenomenon of outsourcing international call centers away from the United Kingdom and the United States has emerged (Friginal, 2007 ). Callers can find the information or help they need from people stationed in remote places such as India or the Philippines where English has penetrated.

As English spreads worldwide, it has also become the major international lingua franca, serving some 800 million multilinguals in Asia alone, and numerous others elsewhere (Bolton, 2008 ). The practical importance of this phenomenon and its impact on English vocabulary, grammar, and accent have led to the emergence of a new field of research called “English as a lingua franca” (Brosch, 2015 ). The twin developments of World Englishes and lingua franca English raise interesting and important research questions. A vast area of research lies in waiting.

Several lines of research suggest themselves from an intergroup communication perspective. How communicatively effective are English native speakers who are international civil servants in organizations such as the UN and WTO, where they habitually speak as if they were addressing their fellow natives without accommodating to the international audience? Another line of research is lingua franca English communication between two English nonnative speakers. Their common use of English signals a joint willingness of linguistic accommodation, motivated more by communication efficiency of getting messages across and less by concerns of their respective ethnolinguistic identities. An intergroup communication perspective, however, would sensitize researchers to social identity processes and nonaccommodation behaviors underneath lingua franca communication. For example, two nationals from two different countries, X and Y, communicating with each other in English are accommodating on the language level; at the same time they may, according to communication accommodation theory, use their respective X English and Y English for asserting their ethnolinguistic distinctiveness whilst maintaining a surface appearance of accommodation. There are other possibilities. According to a survey of attitudes toward English accents, attachment to “standard” native speaker models remains strong among nonnative English speakers in many countries (Jenkins, 2009 ). This suggests that our hypothetical X and Y may, in addition to asserting their respective Englishes, try to outperform one another in speaking with overcorrect standard English accents, not so much because they want to assert their respective ethnolinguistic identities, but because they want to project a common in-group identity for positive social comparison—“We are all English-speakers but I am a better one than you!”

Many countries in the expanding circle nations are keen to appropriate English for local purposes, encouraging their students and especially their educational elites to learn English as a foreign language. A prime example is the Learn-English Movement in China. It has affected generations of students and teachers over the past 30 years and consumed a vast amount of resources. The results are mixed. Even more disturbing, discontents and backlashes have emerged from anti-English Chinese motivated to protect the vitality and cultural values of the Chinese language (Sun et al., 2016 ). The power behind and reflected in modern English has widespread and far-reaching consequences in need of more systematic research.

Power of Language

Language maintains existing dominance.

Language maintains and reproduces existing dominance in three different ways represented respectively by the ascent of English, linguistic sexism, and legal language style. For reasons already noted, English has become a global language, an international lingua franca, and an indispensable medium for nonnative English speaking countries to participate in the globalized world. Phillipson ( 2009 ) referred to this phenomenon as “linguistic imperialism.” It is ironic that as the spread of English has increased the extent of multilingualism of non-English-speaking nations, English native speakers in the inner circle of nations have largely remained English-only. This puts pressure on the rest of the world to accommodate them in English, the widespread use of which maintains its preeminence among languages.

A language evolves and changes to adapt to socially accepted word meanings, grammatical rules, accents, and other manners of speaking. What is acceptable or unacceptable reflects common usage and hence the numerical influence of users, but also the elites’ particular language preferences and communication styles. Research on linguistic sexism has shown, for example, a man-made language such as English (there are many others) is imbued with sexist words and grammatical rules that reflect historical male dominance in society. Its uncritical usage routinely by both sexes in daily life has in turn naturalized male dominance and associated sexist inequalities (Spender, 1998 ). Similar other examples are racist (Reisigl & Wodak, 2005 ) and ageist (Ryan et al., 1995 ) language styles.

Professional languages are made by and for particular professions such as the legal profession (Danet, 1980 ; Mertz et al., 2016 ; O’Barr, 1982 ). The legal language is used not only among members of the profession, but also with the general public, who may know each and every word in a legal document but are still unable to decipher its meaning. Through its language, the legal profession maintains its professional dominance with the complicity of the general public, who submits to the use of the language and accedes to the profession’s authority in interpreting its meanings in matters relating to their legal rights and obligations. Communication between lawyers and their “clients” is not only problematic, but the public’s continual dependence on the legal language contributes to the maintenance of the dominance of the profession.

Language Unites and Divides a Nation

A nation of many peoples who, despite their diverse cultural and ethnic background, all speak in the same tongue and write in the same script would reap the benefit of the unifying power of a common language. The power of the language to unite peoples would be stronger if it has become part of their common national identity and contributed to its vitality and psychological distinctiveness. Such power has often been seized upon by national leaders and intellectuals to unify their countries and serve other nationalistic purposes (Patten, 2006 ). In China, for example, Emperor Qin Shi Huang standardized the Chinese script ( hanzi ) as an important part of the reforms to unify the country after he had defeated the other states and brought the Warring States Period ( 475–221 bc ) to an end. A similar reform of language standardization was set in motion soon after the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty ( ad 1644–1911 ), by simplifying some of the hanzi and promoting Putonghua as the national standard oral language. In the postcolonial part of the world, language is often used to service nationalism by restoring the official status of their indigenous language as the national language whilst retaining the colonial language or, in more radical cases of decolonization, relegating the latter to nonofficial status. Yet language is a two-edged sword: It can also divide a nation. The tension can be seen in competing claims to official-language status made by minority language communities, protest over maintenance of minority languages, language rights at schools and in courts of law, bilingual education, and outright language wars (Calvet, 1998 ; DeVotta, 2004 ).

Language Creates Influence

In this section we discuss the power of language to create influence through single words and more complex linguistic structures ranging from oratories and conversations to narratives/stories.

Power of Single Words

Learning a language empowers humans to master an elaborate system of conventions and the associations between words and their sounds on the one hand, and on the other hand, categories of objects and relations to which they refer. After mastering the referential meanings of words, a person can mentally access the objects and relations simply by hearing or reading the words. Apart from their referential meanings, words also have connotative meanings with their own social-cognitive consequences. Together, these social-cognitive functions underpin the power of single words that has been extensively studied in metaphors, which is a huge research area that crosses disciplinary boundaries and probes into the inner workings of the brain (Benedek et al., 2014 ; Landau et al., 2014 ; Marshal et al., 2007 ). The power of single words extends beyond metaphors. It can be seen in misleading words in leading questions (Loftus, 1975 ), concessive connectives that reverse expectations from real-world knowledge (Xiang & Kuperberg, 2014 ), verbs that attribute implicit causality to either verb subject or object (Hartshorne & Snedeker, 2013 ), “uncertainty terms” that hedge potentially face-threatening messages (Holtgraves, 2014b ), and abstract words that signal power (Wakslak et al., 2014 ).

The literature on the power of single words has rarely been applied to intergroup communication, with the exception of research arising from the linguistic category model (e.g., Semin & Fiedler, 1991 ). The model distinguishes among descriptive action verbs (e.g., “hits”), interpretative action verbs (e.g., “hurts”) and state verbs (e.g., “hates”), which increase in abstraction in that order. Sentences made up of abstract verbs convey more information about the protagonist, imply greater temporal and cross-situational stability, and are more difficult to disconfirm. The use of abstract language to represent a particular behavior will attribute the behavior to the protagonist rather than the situation and the resulting image of the protagonist will persist despite disconfirming information, whereas the use of concrete language will attribute the same behavior more to the situation and the resulting image of the protagonist will be easier to change. According to the linguistic intergroup bias model (Maass, 1999 ), abstract language will be used to represent positive in-group and negative out-group behaviors, whereas concrete language will be used to represent negative in-group and positive out-group behaviors. The combined effects of the differential use of abstract and concrete language would, first, lead to biased attribution (explanation) of behavior privileging the in-group over the out-group, and second, perpetuate the prejudiced intergroup stereotypes. More recent research has shown that linguistic intergroup bias varies with the power differential between groups—it is stronger in high and low power groups than in equal power groups (Rubini et al., 2007 ).

Oratorical Power

A charismatic speaker may, by the sheer force of oratory, buoy up people’s hopes, convert their hearts from hatred to forgiveness, or embolden them to take up arms for a cause. One may recall moving speeches (in English) such as Susan B. Anthony’s “On Women’s Right to Vote,” Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches,” Mahatma Gandhi’s “Quit India,” or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream.” The speech may be delivered face-to-face to an audience, or broadcast over the media. The discussion below focuses on face-to-face oratories in political meetings.

Oratorical power may be measured in terms of money donated or pledged to the speaker’s cause, or, in a religious sermon, the number of converts made. Not much research has been reported on these topics. Another measurement approach is to count the frequency of online audience responses that a speech has generated, usually but not exclusively in the form of applause. Audience applause can be measured fairly objectively in terms of frequency, length, or loudness, and collected nonobtrusively from a public recording of the meeting. Audience applause affords researchers the opportunity to explore communicative and social psychological processes that underpin some aspects of the power of rhetorical formats. Note, however, that not all incidences of audience applause are valid measures of the power of rhetoric. A valid incidence should be one that is invited by the speaker and synchronized with the flow of the speech, occurring at the appropriate time and place as indicated by the rhetorical format. Thus, an uninvited incidence of applause would not count, nor is one that is invited but has occurred “out of place” (too soon or too late). Furthermore, not all valid incidences are theoretically informative to the same degree. An isolated applause from just a handful of the audience, though valid and in the right place, has relatively little theoretical import for understanding the power of rhetoric compared to one that is made by many acting in unison as a group. When the latter occurs, it would be a clear indication of the power of rhetorically formulated speech. Such positive audience response constitutes the most direct and immediate means by which an audience can display its collective support for the speaker, something which they would not otherwise show to a speech of less power. To influence and orchestrate hundreds and thousands of people in the audience to precisely coordinate their response to applaud (and cheer) together as a group at the right time and place is no mean feat. Such a feat also influences the wider society through broadcast on television and other news and social media. The combined effect could be enormous there and then, and its downstream influence far-reaching, crossing country boarders and inspiring generations to come.

To accomplish the feat, an orator has to excite the audience to applaud, build up the excitement to a crescendo, and simultaneously cue the audience to synchronize their outburst of stored-up applause with the ongoing speech. Rhetorical formats that aid the orator to accomplish the dual functions include contrast, list, puzzle solution, headline-punchline, position-taking, and pursuit (Heritage & Greatbatch, 1986 ). To illustrate, we cite the contrast and list formats.

A contrast, or antithesis, is made up of binary schemata such as “too much” and “too little.” Heritage and Greatbatch ( 1986 , p. 123) reported the following example:

Governments will argue that resources are not available to help disabled people. The fact is that too much is spent on the munitions of war, and too little is spent on the munitions of peace [italics added]. As the audience is familiar with the binary schema of “too much” and “too little” they can habitually match the second half of the contrast against the first half. This decoding process reinforces message comprehension and helps them to correctly anticipate and applaud at the completion point of the contrast. In the example quoted above, the speaker micropaused for 0.2 seconds after the second word “spent,” at which point the audience began to applaud in anticipation of the completion point of the contrast, and applauded more excitedly upon hearing “. . . on the munitions of peace.” The applause continued and lasted for 9.2 long seconds.

A list is usually made up of a series of three parallel words, phrases or clauses. “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” is a fine example, as is Obama’s “It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day , in this election , at this defining moment , change has come to America!” (italics added) The three parts in the list echo one another, step up the argument and its corresponding excitement in the audience as they move from one part to the next. The third part projects a completion point to cue the audience to get themselves ready to display their support via applause, cheers, and so forth. In a real conversation this juncture is called a “transition-relevance place,” at which point a conversational partner (hearer) may take up a turn to speak. A skilful orator will micropause at that juncture to create a conversational space for the audience to take up their turn in applauding and cheering as a group.

As illustrated by the two examples above, speaker and audience collaborate to transform an otherwise monological speech into a quasiconversation, turning a passive audience into an active supportive “conversational” partner who, by their synchronized responses, reduces the psychological separation from the speaker and emboldens the latter’s self-confidence. Through such enjoyable and emotional participation collectively, an audience made up of formerly unconnected individuals with no strong common group identity may henceforth begin to feel “we are all one.” According to social identity theory and related theories (van Zomeren et al., 2008 ), the emergent group identity, politicized in the process, will in turn provide a social psychological base for collective social action. This process of identity making in the audience is further strengthened by the speaker’s frequent use of “we” as a first person, plural personal pronoun.

Conversational Power

A conversation is a speech exchange system in which the length and order of speaking turns have not been preassigned but require coordination on an utterance-by-utterance basis between two or more individuals. It differs from other speech exchange systems in which speaking turns have been preassigned and/or monitored by a third party, for example, job interviews and debate contests. Turn-taking, because of its centrality to conversations and the important theoretical issues that it raises for social coordination and implicit conversational conventions, has been the subject of extensive research and theorizing (Goodwin & Heritage, 1990 ; Grice, 1975 ; Sacks et al., 1974 ). Success at turn-taking is a key part of the conversational process leading to influence. A person who cannot do this is in no position to influence others in and through conversations, which are probably the most common and ubiquitous form of human social interaction. Below we discuss studies of conversational power based on conversational turns and applied to leader emergence in group and intergroup settings. These studies, as they unfold, link conversation analysis with social identity theory and expectation states theory (Berger et al., 1974 ).

A conversational turn in hand allows the speaker to influence others in two important ways. First, through current-speaker-selects-next the speaker can influence who will speak next and, indirectly, increases the probability that he or she will regain the turn after the next. A common method for selecting the next speaker is through tag questions. The current speaker (A) may direct a tag question such as “Ya know?” or “Don’t you agree?” to a particular hearer (B), which carries the illocutionary force of selecting the addressee to be the next speaker and, simultaneously, restraining others from self-selecting. The A 1 B 1 sequence of exchange has been found to have a high probability of extending into A 1 B 1 A 2 in the next round of exchange, followed by its continuation in the form of A 1 B 1 A 2 B 2 . For example, in a six-member group, the A 1 B 1 →A 1 B 1 A 2 sequence of exchange has more than 50% chance of extending to the A 1 B 1 A 2 B 2 sequence, which is well above chance level, considering that there are four other hearers who could intrude at either the A 2 or B 2 slot of turn (Stasser & Taylor, 1991 ). Thus speakership not only offers the current speaker the power to select the next speaker twice, but also to indirectly regain a turn.

Second, a turn in hand provides the speaker with an opportunity to exercise topic control. He or she can exercise non-decision-making power by changing an unfavorable or embarrassing topic to a safer one, thereby silencing or preventing it from reaching the “floor.” Conversely, he or she can exercise decision-making power by continuing or raising a topic that is favorable to self. Or the speaker can move on to talk about an innocuous topic to ease tension in the group.

Bales ( 1950 ) has studied leader emergence in groups made up of unacquainted individuals in situations where they have to bid or compete for speaking turns. Results show that individuals who talk the most have a much better chance of becoming leaders. Depending on the social orientations of their talk, they would be recognized as a task or relational leader. Subsequent research on leader emergence has shown that an even better behavioral predictor than volume of talk is the number of speaking turns. An obvious reason for this is that the volume of talk depends on the number of turns—it usually accumulates across turns, rather than being the result of a single extraordinary long turn of talk. Another reason is that more turns afford the speaker more opportunities to realize the powers of turns that have been explicated above. Group members who become leaders are the ones who can penetrate the complex, on-line conversational system to obtain a disproportionately large number of speaking turns by perfect timing at “transition-relevance places” to self-select as the next speaker or, paradoxical as it may seem, constructive interruptions (Ng et al., 1995 ).

More recent research has extended the experimental study of group leadership to intergroup contexts, where members belonging to two groups who hold opposing stances on a social or political issue interact within and also between groups. The results showed, first, that speaking turns remain important in leader emergence, but the intergroup context now generates social identity and self-categorization processes that selectively privilege particular forms of speech. What potential leaders say, and not only how many speaking turns they have gained, becomes crucial in conveying to group members that they are prototypical members of their group. Prototypical communication is enacted by adopting an accent, choosing code words, and speaking in a tone that characterize the in-group; above all, it is enacted through the content of utterances to represent or exemplify the in-group position. Such prototypical utterances that are directed successfully at the out-group correlate strongly with leader emergence (Reid & Ng, 2000 ). These out-group-directed prototypical utterances project an in-group identity that is psychologically distinctive from the out-group for in-group members to feel proud of and to rally together when debating with the out-group.

Building on these experimental results Reid and Ng ( 2003 ) developed a social identity theory of leadership to account for the emergence and maintenance of intergroup leadership, grounding it in case studies of the intergroup communication strategies that brought Ariel Sharon and John Howard to power in Israel and Australia, respectively. In a later development, the social identity account was fused with expectation states theory to explain how group processes collectively shape the behavior of in-group members to augment the prototypical communication behavior of the emergent leader (Reid & Ng, 2006 ). Specifically, when conversational influence gained through prototypical utterances culminates to form an incipient power hierarchy, group members develop expectations of who is and will be leading the group. Acting on these tacit expectations they collectively coordinate the behavior of each other to conform with the expectations by granting incipient leaders more speaking turns and supporting them with positive audience responses. In this way, group members collectively amplify the influence of incipient leaders and jointly propel them to leadership roles (see also Correll & Ridgeway, 2006 ). In short, the emergence of intergroup leaders is a joint process of what they do individually and what group members do collectively, enabled by speaking turns and mediated by social identity and expectation states processes. In a similar vein, Hogg ( 2014 ) has developed a social identity account of leadership in intergroup settings.

Narrative Power

Narratives and stories are closely related and are sometimes used interchangeably. However, it is useful to distinguish a narrative from a story and from other related terms such as discourse and frames. A story is a sequence of related events in the past recounted for rhetorical or ideological purposes, whereas a narrative is a coherent system of interrelated and sequentially organized stories formed by incorporating new stories and relating them to others so as to provide an ongoing basis for interpreting events, envisioning an ideal future, and motivating and justifying collective actions (Halverson et al., 2011 ). The temporal dimension and sense of movement in a narrative also distinguish it from discourse and frames. According to Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle ( 2013 ), discourses are the raw material of communication that actors plot into a narrative, and frames are the acts of selecting and highlighting some events or issues to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and solution. Both discourse and frame lack the temporal and causal transformation of a narrative.

Pitching narratives at the suprastory level and stressing their temporal and transformational movements allows researchers to take a structurally more systemic and temporally more expansive view than traditional research on propaganda wars between nations, religions, or political systems (Halverson et al., 2011 ; Miskimmon et al., 2013 ). Schmid ( 2014 ) has provided an analysis of al-Qaeda’s “compelling narrative that authorizes its strategy, justifies its violent tactics, propagates its ideology and wins new recruits.” According to this analysis, the chief message of the narrative is “the West is at war with Islam,” a strategic communication that is fundamentally intergroup in both structure and content. The intergroup structure of al-Qaeda narrative includes the rhetorical constructions that there are a group grievance inflicted on Muslims by a Zionist–Christian alliance, a vision of the good society (under the Caliphate and sharia), and a path from grievance to the realization of the vision led by al-Qaeda in a violent jihad to eradicate Western influence in the Muslim world. The al-Qaeda narrative draws support not only from traditional Arab and Muslim cultural narratives interpreted to justify its unorthodox means (such as attacks against women and children), but also from pre-existing anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism propagated by some Arab governments, Soviet Cold War propaganda, anti-Western sermons by Muslim clerics, and the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. It is deeply embedded in culture and history, and has reached out to numerous Muslims who have emigrated to the West.

The intergroup content of al-Qaeda narrative was shown in a computer-aided content analysis of 18 representative transcripts of propaganda speeches released between 2006–2011 by al-Qaeda leaders, totaling over 66,000 words (Cohen et al., 2016 ). As part of the study, an “Ideology Extraction using Linguistic Extremization” (IELEX) categorization scheme was developed for mapping the content of the corpus, which revealed 19 IELEX rhetorical categories referring to either the out-group/enemy or the in-group/enemy victims. The out-group/enemy was represented by four categories such as “The enemy is extremely negative (bloodthirsty, vengeful, brainwashed, etc.)”; whereas the in-group/enemy victims were represented by more categories such as “we are entirely innocent/good/virtuous.” The content of polarized intergroup stereotypes, demonizing “them” and glorifying “us,” echoes other similar findings (Smith et al., 2008 ), as well as the general finding of intergroup stereotyping in social psychology (Yzerbyt, 2016 ).

The success of the al-Qaeda narrative has alarmed various international agencies, individual governments, think tanks, and religious groups to spend huge sums of money on developing counternarratives that are, according to Schmid ( 2014 ), largely feeble. The so-called “global war on terror” has failed in its effort to construct effective counternarratives although al-Qaeda’s finance, personnel, and infrastructure have been much weakened. Ironically, it has developed into a narrative of its own, not so much for countering external extremism, but for promoting and justifying internal nationalistic extremist policies and influencing national elections. This reactive coradicalization phenomenon is spreading (Mink, 2015 ; Pratt, 2015 ; Reicher & Haslam, 2016 ).

Discussion and Future Directions

This chapter provides a systematic framework for understanding five language–power relationships, namely, language reveals power, reflects power, maintains existing dominance, unites and divides a nation, and creates influence. The first two relationships are derived from the power behind language and the last three from the power of language. Collectively they provide a relatively comprehensible framework for understanding the relationships between language and power, and not simply for understanding language alone or power alone separated from one another. The language–power relationships are dynamically interrelated, one influencing the other, and each can draw from an array of the cognitive, communicative, social, and identity functions of language. The framework is applicable to both interpersonal and intergroup contexts of communication, although for present purposes the latter has been highlighted. Among the substantive issues discussed in this chapter, English as a global language, oratorical and narrative power, and intergroup leadership stand out as particularly important for political and theoretical reasons.

In closing, we note some of the gaps that need to be filled and directions for further research. When discussing the powers of language to maintain and reflect existing dominance, we have omitted the countervailing power of language to resist or subvert existing dominance and, importantly, to create social change for the collective good. Furthermore, in this age of globalization and its discontents, English as a global language will increasingly be resented for its excessive unaccommodating power despite tangible lingua franca English benefits, and challenged by the expanding ethnolinguistic vitality of peoples who speak Arabic, Chinese, or Spanish. Internet communication is no longer predominantly in English, but is rapidly diversifying to become the modern Tower of Babel. And yet we have barely scratched the surface of these issues. Other glaring gaps include the omission of media discourse and recent developments in Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (Loring, 2016 ), as well as the lack of reference to languages other than English that may cast one or more of the language–power relationships in a different light.

One of the main themes of this chapter—that the diverse language–power relationships are dynamically interrelated—clearly points to the need for greater theoretical fertilization across cognate disciplines. Our discussion of the three powers of language (boxes 3–5 in Figure 1 ) clearly points in this direction, most notably in the case of the powers of language to create influence through single words, oratories, conversations, and narratives, but much more needs to be done. The social identity approach will continue to serve as a meta theory of intergroup communication. To the extent that intergroup communication takes place in an existing power relation and that the changes that it seeks are not simply a more positive or psychologically distinctive social identity but greater group power and a more powerful social identity, the social identity approach has to incorporate power in its application to intergroup communication.

Further Reading

• Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Billig, M. (1991). Ideology and opinions: Studies in rhetorical psychology . Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
• Crystal, D. (2012). English as a global language , 2d ed. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness . New York: John Wiley.
• Holtgraves, T. M. (2010). Social psychology and language: Words, utterances, and conversations. In S. Fiske , D. Gilbert , & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed., pp. 1386–1422). New York: John Wiley.
• Mumby, D. K. (Ed.). (1993). Narrative and social control: Critical perspectives (Vol. 21). Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
• Ng, S. H. , & Bradac, J. J. (1993). Power in language: Verbal communication and social influence . Newbury Park, CA: SAGE. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412994088.n202 .
• Abrams, D. , & Hogg, M. A. (2004). Metatheory: Lessons from social identity research. Personality and Social Psychology Review , 8 , 98–106.
• Bales, R. F. (1950). Interaction process analysis: A method for the study of small groups . Oxford: Addison-Wesley.
• Benedek, M. , Beaty, R. , Jauk, E. , Koschutnig, K. , Fink, A. , Silvia, P. J. , . . . & Neubauer, A. C. (2014). Creating metaphors: The neural basis of figurative language production. NeuroImage , 90 , 99–106.
• Berger, J. , Conner, T. L. , & Fisek, M. H. (Eds.). (1974). Expectation states theory: A theoretical research program . Cambridge, MA: Winthrop.
• Bolton, K. (2008). World Englishes today. In B. B. Kachru , Y. Kachru , & C. L. Nelson (Eds.), The handbook of world Englishes (pp. 240–269). Oxford: Blackwell.
• Bourhis, R. Y. , Giles, H. , & Rosenthal, D. (1981). Notes on the construction of a “Subjective vitality questionnaire” for ethnolinguistic groups. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development , 2 , 145–155.
• British Council . (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-faq-the-english-language.htm .
• Brosch, C. (2015). On the conceptual history of the term Lingua Franca . Apples . Journal of Applied Language Studies , 9 (1), 71–85.
• Calvet, J. (1998). Language wars and linguistic politics . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Cenoz, J. , & Gorter, D. (2006). Linguistic landscape and minority languages. International Journal of Multilingualism , 3 , 67–80.
• Cohen, S. J. , Kruglanski, A. , Gelfand, M. J. , Webber, D. , & Gunaratna, R. (2016). Al-Qaeda’s propaganda decoded: A psycholinguistic system for detecting variations in terrorism ideology . Terrorism and Political Violence , 1–30.
• Correll, S. J. , & Ridgeway, C. L. (2006). Expectation states theory . In L. DeLamater (Ed.), Handbook of social psychology (pp. 29–51). Hoboken, NJ: Springer.
• Danet, B. (1980). Language in the legal process. Law and Society Review , 14 , 445–564.
• DeVotta, N. (2004). Blowback: Linguistic nationalism, institutional decay, and ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Dragojevic, M. , & Giles, H. (2014). Language and interpersonal communication: Their intergroup dynamics. In C. R. Berger (Ed.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 29–51). Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Emerson, R. M. (1962). Power–Dependence Relations. American Sociological Review , 27 , 31–41.
• Fairclough, N. L. (1989). Language and power . London: Longman.
• Foucault, M. (1979). The history of sexuality volume 1: An introduction . London: Allen Lane.
• Friginal, E. (2007). Outsourced call centers and English in the Philippines. World Englishes , 26 , 331–345.
• Giles, H. (Ed.) (2012). The handbook of intergroup communication . New York: Routledge.
• Goodwin, C. , & Heritage, J. (1990). Conversation analysis. Annual review of anthropology , 19 , 283–307.
• Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press.
• Halverson, J. R. , Goodall H. L., Jr. , & Corman, S. R. (2011). Master narratives of Islamist extremism . New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Hartshorne, J. K. , & Snedeker, J. (2013). Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics. Language and Cognitive Processes , 28 , 1474–1508.
• Harwood, J. , Giles, H. , & Bourhis, R. Y. (1994). The genesis of vitality theory: Historical patterns and discoursal dimensions. International Journal of the Sociology of Language , 108 , 167–206.
• Harwood, J. , Giles, H. , & Palomares, N. A. (2005). Intergroup theory and communication processes. In J. Harwood & H. Giles (Eds.), Intergroup communication: Multiple perspectives (pp. 1–20). New York: Peter Lang.
• Harwood, J. , & Roy, A. (2005). Social identity theory and mass communication research. In J. Harwood & H. Giles (Eds.), Intergroup communication: Multiple perspectives (pp. 189–212). New York: Peter Lang.
• Heritage, J. , & Greatbatch, D. (1986). Generating applause: A study of rhetoric and response at party political conferences. American Journal of Sociology , 92 , 110–157.
• Hogg, M. A. (2014). From uncertainty to extremism: Social categorization and identity processes. Current Directions in Psychological Science , 23 , 338–342.
• Holtgraves, T. M. (Ed.). (2014a). The Oxford handbook of language and social psychology . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Holtgraves, T. M. (2014b). Interpreting uncertainty terms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 107 , 219–228.
• Jenkins, J. (2009). English as a lingua franca: interpretations and attitudes. World Englishes , 28 , 200–207.
• Jones, L. , & Watson, B. M. (2012). Developments in health communication in the 21st century. Journal of Language and Social Psychology , 31 , 415–436.
• Kachru, B. B. (1992). The other tongue: English across cultures . Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Landau, M. J. , Robinson, M. D. , & Meier, B. P. (Eds.). (2014). The power of metaphor: Examining its influence on social life . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
• Landry, R. , & Bourhis, R. Y. (1997). Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality an empirical study. Journal of language and social psychology , 16 , 23–49.
• Lenski, G. (1966). Power and privilege: A theory of social stratification . New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Loftus, E. F. (1975). Leading questions and the eyewitness report. Cognitive Psychology , 7 , 560–572.
• Loring, A. (2016). Ideologies and collocations of “Citizenship” in media discourse: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis. In A. Loring & V. Ramanathan (Eds.), Language, immigration and naturalization: Legal and linguistic issues (chapter 9). Tonawanda, NY: Multilingual Matters.
• Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view , 2d ed. New York: Palgrave.
• Maass, A. (1999). Linguistic intergroup bias: Stereotype perpetuation through language. Advances in experimental social psychology , 31 , 79–121.
• Marshal, N. , Faust, M. , Hendler, T. , & Jung-Beeman, M. (2007). An fMRI investigation of the neural correlates underlying the processing of novel metaphoric expressions. Brain and language , 100 , 115–126.
• Mertz, E. , Ford, W. K. , & Matoesian, G. (Eds.). (2016). Translating the social world for law: Linguistic tools for a new legal realism . New York: Oxford University Press.
• Mink, C. (2015). It’s about the group, not god: Social causes and cures for terrorism. Journal for Deradicalization , 5 , 63–91.
• Miskimmon, A. , O’Loughlin, B. , & Roselle, L. (2013). Strategic narratives: Communicating power and the New World Order . New York: Routledge.
• Ng, S. H. , Brooke, M. & Dunne, M. (1995). Interruptions and influence in discussion groups. Journal of Language & Social Psychology , 14 , 369–381.
• O’Barr, W. M. (1982). Linguistic evidence: Language, power, and strategy in the courtroom . London: Academic Press.
• Palomares, N. A. , Giles, H. , Soliz, J. , & Gallois, C. (2016). Intergroup accommodation, social categories, and identities. In H. Giles (Ed.), Communication accommodation theory: Negotiating personal relationships and social identities across contexts (pp. 123–151). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Patten, A. (2006). The humanist roots of linguistic nationalism. History of Political Thought , 27 , 221–262.
• Phillipson, R. (2009). Linguistic imperialism continued . New York: Routledge.
• Pratt, D. (2015). Reactive co-radicalization: Religious extremism as mutual discontent. Journal for the Academic Study of Religion , 28 , 3–23.
• Raven, B. H. (2008). The bases of power and the power/interaction model of interpersonal influence. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy , 8 , 1–22.
• Reicher, S. D. , & Haslam, S. A. (2016). Fueling extremes. Scientific American Mind , 27 , 34–39.
• Reid, S. A. , Giles, H. , & Harwood, J. (2005). A self-categorization perspective on communication and intergroup relations. In J. Harwood & H. Giles (Eds.), Intergroup communication: Multiple perspectives (pp. 241–264). New York: Peter Lang.
• Reid, S. A. , & Ng, S. H. (2000). Conversation as a resource for influence: Evidence for prototypical arguments and social identification processes. European Journal of Social Psychology , 30 , 83–100.
• Reid, S. A. , & Ng, S. H. (2003). Identity, power, and strategic social categorisations: Theorising the language of leadership. In P. van Knippenberg & M. A. Hogg (Eds.), Leadership and power: Identity processes in groups and organizations (pp. 210–223). London: SAGE.
• Reid, S. A. , & Ng, S. H. (2006). The dynamics of intragroup differentiation in an intergroup social context. Human Communication Research , 32 , 504–525.
• Reisigl, M. , & Wodak, R. (2005). Discourse and discrimination: Rhetorics of racism and antisemitism . London: Routledge.
• Robinson, W. P. (1996). Deceit, delusion, and detection . Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
• Rubini, M. , Moscatelli, S. , Albarello, F. , & Palmonari, A. (2007). Group power as a determinant of interdependence and intergroup discrimination. European Journal of Social Psychology , 37 (6), 1203–1221.
• Russell, B. (2004). Power: A new social analysis . Originally published in 1938. London: Routledge.
• Ryan, E. B. , Hummert, M. L. , & Boich, L. H. (1995). Communication predicaments of aging patronizing behavior toward older adults. Journal of Language and Social Psychology , 14 (1–2), 144–166.
• Sacks, H. , Schegloff, E. A. , & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. L anguage , 50 , 696–735.
• Sassenberg, K. , Ellemers, N. , Scheepers, D. , & Scholl, A. (2014). “Power corrupts” revisited: The role of construal of power as opportunity or responsibility. In J. -W. van Prooijen & P. A. M. van Lange (Eds.), Power, politics, and paranoia: Why people are suspicious of their leaders (pp. 73–87). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Schmid, A. P. (2014). Al-Qaeda’s “single narrative” and attempts to develop counter-narratives: The state of knowledge . The Hague, The Netherlands: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, 26. Available at https://www.icct.nl/download/file/A-Schmid-Al-Qaedas-Single-Narrative-January-2014.pdf .
• Semin, G. R. , & Fiedler, K. (1991). The linguistic category model, its bases, applications and range. In W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), European review of social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 1–50). Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley.
• Smith, A. G. , Suedfeld, P. , Conway, L. G. , IIl, & Winter, D. G. (2008). The language of violence: Distinguishing terrorist from non-terrorist groups by thematic content analysis. Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict , 1 (2), 142–163.
• Spender, D. (1998). Man made language , 4th ed. London: Pandora.
• Stasser, G. , & Taylor, L. (1991). Speaking turns in face-to-face discussions. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology , 60 , 675–684.
• Stolte, J. (1987). The formation of justice norms. American Sociological Review , 52 (6), 774–784.
• Sun, J. J. M. , Hu, P. , & Ng, S. H. (2016). Impact of English on education reforms in China: With reference to the learn-English movement, the internationalisation of universities and the English language requirement in college entrance examinations . Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development , 1–14 (Published online January 22, 2016).
• Tajfel, H. (1982). Social psychology of intergroup relations. Annual Review of Psychology , 33 , 1–39.
• Turner, J. C. (2005). Explaining the nature of power: A three—process theory. European Journal of Social Psychology , 35 , 1–22.
• Van Zomeren, M. , Postmes, T. , & Spears, R. (2008). Toward an integrative social identity model of collective action: A quantitative research synthesis of three socio-psychological perspectives. Psychological Bulletin , 134 (4), 504–535.
• Wakslak, C. J. , Smith, P. K. , & Han, A. (2014). Using abstract language signals power. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 107 (1), 41–55.
• Xiang, M. , & Kuperberg, A. (2014). Reversing expectations during discourse comprehension . Language, Cognition and Neuroscience , 30 , 648–672.
• Yzerbyt, V. (2016). Intergroup stereotyping. Current Opinion in Psychology , 11 , 90–95.

Related Articles

• Language Attitudes
• Vitality Theory
• The Politics of Translation and Interpretation in International Communication

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Communication. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 04 June 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [66.249.64.20|185.80.150.64]
• 185.80.150.64

Character limit 500 /500

How the Language You Speak Influences the Way You Think

The relationship between language and thought is far from straightforward..

Posted August 8, 2018 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

[Article revised on 24 November 2020.]

Time heaved a gentle sigh as the wind swept through the willows.

Communication does not require language, and many animals communicate effectively by other means. However, language is closely associated with symbolism, and so with conceptual thought, problem solving, and creativity . These unique assets make us by far the most adaptable of all animals and enable us to engage in highly abstract pursuits such as philosophy , art, and science that define us as human beings.

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine what it would be like to live without language—not without the ability to speak, but without language itself. Given the choice, would you rather lose the faculty of sight or the faculty of language? This is probably the first time that you have faced this question: The faculty of language is so fundamental to what it means to be human that, unlike the faculty of sight, we take it completely for granted. ‘Monkeys’ quipped Kenneth Grahame, ‘very sensibly refrain from speech, lest they should be set to earn their livings.’

If rhetoric, the beauty of language, can so bend us, how about language itself? In other words, how does the language you speak influence the way you think? The ostensible purpose of language is to transmit thoughts from one mind to another. Language represents thought, that’s for sure, but does it also determine thought?

Wittgenstein famously wrote that ‘the limits of my language stand for the limits of my world’. Taken at face value, that seems too strong a claim. There are over 7,000 languages in the world—with, by some estimates, one dying out every two weeks or so. The number of basic colour terms varies quite considerably from one language to another. Dani, spoken in New Guinea, and Bassa, spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone, each have no more than two colour terms, one for dark/cool colours and the other for light/warm colours. But, obviously, speakers of Dani and Bassa are able to perceive and think about more than just two colours.

More subtly, there is no English equivalent for the German word Sehnsucht , which denotes dissatisfaction with reality and yearning for a richer, ‘realer’ ideal. But despite lacking the word, the American poet Walt Whitman (d. 1892) was able, very successfully, to conjure both the concept and the emotion : Is it a dream? Nay, but the lack of it the dream, And, failing it, life’s lore and wealth a dream, And all the world a dream.

The English language has a word for children who have lost their parents (‘orphan’), and a word for people who have lost their spouse (‘widow’ or ‘widower’), but no word for parents who have lost a child. This may mean that parents who have lost a child are less likely to enter our minds, but not that they cannot enter our minds or that we cannot conceive of them. We often think about or remember things that cannot be put into words, such as the smell and taste of a mango, the dawn chorus of the birds, or the contours of a lover’s face or other part of their anatomy. Animals and pre-linguistic babies surely have thoughts, even though they have no language.

If language does not determine thought, how, if at all, does it interact with thought? Russian, Greek, and many other languages have two words for blue, one for lighter shades and the other for darker shades— goluboy and siniy in Russian, and ghalazio and ble in Greek. A study found that, compared to English speakers, Russian speakers were quicker to discriminate between shades of goluboy and siniy , but not shades of goluboy or shades of siniy . Conversely, another study found that Greek speakers who had lived in the UK for a long time see ghalazio and ble as more similar than Greek speakers living in Greece. By creating categories, by carving up the world, language supports and enhances cognition .

In contrast to modern Greek, Ancient Greek, in common with many ancient languages, has no specific word for blue, leaving Homer to speak of ‘the wine-dark sea’. But the Ancient Greeks did have several words for 'love', including philia , eros , storge , and agape , each one referring to a different type or concept of love, respectively, friendship , sexual love, familial love, and universal or charitable love. This means that the Ancient Greeks could speak more precisely about love, but does it also mean that they could think more precisely about love, and, as a result, lead more fulfilled love lives? Or perhaps they had more words for love because they led more fulfilled love lives in the first place, or, more prosaically, because their culture and society placed more emphasis on the different bonds that can exist between people, and on the various duties and expectations that attend, or attended, to those bonds.

Philosophers and academics sometimes make up words to help them talk and think about an issue. In the Phædrus , Plato coined the word psychagogia , the art of leading souls, while discussing rhetoric—which, it turns out, is another word that he invented. Every field of human endeavour invariably evolves its own specialized jargon. There seems to be an important relationship between language and thought: I often speak—or write, as I am doing right now—to define or refine my thinking on a particular topic, and language is the scaffolding by which I arrive at my more subtle or syncretic thoughts.

While we’re talking dead languages, it may come as a surprise that Latin has no direct translations for ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Instead, one either echoes the verb in the question (in affirmative or negative) or expresses one’s feelings about the truth value of the proposition with adverbs such as certe , fortasse , nimirum , plane , vero , etiam , sane , minime … This may have led to more nuanced thinking, as well as greater interpersonal engagement, though it must have been a nightmare for teens—if they even had teens in those days.

As I argue in my new book, Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking , much of the particularity of a language is extra-lexical, built into the syntax and grammar of the language and virtually invisible to native speakers. English, for instance, restricts the use of the present perfect tense (‘has been’, ‘has read’) to subjects who are still alive, marking a sharp grammatical divide between the living and the dead, and, by extension, between life and death. But of course, as an English speaker, you already knew that, or at least subconsciously. Language is full of built-in assumptions and prejudices of this kind. Here’s another, more substantial example. When describing accidental events, English speakers tend to emphasize the agent (‘I fired the gun’) more than, say, speakers of Spanish or Japanese, who prefer to omit the agent (‘the gun went off’). One study found that, as a result, English speakers are more likely to remember the agents of accidental events—and, I surmise, to attach blame.

Some languages seem more egocentric than others. Many languages forgo the explicit use of the personal pronoun, which is instead built into the verb. For example, ‘I want’ in Spanish is simply quiero . English in contrast requires the explicit use of the personal pronoun in all cases, as does French. What’s more, French speakers often double up on the first-person personal pronoun, as in Moi, je pense que… [Me, I think that] with the stress on the moi . Sometimes, they also redouble on other personal pronouns, Et toi, qu’en penses-tu? [And you, what do you think about it?]. But redoubling on the first-person personal pronoun is much more common: Bon aller, moi j’en ai marre [Whatever, I’m fed up me]. This redoubling, this pleonasm, is more a feature of the spoken than the written word, and, depending on the context, can serve to emphasize or simply acknowledge a difference of opinion. Equivalent forms in English are more strained and recondite, and less commonly used, for example, ‘Well, as for me, I think that…’ The redoubling, in French, on the first-person personal pronoun seems to inject drama into a conversation, as though the speaker were acting out her own part, or playing up her difference and separateness.

In English, verbs express tense, that is, the time relative to the moment of speaking. In Turkish, they also express the source of the information (evidentiality), that is, whether the information has been acquired directly through sense perception, or only indirectly by testimony or inference. In Russian, verbs include information about completion, with (to simplify a bit) the perfective aspect used for completed actions and the imperfective aspect for ongoing or habitual actions. Spanish, on the other hand, emphasizes modes of being, with two verbs for ‘to be’— ser , to indicate permanent or lasting attributes, and estar , to indicate temporary states and locations. Like many languages, Spanish has more than one mode of second-person address: tú for intimates and social inferiors, and usted for strangers and social superiors, equivalent to tu and vous in French, and tu and lei in Italian. There used to be a similar distinction in English, with ‘thou’ used to express intimacy , familiarity, or downright rudeness—but because it is archaic, many people now think of it as more formal than ‘you’: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate… It stands to reason that, compared to English speakers, Turkish speakers have to pay more attention to evidentiality, Russian speakers to completion, and Spanish speakers to modes of being and social relations. In the words of the linguist Roman Jakobson (d. 1982), ‘Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.’

In many languages, nouns are divided into masculine and feminine. In German, there is a third, neutral class of nouns. In Dyribal, an Aboriginal language, there are four noun classes, including one for women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals—or, as George Lakoff put it, ‘women, fire, and dangerous things’. Researchers asked German speakers and Spanish speakers to describe objects with opposite gender assignments in German and Spanish and found that their descriptions conformed to gender stereotypes, even when the testing took place in English. For example, teutophones tended to describe bridges (feminine in German, die Brücke ) as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender, whereas hispanophones tended to describe bridges (masculine in Spanish, el puente ) as big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy, and towering.

Another study looking at the personification in art of abstract concepts such as love, justice, and time found that, in 78% of cases, the gender of the concept in the artist’s language predicted the gender of the personification, and that this pattern held even for uncommon allegories such as geometry, necessity, and silence. Compared to a French or Spanish artist, a German artist is far more likely to paint death [ der Tod , la mort , la muerte ] or victory [ der Sieg , la victoire , la victoria ] as a man—though all artists, or at least all European artists, tend to paint death in skeletal form. So grammar, it seems, can directly and radically influence thought, perception, and action.

It is often said that, by de-emphasizing them, language perpetuates biases against women. For example, many writers in English continue to use ‘mankind’ to talk about humankind, and ‘he’ for ‘he or she’. Similarly, many languages use masculine plural pronouns to refer to groups of people with at least one man. If 100 women turn up with a baby in a pram, and that baby happens to have a penis, French grammar dictates the use of the masculine plural ils: ils sont arrivés , ‘they have arrived’.

Language changes as attitudes change, and sometimes politicians, pressure groups, and others attempt to change the language to change the attitudes—but, on the whole, language, or at least grammar, serves to preserve the status quo, to crystallize and perpetuate the order and culture that gave rise to it.

Language is also made up of all sorts of metaphors. In English and Swedish, people tend to speak of time in terms of distance: ‘I won’t be long’; ‘let’s look at the weather for the week ahead’; ‘his drinking finally caught up with him’. But in Spanish or Greek, people tend to speak of time in terms of size or volume—for example, in Spanish, hacemos una pequeña pausa [let’s have a small break] rather than corta pausa [short break]. More generally, mucho tiempo [much time] is preferred to largo tiempo [long time], and, in Greek, poli ora to makry kroniko diastima . And guess what… According to a study of bilingual Spanish-Swedish speakers, the language used to estimate the duration of events alters the speaker’s perception of the relative passage of time.

But all in all, with a few exceptions, European languages, or even Indo-European languages, do not differ dramatically from one another. In contrast, to talk about space, speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre, an Aboriginal language, use 16 words for absolute cardinal directions instead of relative references such as ‘right in front of you’, ‘to the right’, and ‘over there’. As a result, even their children are always aware of the exact direction in which they are facing. When asked to arrange a sequence of picture cards in temporal order, English speakers arrange the cards from left to right, whereas Hebrew or Arabic speakers tend to arrange them from right to left. But speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre consistently arrange them from east to west, which is left to right if they are facing south, and right to left if they are facing north. Thinking differently about space, they seem to think differently about time as well.

Language may not determine thought, but it focuses perception and attention on particular aspects of reality, structures and thereby enhances cognitive processes, and even to some extent regulates social relationships. Our language reflects and at the same time shapes our thoughts and, ultimately, our culture, which in turn shapes our thoughts and language. There is no equivalent in English of the Portuguese word saudade , which refers to the love and longing for someone or something that has been lost and may never be regained. The rise of saudade coincided with the decline of Portugal and the yen for its imperial heyday, a yen so strong and so bitter as to have written itself into the national anthem: Levantai hoje de novo o esplendor de Portugal [Let us once again lift up the splendour of Portugal]. The three strands of language, thought, and culture are so tightly woven that they cannot be prised apart.

It has been said that when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. But when a language dies, it is a whole world that crumbles into the sea.

See my related article, Beyond Words: The Benefits of Being Bilingual.

Winawer J et al (2007): Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104(19):7780-5.

Fausey CM et al. (2010): Constructing Agency: The Role of Language. Front Psychol 1:162.

Boroditsky L et al. (2003): Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition, ed. Genter D & Goldin-Meadow S, pp. 61-80. Cambridge University Press.

Segel E & Boroditsky L (2010): Grammar in Art. Front Psychol. 1:244.

Bylund E & Athanasopoulos P (2017): The Whorfian Time Warp: Representing Duration Through the Language Hourglass. J Exp Psychol Gen. 146(7):911-916.

Gaby A (2012): The Thaayorre Think of Time Like They Talk of Space. Front Psychol 3:300.

Neel Burton, M.D. , is a psychiatrist, philosopher, and writer who lives and teaches in Oxford, England.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University

Social Impact Jun 1, 2024

The stereotypes lurking in our language, a new tool can shed light on intersectional biases—and how they may change over time..

Tessa Charlesworth

Mahzarin R. Banaji

Kshitish Gate

Michael Meier

It’s a well-known riddle: A father and his son are involved in a car crash. They are rushed to the hospital and when the child is wheeled into the operating theatre, the surgeon steps back and says, “I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.” How can this be?

The answer, of course, is that the surgeon is his mother.

The setup is used to reveal the hidden biases we share about different groups of people, in this case, women. More recently, however, scholarly investigations of bias have expanded to examine not just a single sociodemographic group on its own—defined by gender, say, or race—but the interaction of several, intersecting groups together (e.g., defined by gender and race simultaneously).

“White, rich women experience a different world than white, poor women. Similarly, Black women experience a different world than Black men, and so on,” says Tessa Charlesworth , an assistant professor of management and organizations at Kellogg. “Because of this, it’s important to understand how to study this intersectionality at scale.”

A new tool developed by Charlesworth, Kshitish Ghate of Carnegie Mellon, Aylin Caliskan of the University of Washington, and Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard provides a way to do precisely this.

Using the novel Flexible Intersectional Stereotype Extraction procedure, or FISE, the researchers analyzed 840 billion words of text to unearth biases surrounding different intersectional groupings of people.

In addition to providing a proof of concept for their procedure, the researchers’ initial analysis found that historically powerful groups—rich and white—dominate in terms of how frequently they are discussed. The words used to describe these groups are overwhelmingly positive, too, while words used to describe groups that are historically overlooked tend to be negative.

The best of two worlds

For decades, scholars have looked to language as a reflection of the biases we hold, the idea being that how we talk about something opens a window into how we think about that thing.

With this logic in mind, social scientists have had success mapping a single trait, like gender, against associated stereotypes. However, mapping the intersection of several traits has proven trickier. Computer scientists, meanwhile, have had more success at mapping stereotypes to intersectional traits, but their methods are more technically complex and computationally intensive, and have typically relied on group information that is encoded in names (e.g., Jamal versus John), while leaving unexplored more concealable groups (i.e., those not easily decoded from names), like sexual orientation, religion, or age, among others.

FISE bridges these shortcomings. “It’s a much lighter model than those typically used to look at intersectionality,” Charlesworth says. “That means it doesn’t require heavy computing resources, and it is more flexible for use in different language contexts. For example, with this tool, we’ll be flexibly able to look at intersectionality in language across non-English languages or even in historical texts from 200 years ago.”

“One of the great things about FISE is that it allows us to look into the directionality of this effect and, for the first time, study the evolution of intersectional stereotypes over history.” — Tessa Charlesworth

The tool works as follows. First, researchers identify the terms they want to study—descriptive qualities like warm , cold , enthusiastic , friendly , and so on, for example. Second, by scanning huge archives of Internet text from Wikipedia and Common Crawl, the model calculates how closely these words are associated with other terms along a first group dimension, like social class (with rich and affluent signaling wealth and poor or needy signaling poverty). Third, the model calculates the difference between how closely the descriptive quality like warm is associated with wealth as opposed to poverty. Finally, this same process is carried out along a second group dimension, like race. These differences in how warmth is perceived across both race and class can then be mapped into four quadrants (rich–Black vs. rich–white vs. poor–Black vs. poor–white), revealing the intersectional stereotypes about people.

Though most of the analyses Charlesworth and her colleagues ran used just two dimensions, “theoretically, you could expand this analysis to as many group dimensions as you want. We could simultaneously look at race, class, and gender, or even more dimensions,” she says. “The interpretation does become trickier, though.”

How biases get amplified

Now that the researchers had built their tool, they wanted to test it against a “ground-truth” by analyzing how accurately it associated gender and race with 143 different occupations.

To do this, they ran FISE, sorting each of these occupations into four quadrants: white–male, white–female, Black–male, and Black–female.

They then cross-checked the results of FISE with a 2022 Bureau of Labor Statistics report. If the model worked as it was supposed to, then occupations associated with Black men in the real world should have the same language-based associations according to FISE.

The tool worked. FISE found, for instance, 59 percent of occupations associated with white men, while BLS lists 48 percent. It found 9 percent of occupations associated with Black women, compared with 5 percent in BLS data. The authors note that though these figures aren’t identical, they are also not statistically different. Similar levels of accuracy were found for the class-by-gender and race-by-class comparisons.

Having demonstrated congruity between FISE and the occupational data, the researchers next used the model to analyze the association between qualities like honest , courageous , greedy , and so on with race, gender, and class. The model revealed two key insights.

“The first is what we call the dominance of powerful groups,” says Charlesworth. “When you look at intersectional groups like white men versus Black women, you see really clear patterns of white men dominating the language space, purely in terms of the percentage of traits associated with that group.” Fifty-nine percent of all traits analyzed refer to white men, while five percent refer to Black women. Thirty percent relate to white women and six percent to Black men.

The second insight was that the traits associated with white men and women are largely positive, while those associated with Black men and women tend to be negative. (To determine this given the lopsidedness of white men’s dominance in the language space, the researchers forcibly assigned an equal number of descriptive traits to all four groups).

That said, when the researchers introduced the dimension of class into their analysis, they found that intersectional biases involving social class had the strongest positive and negative associations of all. White–rich or male–rich was overwhelming positive, while white–poor or male–poor was overwhelmingly negative.

“Though I tend to focus on race and gender in my research, social class kept popping out as the most important dimension that defines which intersectional groups are seen as positive,” Charlesworth says. “Interestingly, although class was definitive when thinking about the quality (positivity/negativity) of traits, it was relatively less important when thinking about the frequency of traits. When it came to frequency, race and gender were the most important dimensions to explain which groups dominated the language space.”

Shining a light through language

Charlesworth’s tool will allow scholars to track how biases, including intersectional ones, change over time.

Using FISE, researchers can now see when and how ideas about, say, Black women have been shifting. Or they could use FISE to determine how long it takes for the demographic shifts in occupational statistics (i.e., changes in the percentage of managers who are Black women) to eventually also trickle into changing the stereotypes embedded in language.

Or, as Charlesworth wonders, perhaps the opposite is true; perhaps changes to language act as prophecy. “It could be that we first see the possibility of women doctors as ‘a thing’ showing up in language. Maybe it’s just a possibility raised about white women at first, or wealthy women. But we can look into how language is a harbinger of change in the world,” she says. “One of the great things about FISE is that it allows us to look into the directionality of this effect and, for the first time, study the evolution of intersectional stereotypes over history.”

But as her initial analysis suggests, a tool like FISE can also shed light on longstanding concerns about algorithmic bias. As Charlesworth notes, we have a problem if white men dominate the training data and greater wealth is synonymous, in our language, with greater goodness. Whatever output AI produces is going to be much more problematic when it comes to poor or underrepresented groups.

We see disparities emerging already: AI-generated faces are judged as more realistic than natural human faces, but only for white faces due to their dominance in training data. And the frequency of women or men in Google search outputs, itself a product of societal bias, becomes self-reinforcing by shaping beliefs about the default “person.”

Charlesworth summarized: “With AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) becoming part of the bread-and-butter of our everyday lives, we, as consumers, researchers, or leaders, need to understand how bias is baked into these tools. In particular, understanding the unique patterns of intersectional biases in AI and LLMs will be necessary to make more fair technologies for the future.”

Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations

Dylan Walsh is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

Charlesworth, Tessa, Mahzarin Banaji, and Kshitish Ghate. 2024. "Extracting Intersectional Stereotypes from Embeddings: Developing and Validating the FISE Procedure." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

Read the original

We’ll send you one email a week with content you actually want to read, curated by the Insight team.