The relationship between language and culture is a source of great debate between those who study languages and their effect on civilization.
Donna Patrick, an anthropology professor at Carleton, said there are two concepts to explore.
“Culture is defined through sets of social practices or cultural practices, things that people do,” she said. “We enact culture, and we perform culture through our social actions and interactions with others.”
“So obviously language practices are a part of that, but they are just one part of what we might think of as our cultural identity.”
Acknowledging the prevalence of multilingualism is another important feature in the relationship between language and culture, Patrick said.
“The majority of the world is multilingual and they are operating in sometimes two or many more than two languages. To say there is a primordial link between one’s language and culture becomes problematic, because of the multilingual nature of human interaction,” she said.
Charles Boberg, an associate professor at McGill University specializing in language variation and change, thinks differently.
“There is a two-way relationship between language and culture. The dominant pattern is that culture influences language. And we see languages transported to new areas,” he said.
“The new world variety of French, English and Spanish are all different then their European variety in ways that reflect the transference of those languages to new geographical and cultural contexts.”
Unlike Patrick’s view that languages are less significant markers of cultural identity, Boberg finds that language is still a decisive factor in multilingual societies.
“When we look at the alignment between language and culture around the world, we can see that there are both multicultural languages and multilingual cultures,” he said.
But Boberg maintains that countries like Canada, Switzerland and Belgium have difficulties finding a common culture that spreads across groups largely defined by language.
He sees the overt politicization of language as an indicator of why it remains a hotly contested issue – particularly for Canadians – with regards to cultural preservation, and he remains cautious about Canada’s political success with multilingual accommodation.
“Can we build a strong national identity that bridges two language groups? I think it’s a very serious challenge” he states. “I don’t know that Canada has successfully met that challenge. I think Canada remains an uneasy alliance between two cultural groups that are largely defined linguistically.”
“It’s the reality of the majority of people globally; people are multicultural and have multiple affiliations,“ said Patrick.
Despite the disagreements about the exact relationship between language and culture, it remains clear that their existences are intertwined.
“Languages come and go over the course of history. In the long term, languages have always fallen and risen with the fortunes of culture. And the fortunes of languages do ebb and flow,” said Boberg.
“They are like living things — they have a birth, they have growth, they have change, and death. And that has happened throughout human history.”
