Communities of language users

Social conventions, norms of social appropriateness, are product of communities of language users.

Speech community is composed of people who use the same linguistic code.

People who identify themselves as members of a social group (family, neighborhood, professional or ethnic affiliation, nation) acquire common ways of viewing the world through the interactions with other members of the same group. These views are reinforced through institutions like the family, the school, the workplace, the church, the government. Discourse communities refer to the common ways in which members of a social group use language to meet their social needs. Not only the grammatical, lexical, and phonological features of their language (for example, teenage talk, professional jargon, political rhetoric) differentiate them from others, but also the topics they choose to talk about, the way they present the information, the style with which they interact – their discourse accent. E.g. reaction to the compliment. The Americans – Thank you, the French – downplay the compliment and minimize its value.

The diachronic view of culture focuses on the way in which a social group represents itself and others through its material productions over time – its technological achievements, its monuments, its works of art, its popular culture – that punctuate the development of the historical identity. This material culture is reproduced and preserved through institutional mechanisms that are also part of the culture, like museums, schools, public libraries, governments, corporations and the media. Language plays a major role in the perpetuation of culture, particularly in its printed form.

 

Imagined communities

These two layers of culture combined, the social (synchronic) and the historical (diachronic), have often been called the sociocultural context of language study. The third layer is imagination. Discourse communities are characterized not only by facts and artifacts, but by common dreams, fulfilled and unfulfilled imaginings. These imaginings are mediated through the language.

Insiders/outsiders

To identify themselves as members of a community, people have to define themselves jointly as insiders against the others, outsiders. There is a hegemonic effect of dominant cultures in representing the Other. Knowledge itself is coloured by the social and historical context n which it is acquired and disseminated.

In the social, the historic, and the imagined dimension, culture is heterogeneous. Members of the same discourse community all have different biographies and life experiences, they may differ in age, gender, or ethnicity, they have different political opinions. Cultures change over time.

 

 

In summary, culture can be defined as membership in a discourse community that shares a common social space and history, and common imaginings.

1. Culture is always the result of human intervention in the biological process of nature.

2. Culture both liberates and constrains. It liberates by investing the randomness of nature with meaning, order, and rationality and by providing safeguards against chaos; it constrains by imposing a structure on nature and by limiting the range of possible meanings created by the individual.

3. Culture is the product of socially and historically situated discourse communities, that are to a large extent imagined communities, created and shaped by language.

4. A community’s language and its material achievements represent a social patrimony and a symbolic capital that serve to perpetuate relationship of power and domination; they distinguish insiders from outsiders.

5. Cultures are fundamentally heterogeneous and changing, they are a constant site of struggle for recognition and legitimation.

 

Linguistic relativity

In the 19th century scholars put forward the idea that different people speak differently because they think differently, and they think differently because their language offers them different ways of expressing the world around them. This notion was picked up by Franz Boas (1858-1942), and subsequently by Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941).