LINGUACULTURE

The language – culture nexus in transnational perspective

Karen Risager

1 Introduction

People trained in language studies tend to see culture through the lens of language. Culture is typically seen as a kind of extension of language: you study language and‘its associated culture’ – a very frequent phrase in the parts of linguistics that are interested in the relationship between language and culture (Risager, 2006). Among people trained in fields like anthropology or cultural studies this language-bound view of culture is not normally seen. The conceptualizations of culture in these fields may be very diverse, conflictual, and contested, but the point of departure would seldom be that‘culture’is coterminous with‘language’ –unless perhaps when we are dealing with an interdisciplinaryfield like linguistic anthropology.

In my view, an examination of the relationship between language and culture must combine perspectives from both linguistics and anthropology (or otherfields dealing with culture, such as cultural studies or postcolonial studies). If only approaches from linguistics are involved, the risk is that the understanding of culture is, from a culture–theoretical point of view, unsatisfactory and perhaps outdated. Therefore, this chapter will present a conceptualization of the language– culture relation in a combined anthropological–linguistic perspective. The primary perspective is anthropological and draws on theories of culture and globalization, especially that of the social anthropologist Ulf Hannerz (1992), who has developed the idea of transnational culturalflows (flows of lifestyles, musical genres, food and drink, pictures andfilms, etc. in social networks across the world). The secondary perspective is linguistic in the sense that I focus on transna- tional linguistic flows (also known as language spread) as cultural flows among others in the world, and then direct the attention to the culturality of language in the midst of theseflows. In my view, the concept of linguaculture is useful when we are dealing with the multiple dimensions of the culturality of language in complex andfluid societies (Risager, 2006, 2012).

2 Historical perspectives

The concept of linguaculture (or languaculture, see below) is a recent offshoot of the cultural move- ment originating in the German-speaking areas of Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, mainly represented by the works of Johann Gottfried von Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt. This movement introduced the idea that language should be seen as related to nation, people, and culture.

Herder, a centralfigure in connection with the emerging German national consciousness in the period known as theSturm-und-Drangperiod (1765–85) was the first to formulate this idea (Herder, 1952 [1782]). His thoughts were further developed by Humboldt (Humboldt, 1907 [1836]) (see Chapter 2 this volume), a politician/diplomat and academic, who was strongly influenced by the ideas of neo-humanism concerning the value of clarity and harmony in spiritual cultivation. Humboldt was particularly interested in language as a creative activity that was made possible because of the power of the human mind. He was, then, most interested in the psychological aspect of language, especially in the role of language for thought:

‘Language is the formative organ of thought’(Humboldt, 1907: 53) and for the world-view (Weltansicht):‘so there lies in every language a particular world-view’(60). Thus he was thefirst to formulate the basic idea of linguistic relativity. Furthermore he was interested in what happens to one’s world-view when one learns a foreign language, as he thought that the new language marks a new standpoint or a different approach to an understanding of the world:‘one always transfers into a foreign language, more or less, one’s own world-view’(60)–a thought I will come back to below.

During the nineteenth century the idea of correlation between language and people gained a national–romantic form, so that one now spoke of a mysterious, intimate connection between language, people, and national soul. This romantic idea of a fusion between language and people/nation gained considerable general support in connection with the nationalist tendencies that became increasingly strong and widespread in the course of nineteenth-century Europe, first as a progressive liberal movement, later on in various right-wing nationalist and socialist versions (Hobsbawm, 1990; Risager, 2006). Even today, the national paradigm and its insistence on the inseparability of language and culture is quite strong, especially in popular discourse in certain parts of the world such as Europe, China, and Japan. It is also quite widespread in general and applied linguistics, for example in the field of language teaching (Risager, 2007). However, it should be noted that the idea of inseparability of language and culture may not refer to the‘national’in the political sense (for example: French language and French culture in the nation state of France), but may rest more on ideas of ethnic or social groups (for example: the language and culture of the Sami people, or the language and culture of drug users).

As is well known, in the first decades of the twentieth century the German tradition of culture studies, and studies of language as part of culture, was introduced to the USA by Franz Boas and his followers in anthropology, primarily Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf (see Chapter 2this volume). Sapir was active in many parts of anthropology, including the study of language (Sapir, 1921). However, it should be noted that although he was very interested in the relationship between language and culture, he was not an adherent of the national paradigm and its insistence on the inseparability of language and culture. Actually, he emphasized that languages can spread across cultural areas:

Languages may spread far beyond their original home, invading the territory of new races and of new culture spheres. A language may even die out in its primary area and live on among people violently hostile to the persons of its original speakers. Further, the accidents of history are constantly rearranging the borders of cultural areas without necessarily effacing the existing linguistic cleavages.

(Sapir, 1921: 208) Later in this chapter, Sapir’s view will be further elaborated in a rethinking of the concepts of language and linguaculture in the context of transnational migrations.

3 Current contributions and research

3.1 Origins of the concept of ‘linguaculture’in anthropology: Paul Friedrich and Michael Agar

Whereas the idea of intimate connection between language and culture is an old one, it was not until 1989 that the term linguaculture was introduced, namely by the linguistic anthropologist Paul Friedrich in an article on the relationship between political economy, ideology, and language (Friedrich, 1989). (He also used the term in a manuscript from 1988.) In the article he writes that

‘the many sounds and meanings of what we conventionally call “language” and “culture” constitute a single universe of its own kind’(Friedrich, 1989: 306), and he describes the concept of linguaculture with these words: ‘a domain of experience that fuses and intermingles the vocabulary, many semantic aspects of grammar, and the verbal aspects of culture’(1989: 306)

Thus the concept of linguaculture does not encompass all of culture, but only ‘the verbal aspects of culture’. Friedrich adds that this terminological innovation can‘help to get rid of the decades-long balancing act between“languageandculture”(“how much of each?”),“language in culture”(“culture inlanguage?”)’(1989: 307; italics in the original). Friedrich is thefirst to emphasize that there are dimensions of culture that are not related to language. At the same time he also indirectly says that there are dimensions of language that are not culture. He tries to carve out a concept that lies in the interface of language and culture.

The linguistic anthropologist Michael Agar borrows the concept from Friedrich, but changes it to

‘languaculture’. He justifies his alteration of the term as follows:‘I modified it to“langua”to bring it in line with the more commonly used“language”’(Agar, 1994: 265). In his bookLanguage Shock:

Understanding the Culture of Conversation(1994) Agar presents, in a metaphoric style and with many anecdotal illustrations, the linguistic and anthropological basis for ideas about the interrelation between language and culture, and here he refers repeatedly to the Sapir–Whorf discussion of linguistic relativity. He deals with the misunderstandings and cultural awareness that can arise in connection with conversations, both when it is a question of‘different languages’, and when it is a question of‘the same language’. Whereas Friedrich refers to locally defined variation such as southern Vermont linguaculture, Agar expands the range of languacultural variation to all social groups.

Agar introduces the concept of languaculture in order to be able to sum up culture and language in one word:

Language, in all its varieties, in all the ways it appears in everyday life, builds a world of meanings. When you run into different meanings, when you become aware of your own and work to build a bridge to the others, ‘culture’ is what you’re up to.

Languagefills the spaces between us with sound; culture forges the human connection through them. Culture is in language, and language is loaded with culture.

(Agar, 1994: 28) The term languaculture, then, stresses two relations:‘Thelanguain languaculture is about discourse, not just about words and sentences. And the culture in languaculture is about meanings that include, but go well beyond, what the dictionary and the grammar offer’(Agar, 1994: 96, italics in the original). Thus Agar focuses on meaning in discourse, particularly in conversation. But he is not as clear as Friedrich about the idea that there are dimensions of culture that are not related to language (or discourse).

Agar spends some time explaining what the Whorfian discussion is about. As so many people within modern linguistic anthropology and socio and psycholinguistics he is in favour of the

Linguaculture in transnational perspective

weak version of the Whorfian hypothesis, with such formulations as:‘Language carries with it patterns of seeing, knowing, talking, and acting. Not patterns that imprison you, but patterns that mark the easier trails for thought and perception and action’(Agar, 1994: 71). Agar proposes that what Whorf was really talking about was‘languaculture’.

Agar also introduces the concept of‘rich points’, meaning the places in conversation where people misunderstand one another. It is in this that there is the opportunity to glimpse‘culture’, to become conscious of cultural differences. He writes about ‘the Whorfian Alps’in linguistic communication in the sense that between people who have different languacultures (which ultimately everyone has) a number of cultural differences rise up–some small, some large–and that it is a question of bringing these out into the open and trying to go beyond them.

The concept of languaculture is developed in several of Agar’s publications (see, e.g. Agar, 2008). In this article he argues that one should think of ethnography as second languaculture learning and translation. He suggests that the usual abbreviation L2 be replaced by LC2 (second languaculture), and similarly that translation should be seen as a relation between LC1 and LC2.

He argues that ethnographic work is both a process where the ethnographer learns a second languaculture, including experiences with significant rich points, and a product where the ethnographer struggles with communicating his/her interpretation of LC2 in a translation to an LC1 public.

3.2 Further developments of the concept of ‘linguaculture’in linguistics:

Karen Risager

Whereas Agar focuses on ethnographic studies of languaculture in local settings, the author of this chapter introduces a transnational perspective in the bookLanguage and Culture: Global Flows and Local Complexity(2006). The main disciplinary backgrounds for my work are sociolinguistics/the sociology of language and cultural and social anthropology, and in this interdisciplinary perspective

‘languaculture’is an important interface concept. (I have used the term‘languaculture’, but in my recent writings I prefer‘linguaculture’as a perhaps more straightforward term for linguists.)

As I basically see human language as a part of human culture in general, I take my point of departure in a theory of culture, particularly a theory that departs from the national paradigm and takes a transnational and global perspective, namely that of the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz.

In his book Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (1992) Hannerz describes his theory of the social organization of meaning, with particular reference to cultural flows and cultural complexity. He begins by giving the following summary of his understanding of culture:

The three dimensions of culture, to be understood in their interrelations, are thus:

1 ideas and modes of thoughtas entities and processes of the mind–the entire array of concepts, propositions, values, and the like which people within some social unit carry together, as well as their various ways of handling their ideas in characteristic modes of mental operation;

2 forms of externalization, the different ways in which meaning is made accessible to the senses, made public; and

3 social distribution, the ways in which the collective cultural inventory of meanings and meaningful external forms – that is, (1) and (2) together – is spread over a population and its social relationships.

(Hannerz, 1992: 7, italics in the original)

In Hannerz’s opinion, then, culture has two loci, an external and an internal: the external locus is meaningful, externalized forms such as speech, gestures, song, dance, and decoration. The internal locus of culture is meaning in consciousness–not perceived as an idealized consciousness but as that of concrete human beings. The individual’s share in culture he mainly describes with the aid of the hermeneutical concepts perspective and horizon: each human being is unique in his or her experience-based, socially influenced perspective on the outside world, and his or her horizon is reflected by personal life experiences and education. At the individual level, society is thus seen as a network of perspectives. The two loci of culture are each other’s prerequisites, and the cultural process takes place in the interaction between them. Finally, meaning in con- sciousness and the externalized forms of thisfind themselves in a constant distribution process and this means that‘people must deal with other people’s meanings’(Hannerz, 1992: 14).

Thus Hannerz takes interaction at the micro level as his point of departure, describing cul- turalflow as a constant alternation between externalization and interpretation, with theflow passing from person to person in a constant process of distribution and transformation. But he also takes a bird’s-eye perspective, stating that the cultural process takes place at both the societal micro and macro level. It occurs partly in the concrete interaction between people in inter- personal situations, but also at higher levels, right up to the highest level: the global level, i.e. via the distribution of goods and mass communication. Hannerz, then, adopts a macro-anthro- pological perspective. He studies, among other things, how cultural distribution processes of various, possibly global, extent result in local mixes. Thus he contributes to current critiques of essentialist and static notions of culture.

3.3 Transnational view of language: linguisticflows and linguistic complexity Hannerz only deals with language in passing, but his model is very useful for the development of a transnational view of language that foregrounds global linguisticflows and linguistic complexity, and also contributes to current critiques of essentialist notions of language.

Referring to Hannerz’s two loci for culture, an external and an internal, I would also consider language as a two-sided phenomenon: the external locus is linguistic practice, oral or written (or some kind of a mixture), and the internal locus is linguistic resources in the subject, developed during his or her socialization and total life history. But in addition to this, I would include a third locus that has a more deliberately constructed or‘artificial’nature, namely the idea of‘the language’or‘the language system’conceived as a coherent whole, or maybe an object, or even an organism or a person.

The twofirst-mentioned loci of language presuppose each other: linguistic practice cannot be produced and received without linguistic resources carried by individual people, and the linguistic resources of the individual cannot be developed without the experience of linguistic practice.

Whereas these two loci of language are both natural and necessary, the idea of the ‘language system’is not. We have to deconstruct the idea that there is a language‘out there’that we can use and study as a natural object. The ‘language system’ is a construct or, in other words, a family of historically and discursively constructed notions (‘French’,‘Arabic’, etc.). At the same time it is important to note that this construct has consequences for linguistic practice and linguistic resources. The idea of the language system interacts with both linguistic practice and linguistic resources, being a kind of–more or less conscious–normative factor.

The use (linguistic practice) of a specific language may be seen asflows (and change) in social networks of people and groups of people. These networks may be located physically in individuals acting together, or they may be located in virtual space as communication networks made possible by information technologies such as telephone, the Internet, etc. These networks

Linguaculture in transnational perspective

develop further through migration and language learning. Danish language, for example, spreads in social networks all over the world where there are Danish-speaking people as settlers, tourists, sojourners, students, soldiers, sports people, etc. People carry their Danish-language resources with them into new cultural contexts and put them to use in perhaps new ways under the new circumstances. People around the world are learning Danish as a foreign language for instance in Scandinavian departments, and thus the Danish language has spread to new individuals and new social networks. It has also spread to new users via the learning of Danish as a second language in Denmark. Seen in this perspective, quite a large number of the world’s languages are spreading in large global networks and can indeed be said to be world languages– not on the basis of their numbers of speakers, but on the basis of the extent of the networks using them.

These transnational linguistic flows of a large number of different languages create local multilingual situations of great complexity, characterized by language hierarchies and struggles among language users for power and recognition. Almost every country (state) in the world is multilingual in some sense. In a small country like Denmark, for instance, over 120 languages are spoken asfirst languages (Risager, 2006). (For the sake of simplicity, I will not deal with the issues of language alternation and language mixing in this chapter although this is clearly also relevant for the question concerning the relationship between language and culture.)

The transnational view of language makes it possible to describe how language and culture can be separated: linguistic practiceflows in social networks that may reach from one cultural context to another across the world. Or in other words–focusing on the internal locus: when people move around in the world, they carry their linguistic resources with them from one cultural context to another (see Sapir’s position quoted above).

3.4 Linguaculture: three interrelated dimensions

The description of linguisticflows has implicitly focused on language codes: it is codes that are seen asflowing and intermingling in social networks–irrespective of the meanings to which they give rise. With the concept of linguaculture, the focus switches to the content or meaning side of language.

In relation to Agar’s (1994) concept of languaculture, which focuses on the semantics and pragmatics of language (in discourse), I expand the concept to include two other dimensions as well: the poetics of language and the identity dimension of language. Together they are meant to encompass the full range of culturality of a language.

The semantics and pragmatics of language is the dimension specifically explored by Agar and his antecedents in linguistic anthropology represented by Sapir and Whorf, as well as by many linguists and language specialists interested in contrastive and intercultural semantics and pragmatics, both at sentence, discourse, and text levels. This dimension is about the interplay of constancy and variability in the semantic and pragmatic potentials and practices of specific languages as opposed to other languages: as regards constancy; it could be more or less obligatory distinctions between (in English) ‘sister’and‘brother’, between‘he’and‘she’, between‘red’and‘orange’, between‘hello’and‘how are you’, and the denotative (dictionary) meanings of culturally specific words like‘Christmas’,‘race’,‘lecturer’,‘done’. As regards variability, it could be the social and personal variability that is found in concrete situations of use in different parts of the world. This is a vast and well-exploredfield of study, including for example culturally oriented conversation analysis and (linguistic) discourse analysis.

The poetics of language is the dimension related to the kinds of meaning created in the exploitation of the interplay between form and content in the language in question–different kinds of rhymes, puns based on the relationship between speech and writing, etc.–areas that