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the risk is that the understanding of culture is, from a culture–theoretical point of view, unsatisfactory and perhaps outdated.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 and films, 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 the Sturm-und-Drang period (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 the first 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.