Sunday, July 6, 2008

Language, culture and world's vision

Until yesterday all my efforts were concentrated to work on "language, culture and wolrd's vision", therefore I've been reading, studying and talking about it. This topic has raised lots of discussions and it’s investigated by many disciplines. And, so far the main question is, does our culture and language mold the way we think and conceive the world?
Searching for information I’ve found that in the 60’s some experts on linguistic come up with the idea that language molded the world’s vision of the people. They said that when we talk, we communicate things that belong to our “intimate world”; hence, what, how and when we speak could give very fundamental information about the way one person conceives the reality. Even more, they saw as possible that through language we could discover ideas that underlie the speaker’s culture. We cannot forget that through language we transmit/ express/ communicate our culture. That’s why, on the other hand, also the importance of studying language in its sociocultural context more than the formal structure of it, took place in the postulate of linguistic field. Quickly the topic become popular and lots of research started developing it. Nowadays, although there are different opinions (as always) the importance of this topic is recognized and studied through the world.
I’ve been reading lots of researches that demonstrated with practical examples how this works and it’s incredible for one side and sometimes it seems so obvious for the other. So, I would really like to do some investigation for example on kids of different cultures, or socioeconomic stratums so one could applies the knowledge and make some people understand that ones culture makes one to think the world on a particularly way that perfectly could differ from other, arguing with languages researches.
I find this very interesting because it has the key to understand that people’s culture and therefore people’s language makes them conceive differently the reality. Those things that one think that are normal or truth, other can find ridiculous and strange. So if we all could understand that, we could live better, not thinking that we are the best and we’ve the reason but knowing that our is one of the thousands ways to think the world. Therefore, there were lots of unjustifiable and senseless wars and all could live in harmony.

There're two web sites that have lots of information:

http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/field/
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/fieldwork.html

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