PERTEMUAN 12 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Language is a part of culture which plays a very important role in it. Some social scientists argue that without language, culture would not be possible. Language simultaneously reflects the culture of its speakers. In a broad sense, language is a symbolic representation of a nation, reflecting its historical background, cultural way of life, and people's way of thinking. Language is part of culture and culture is part of language. The two are so closely intertwined that one cannot separate culture and language. To deepen the relationship between language and culture, an in-depth study of the following Sapir-Worf and Frans Boas (American anthropology) hypothesis is required.

The link between language and culture was originally developed by Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Benyamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Sapir and Whorf saw that the human mind is determined by the classification system of a particular language used by humans. The first hypothesis is the linguistic relativity hypothesis which states that differences in language structure are generally parallel to cognitive differences in non-languages. The second hypothesis is linguistic determinism, which states that the structure of language affects the way individuals perceive and reason about the perceptual world. The relationship between language and culture is very close. That is, language can be viewed as an extension of culture. According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in fact every language represents a distinctive symbolic world and depicts the reality of the mind, inner experiences, and needs of the wearer.