Language as a Window Into Culture: Business and Travel

Introduction

One of the lesser-known but important programs of the United Nations is the promotion of language preservation worldwide. The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) has incorporated language into sustainability standards, concerned in particular about the preservation of languages most at risk of disappearing. Language, the organization argues, represents a way of thinking for a people (UNDESA, 2016). By that logic, understanding a culture requires understanding its language. Culture is incredibly complex, and it can be impossible to fully understand a culture without immersion in it. But even without full immersion, learning more about a culture can facilitate mutual understanding, enable commerce, and allow knowledge to be transferred from one culture to another. If each culture is viewed as a source of knowledge, then the vocabularies of each culture can be seen as a window into the collective knowledge of humanity.

For business, or for any cultural interaction, knowing the language can be an important means by which understanding is cultivated. As noted above, language is a window into a culture because culture shapes the way a language develops over time. Language also facilitates the transfer of knowledge and understanding in a way that few other cultural artifacts can. There is a role for things like music and art, but language remains a highly critical dimension along which culture — and therefore knowledge — can be transmitted. This paper examines the role that language plays in helping us understand culture, and the value that understanding can have for anyone engaged in cultural interaction, whether recreational or in business.

Language as a Culture Carrier

During the age of colonization, many if not most colonizers sought to attack elements of local culture that were not aligned with colonial interests. Religion was always a popular target, but so too was language. Some actions taken to suppress local languages were deliberate, while in other cases languages were placed under stress in more hegemonic ways — people would have to learn the colonizers' language in order to have opportunities to thrive in colonial society. With colonizers holding the keys to power, the value of the local language for any sort of success or access to opportunity diminished, leading to its decline over successive generations. Brandist (2015) discusses the hegemonic policies under Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, both of which used passive and active forms of hegemony to reduce the incidence of local languages throughout their empires. Many local languages survived, though often in altered form — for example, through the imposition of Cyrillic notation developed by Soviet bureaucrats.

As a window into culture, this history makes for a fascinating study. In the post-Soviet world, many minority languages have reverted to scripts more common within their language groups. Travelers in the former Soviet republics today will find that Uzbekistan has switched to Latin script for its Turkic language, reflecting a cultural desire to pivot toward Turkey's sphere of influence. Tajikistan, with its Persian language, has switched to the Farsi script. In Kyrgyzstan, the local language is still written in Cyrillic despite being a Turkic language, because that country's ties remain closer to Russia than to Turkey.

Jiang (2000) argues that language is a mirror of culture. To understand a culture, he contends, one must understand the language, because language is an essential tool by which one can traverse a culture — the underlying logic of language and culture become intertwined. He points to similar words that share a general meaning yet carry quite different specific meanings. "Lunch" in English and Chinese, for example, refers to the same midday meal, but what that meal actually consists of varies significantly for speakers of those languages. The word "dog" denotes the same animal, but what that animal means is quite different to most English- and Chinese-language speakers. A truer understanding of those words, within each broad cultural group, would require a more in-depth engagement with the languages themselves.

The reality of underlying context in even common words highlights the challenges faced when translating between languages, as Nida (1998) points out. Language needs culture in order to have full meaning. An interesting observation Nida makes is that culture often changes more quickly than language, which means that in some cases a word's meaning carries both syntagmatic and cultural contexts (Nida, 1998). Consider how older generations use certain words that had different meanings or levels of social acceptability in their time but now seem dated — even when the speaker is still very much alive.

The fact that meanings can be in a state of flux creates an imperative to learn language in order to understand culture. It may be simple to do a verbatim translation using technology, but without context such a translation can provide a very poor understanding compared with actually knowing the language. The challenge, of course, is that a superficial level of knowledge is insufficient to truly understand a culture, and may even do harm to understanding: someone with a little knowledge of a subject often feels they know more than they do. Only when you acquire greater knowledge do you start to comprehend just how little you really know — like the person who spends one summer in Europe and returns home feeling worldly.

Montasser (2015) examined the complex links between language and culture, writing about the merits of teaching culture alongside language when teaching English in the Arab world. Two things stand out from his analysis. First, some culture is inherently conveyed regardless of whether it is explicitly taught. But with English serving as a global lingua franca, it is possible to teach English in a primarily transactional way, conveying little culture beyond legal and business concepts. This discussion veers into whether teaching other cultures inherently damages Arab identity, as may be happening in other parts of the world where English is organically displacing smaller local languages.

That thought raises another issue: how does one teach "English" culture, given how many different cultures use English as a first language? Does such a thing even exist? Native English speakers actually gain a window into multiple cultures when they learn the differences between varieties of English. The complex relationship between England and Scotland, for instance, is revealed in the ways the Scots language finds its way into Scottish English. Canada uses a mix of British and American spellings, highlighting dual linguistic influences on what is in theory a homogenous cultural group.

Language in Business

One of the more interesting aspects of language as culture is its use in business. For as long as different cultures have traded with one another, business communication has relied on a transactional meeting of minds. In many cases this is achieved through a dominant language, but in many situations a lingua franca would emerge to play the role of the business language. The Chinook Jargon of the northwest coast of North America is a good example, uniting people of many different cultures with basic words through which simple transactions could be conducted. In multilingual nations today, the former colonial language is often considered to carry less political baggage than selecting a dominant local language. English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese are consequently common business languages around the world as a means of de-politicizing transactions — even in India, English is a more viable business language than Hindi, because the nation's non-Hindu communities reject the connotations of Hindu nationalism embedded in the widespread use of Hindi.

What has changed in recent years is that not all business between cultures is purely transactional. Simple language gets the job done when negotiating prices and quantities, but when a company wishes to serve the entire world, it takes considerably more than that, and in multiple different ways. Multinational companies must have a high level of cultural knowledge in order to sell effectively in a foreign country. The business world has moved well past the era of naive blunders — such as the oft-cited case of the Chevy Nova in Spanish-speaking markets — but only after learning from such mistakes in the first place. Marketers at the very least need to be immersed in local culture, and that typically means linguistic natives are required or at least strongly preferred.

Beyond marketing, some particular business challenges can best be addressed by people from specific cultural backgrounds. Understanding how a language works, and the influence it exerts on culture, can be key to understanding why certain countries produce large numbers of artists, and others large numbers of software engineers. Doing business globally creates opportunities to recruit globally, and that makes cultural understanding strategically important.

References

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Brandist, C. (2015). The dimensions of hegemony: Language, culture and politics in revolutionary Russia. Brill.

Jiang, W. (2000). The relationship between culture and language. ELT Journal, 54(4), 328–334.

Montasser, M. (2015). Culture and English language teaching in the Arab world. Adult Learning, 26(2), 66–72.

Nida, E. (1998). Language, culture, and translation. Journal of Foreign Languages, 115(3), 29–33.

Seelye, N. (1984). Teaching culture: Strategies for intercultural communication. National Textbook Company.

UNDESA. (2016). Protecting languages, preserving cultures. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/social/preserving-indigenous-languages.html