Читать книгу An Introduction to Sociolinguistics - Ronald Wardhaugh, Janet M. Fuller - Страница 24

There is a tradition of study in linguistic anthropology which addresses the relationship between language and culture. By ‘culture’ in this context we do not mean ‘high culture,’ that is, the appreciation of music, literature, the arts, and so on. Rather, we adopt Goodenough’s well‐known definition (1957, 167): ‘a society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and to do so in any role that they accept for any one of themselves.’ Such knowledge is socially acquired: the necessary behaviors are learned and do not come from any kind of genetic endowment. Culture, therefore, is the ‘knowhow’ that a person must possess to get through the task of daily living; for language use, this is similar to the concept of communicative competence we introduced above. The key issue addressed here is the nature of the relationship between a specific language and the culture in which it is used. Of course, we must recognize that cultural norms are not static; they change over time and what is ‘normal’ is constantly negotiated by members of a society. Thus they do not just vary over space, but also over time.