Читать книгу Bilingual Couples in Conversation - Silja Ang-Tschachtli - Страница 17

Cultureculture is hard to grasp, yet it permeates many aspects of our life and being, even though we may not always be aware of it. Grosjean highlights the different areas of our lives that are interconnected with culture:

Culture is the way of life of a people or society, including its rules and behavior; its economic, social, and political systems; its language; its religious beliefs; its laws; and so on. Culture is acquired, socially transmitted, and communicated in large part by language. (1982: 157)

Spencer-Oatey emphasizes the complexity of culture, defining it as “a fuzzy set of attitudes, beliefs, behavioural conventions, and basic assumptions and values that are shared by a group of people, and that influence each member’s behaviour and each member’s interpretations of the ‘meaning’ of other people’s behaviour” (2000a: 4). Culture may not always be apparent; rather, it “is manifested at different layers of depth, ranging from inner core basic assumptions and values, through outer core attitudes, beliefs and social conventions, to surface-level behavioural manifestations” (Spencer-Oatey 2000a: 4).

Given the complexity and elusiveness of one single culture, the situation becomes even more complicated when multiple cultures come into contact. If this contact is extended, as in the case of cross-cultural couples, this often leads to biculturalism, “the coexistence and/or combination of two distinct cultures” (Grosjean 1982: 157). I consider all couples in this book to be bicultural, independent of the extent to which they combine their two cultures as a couple. It should be noted, though, that there may be vast differences with regard to the level of acculturation of both partners to the other’s culture.