So a young nomadic Mongolian girl and I (UK, middle-age, male, working in craft/retail) don't represent different cultures because we can both speak English?
Go on, explain, clearly I don't understand.
Didn't you already explain that there were vastly different subcultures within the population of English language speakers? Don't you think there's more to culture than mutual unintelligibility?
I think the person you responded to went too far in their argument. I would've said that speakers of the same language can have very different culture, but that (in your example) the English-speaking Mongolian girl wouldn't be part of the same culture that she would if she were a Mongolian-speaking Mongolian girl.
Language doesn't dictate patterns of thought, but it certainly shapes them. A concept that might be easy to formulate in Mongolian may be difficult to formulate in English, and the reverse applies. People naturally use the patterns that the language encourages. With different patterns, different group behaviors tend to emerge, because they're easy to think about.
Simultaneously, the culture shapes the language to fit its needs. Given time and isolation, it will become more and more distinctly different.
What you're talking about is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it is not certain at all. It's highly contested. Language may have an effect on some cognitive processes (again, contested) but definitely not all.
However, language does reflect the cumulative experience of a culture, whether modern speakers are aware of that experience or not. Here's a good illustration: http://youtu.be/kIzFz9T5rhI
So language can reflect a culture, but it probably doesn't dictate it. In the case of the Mongolian girl, she's unlikely to be a nomad these days, and what separates an English speaking Mongolian from a non-English speaking one is usually wealth. So, someone from a wealthy country is probably more culturally similar to her than they might expect.
Yes, I am. The weak variation of the hypothesis. Coming from a computing background, it's difficult to convince myself that it's the case that the structure of a language (whether artificial or natural) doesn't encourage or discourage specific ways to represent meaning.
If the Mongolian girl lives in Englang and speaks English as a first language (e.g. second generation immigrant), then obviously she is far less different culturally to you than a Mongolian girl that just arrived from Ulan Bator.
Cultures have degrees. Losing the language of your culture means you lose a lot of connection to it (can't anymore follow its arts and letters for one, or even casual conversations between people from that culture).
And after a few generations in a different country you're mostly a token X (where X your original culture), except if you (and your family) went to great pains to maintain the connection (the default is losing it).
>Didn't you already explain that there were vastly different subcultures within the population of English language speakers?
Vastly different cultures in arts/consumerism/urban lifestyle/etc, but not vastly different national cultures.
A 3rd-gen British Mongolian can be a spiky haired punk, something totally different from a 3rd-gen British Italian dubstep fan, but they're both hardly major representatives of Mongolian and Italian cultures.
>Don't you think there's more to culture than mutual unintelligibility?
Given that all culture is made into some language or another, and more especially in some national cultural context or another, then, yes, there is something more, but not much.
Language and culture are not linearly independent.
Like Morocco, Saudi, Turkey, and Indonesia all have the same culture, because Standard Arabic is common due to Islam?
Or England, Kenya, and India are so culturally identical because English is a standard language across them?
Or how it's difficult to tell a Spaniard apart from a Mexican, because they both speak Spanish and hence are culturally identical?
England, Kenya, and India all speak English, but English is merely a common language, and a lot of cultural differences come from the linguistic diversity in each of those countries.
Culture is a result of multiple factors, one of which is language. Monolingualism is certainly one large step towards a homogenous culture.
We often modify our speech for the audience - put someone in a party situation where they are the odd one out and it will be harder for them to follow along.
I've seen a fair amount of British TV, and I'm fairly comfortable with the idioms and vocabulary differences. Less so than American TV, but I think that's fair, since I'm not immersed in the culture.
I've seen much less Australian TV, but a lot of the slang was utterly unfamiliar to me, in what I have seen. I'm sure that if I watched more, it would become more familiar.
I don't understand what is so controversial about the idea that other places use the language slightly differently, and it can take some time to become accustomed to the differences.
Nothing. What's controversial is equating "other places use the language slightly differently, and it can take some time to become accustomed to the differences" with "it takes a few weeks of practice to intelligibly [sic] understand someone from another place".
The first of those, yours, is a very weak claim. The second is a very strong one.
I said "this is dramatically overstated" and you're trying to contradict me by saying that a much weaker version of the claim is true. Yes, it is, that's what "overstated" means.
My best friend is Australian, the idioms are often nonsensical or require a bit of thinking due to being a variant of an idiom I'm familiar with. e.g "a roo loose in the top paddock"
We do something similar to that already. Kids make up their own lingo when playing, subgroups invent new slangs within a single language, areas make their own dialect, we invent new cultural languages (e.g. music genres) that differentiate us from others, we invent new computer languages despite having existing ones, etc. Heck, even English got developed while other languages already existed.
But that's a question for an alternative reality. It doesn't answer whether it would be better to remove historical languages, and adopt a single (existing or new) one. What I mean is that what would be the best approach in a world that spoke a single language does not really enlighten us about a world that already has many. The world that "spoke a single language" wouldn't have existing living cultures in different languages like us to remove, and thus they'd have nothing to fear of losing.
Besides, languages encode ways of thinking and the culture/history etc of its generations speakers, something that will be lost in a monoculture. Single language = single universal culture = same shit all over the world, no diversity.
And if you think you're still getting diversity within a single country (e.g. because you have stuff ranging from Metallica to the Residents and from Hank Williams and Beyonce to Philip Glass and John Zorn) then you really don't know what actual cultural diversity is.