UUKIC 2. KOLOKVIJ Flashcards
What are the relationships between language and society and culture?
- Language and society and culture are all interconnected and influence each other in various ways.
- We use language to communicate with different social groups, people
- When language is used in communication contexts, it is bound up with culture in multiple and complex ways
- Members of a community or social group do not only express experience; they also create experience through language
- How people use the spoken, written or visual medium** creates meanings that are understandable to their group**
- Language is a system of signs that is seen as having a cultural value.
- Speakers identify themselves and others through their use of language; language = part of social identity
- Language expresses, embodies and symbolises cultural reality.
What does Sapir-Whorf hypothesis state? What are the differences between its two versions?
- The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativity, proposes that the structure and usage of language can shape and influence the way we perceive and think about the world around us. There are two versions:
- ** the strong version **– this version suggests that language determines or completely shapes a person’s thoughts and worldview; we can only think within the constraints of a particular language we are using; we are prisoners of our language
- **the weak version **– this version suggests that language does influence thought and perception of the world around us but doesn’t entirely determine it; language influences thought to some extent but doesn’t entirely dictate or limit it.
What is the main message of the sociolinguistic relativity (Dell Hymes)?
- According to Chomsky, any native speaker can produce grammatically correct sentences, and the native speaker decides what is correct and what is incorrect
- Dell Hymes regards this view of language as too restrictive in that it did not, in fact, could not, account for the** social knowledge we rely on to produce and interpret utterances appropriate to the particular contexts in which they occur**
- Dell Hymes: It is not enough for the child to be able to produce any grammatical utterance. It would have to remain speechless if it could not decide which grammatical utterance should be used here and now, if it could not connect utterances to their contexts of use
- He emphasizes the significance of sociocultural contexts in understanding language use, challenging the notion that language can be solely understood through formal rules
- He developed an approach to the study of language that he called the ethnography of speaking. This approach* tries to capture the conventional patterns of language used by members of particular sociocultural groups *
Human rights?
Rights one acquires by being alive; your rights simply for being a human being
Human rights are universally accepted requests regardless of nationality, religion and ethnicity
Civil rights?
Civil rights are rights obtained by being a legal member of a particular political state
Civil rights are contextual, meaning you are entitled to specific civil rights as a citizen of a particular country, nation, or state
The government proclaims civil rights for the citizens of that country, while human rights are derived from natural law and are universally protected and applied
Civil rights depend on the laws of the country
List all the important documents connected with the regulation of human rights internationally!
Important to notice: Although human rights had antecedents (prethodnike) in the 18th Century, notably* the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizens of 1789*, international, as opposed to national statements of human rights, are a 20th-century, post-1945 phenomenon
* The United Nations was established in 1945 to support international efforts to achieve justice, peace and freedom in the world through the promotion and protection of human rights
* Human rights were adopted as the underlying principle of international law with the drafting of the Charter of the United Nations in 1945; they were first comprehensively defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948
* In 1953, member states of the Council of Europe signed the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, giving legal force to those rights and freedoms contained in it and providing a court to which individuals may take their cases.
* The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989)
* Universal acceptance that human rights standards apply to all children and adults worldwide was confirmed in **the Vienna Declaration of June 1993. **
What are civil liberties? How are they different from civil rights?
Civil liberties are protections against government actions. Civil rights, on the other hand, protect people from discrimination.
Civil society?
- Civil society can be understood as the “third sector” of society, distinct from government and business, and including the family and the private sphere
- By other authors, civil society is used in the sense of 1) the aggregate of non-governmental organisations and institutions that manifest interests and will of citizens or 2) individuals and organisations in a society independent of the government.
- Sometimes, the term civil society is used in the more general sense of “the elements such as freedom of speech, an independent judiciary, etc, that make up a democratic society” (Collins English Dictionary)
- Especially in the discussions among Eastern and Central European thinkers, civil society is also seen as a normative concept of civic values.
The central themes of educational programmes that promote international goals include? (UNESCO)
Name at least five!
- peace
- protection of human rights
- knowledge of other cultures
- environmental protection
- UN actions
- abolition of child labour
- stopping child trafficking
- stopping child prostitution and pornography
- preventing the warring of children
- stopping (sexual) abuse of children
- protection of children living at risk
- protection of children of the homeless, refugees, displaced persons, etc.
What’s the connection between human rights and language teaching?
- The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child includes a commitment to provide education directed to the development of respect for human rights – language teaching is a vehicle for transmitting such knowledge
- Debates and discussions are an essential element of activities for the development of the speaking skill –> teachers should make sure students respect each other, each other’s opinions, listen to each other… to always be respectful! They themselves shouldn’t use sarcasm, irony and disparaging judgements!
- FL teachers should help their students to develop what Byram characterises as critical cultural awareness!
What are speech, discourse and imagined communities?
- Speech communities: communities where we are raised, like family, neighbourhood, professional or ethnic affiliation, nation
- Discourse communities are communities in which social group members use language to meet their social needs – in their conversations so that they will differ in different age groups (children, teenage talk, adults, professional jargon, political rhetoric).
- Imagined communities: thus, the City of London is inseparable, in the cultural imagination of its citizens, from Shakespeare and Dickens; Lincoln Memorial Building in Washington has been given extra meaning through the words: I have a dream… Martin Luther King Jr. spoke there in 1963; Wimbeldon with tennis tournament; Ovčara, with the tragic death of Croatian citizens
What aspects does culture involve?
- Culture is always the result of human intervention in the biological processes of nature
- Culture both liberates and constrains. It delivers by investing the randomness of nature with meaning, order, and rationality and by providing safeguards against chaos; it constrains by imposing a structure on nature and by limiting the range of possible meanings created by the individual
- Culture is the product of socially and historically situated discourse communities that are, to a large extent, imagined communities, created and shaped by language
- A community’s language and its material achievements represent a social patrimony and a symbolic capital that serve to perpetuate relationships of power and domination; they distinguish insiders from outsiders
- But because cultures are fundamentally heterogeneous and changing, they are a constant site of struggle for recognition and legitimation
What are systemic linguistics (Halliday)?
(Views language as a system for expressing meaning in social contexts. It focuses on how language works to fulfill different functions (expressing ideas, interacting socially etc.) and how these functions are realized through grammar and linguistic choices)
It seeks to describe the linguistic options that are available to individuals to construct meanings in particular contexts or situations for specific purposes
Monolinguals, bilinguals, monocultural bilinguals, bicultural bilinguals, acultural, decultural?
- Monolinguals – those who are raised only by being exposed to one language
- Bilinguals – those who were raised by being exposed to two languages (simultaneous and successive bilinguals)
- Monocultural bilinguals – they claim to belong to the culture associated with L1
- Bicultural bilinguals – belong to both cultures (cultures associated with L1 and L2)
- Acultural – belong to L2
- Decultural – live in distress; they do not know to which culture they belong to
What is political correctness?
Political correctness is a term used to refer to language that is intended to cause the least amount of offense especially when describing groups identified by external markers such as race, gender, culture, or sexual orientation
Politically correct speech is avoiding the use of names, phrases, words, that encourage prejudice or could be offensive to members of different minorities or groups of people because they relate to their gender, age, sexual orientation, nationality, physical disability and the like (e.g. The avoiding use of nigger, negro, black, fag, faggot)
