Culture & language

Part of a culture can be seen and touched: its pots, coins, clothes, books and buildings. Scholars call this its material culture, and for a people who left no writing it is all an archaeologist has to go on.

The larger part cannot be held at all. Deepest are a group’s values, its shared standards of what is good, right and worth wanting, such as honesty, modesty or generosity to guests. Values show on the surface as customs, the everyday ways of doing things that people repeat without thinking: how they greet, eat, marry and mourn. A custom can look arbitrary to an outsider until the value beneath it comes into view. By old Bedouin custom a stranger is fed and sheltered before anyone asks his business. The value underneath is hospitality.

Cultures differ so much that it is easy to miss what they share. In 1945 the anthropologist George Murdock listed the features that turn up, as far as he could find, in every culture known to history. There were dozens: language, cooking, marriage, gift-giving, hospitality, rules of inheritance, funeral rites. Features like these are called cultural universals.

They show that every people faces the same questions: how to raise children, share food, settle quarrels and bury the dead. Cultures differ in their answers, never in the questions. One universal stands out. No society has been found without religion, some shared belief in the unseen with worship and rites built around it. Anthropologists record that as a fact about human beings, whatever they believe themselves.

Nobody sits a child down to teach her a culture. She soaks it up: the language first, then how close to stand, what is funny, what is shameful and what is simply not done. Anthropologists call this absorbing of one’s own culture enculturation, and most of it happens without anyone noticing, the child least of all.

Because each generation receives what the last one knew, human knowledge piles up. No one has to rediscover fire, the wheel or how to bake bread. Knowledge is handed down, and each generation starts where the one before it stopped. A belief or practice handed down like this and kept alive by repetition is a tradition, from the Latin for handing over. Age alone does not make a tradition right. It does mean that many lives have tried it and kept it.

Having grown into one culture, people tend to take it for the natural way to live. Its food is simply food and its manners are simply good manners, while other peoples’ ways look odd, comic or wrong. Judging another culture by the yardstick of your own is called ethnocentrism, a word the sociologist William Graham Sumner brought into wide use in 1906.

It is one case of a wider habit. People everywhere split the world into us and them, and rate their in-group, the ‘us’, above the rest. Ethnocentrism is that habit applied to a whole way of life. It is hard to see from the inside, because the yardstick itself was absorbed in childhood along with everything else. Travellers’ tales are full of it. Each visitor reports how strange the locals are, and the locals say the same of him.

The cure for ethnocentrism is a rule of method: understand a custom first by what it means to the people who keep it, and only then weigh it. Anthropologists call the rule cultural relativism. It is a way of seeing clearly. It does not claim that every custom is good or that all values are equally true. That further claim is moral relativism, a different thing, and a Muslim who studies a practice on its own terms still judges it by revelation.

A Muslim scholar worked this way centuries before the method had a name. Al-Bīrūnī travelled to India in the time of Sultan Maḥmūd of Ghazna, learned Sanskrit and read the Hindus’ own books. Around 1030 he wrote an account of their beliefs. It was not, he said, a book of argument. He would set the Hindus’ ideas before the reader exactly as they are.

Cultures change in two ways. Sometimes a people invents something new. Far more often it borrows. The spread of an idea or a skill from one culture to another is called diffusion, and paper is a famous case. Paper was first made in China. By the eighth century the craft had reached Samarkand, by 794 paper mills were at work in Baghdad, and by the twelfth century Muslim Spain was making paper too. The rest of Europe learned the craft from the Muslim world.

Neighbours borrow as well. The historian Ibn Khaldūn observed that a defeated people tends to copy the victor in his dress, his occupation and all his other customs. When a smaller group goes on borrowing until its own language and customs have faded into those of the larger one, the process is called assimilation.

A wedding ring is a small band of metal. It means nothing in itself. It stands for a marriage because people agree that it does, and a thing that stands for something else by shared agreement is a symbol. Because the link is agreed and not natural, one sign can mean different things in different places. A nod means yes in most countries and no in Bulgaria.

The greatest set of symbols any people has is its language. A word is a sound that carries its meaning only by agreement; nothing in the sound of ‘tree’ is like a tree. With such sounds a people can store what it knows, hand it to its children and speak of things that are absent, past or not yet real. Language is the main carrier of a culture, and when a language dies out, much of what its speakers knew goes with it.

Do a people’s words fix what it can think? In the 1930s the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf argued that language shapes thought. The strongest form of their idea, linguistic determinism, says a language decides what its speakers are able to think. It has not survived testing. People grasp ideas their language has no word for, and when they need a word they coin or borrow one.

A weaker form has fared better: language influences how we think, in small ways. Russian has two everyday words for blue, one for light blue and one for dark, where English has one. In a 2007 experiment, Russian speakers were faster at telling two shades apart when the pair fell on opposite sides of that line than when both had the same name. English speakers showed no such difference. The effect is slight, and not every repeat has found it.

No language is spoken in just one way. A dialect is a regional variety of a language, with its own accent, words and turns of phrase. An Egyptian and a Syrian both speak Arabic, and each can tell within a sentence where the other is from. Where a dialect ends and a separate language begins is often settled by politics more than by grammar.

Speech also shifts with the occasion. A man speaks one way giving the Friday sermon and another way joking with his cousins. That level of formality is called register, and every speaker changes it without thinking. Arabic stretches the two further apart than most languages do. Its spoken dialects differ from Morocco to Iraq, yet all of them use one shared written standard, the formal Arabic of books, news and sermons, which nobody speaks at home.

About seven thousand languages are spoken today, and they are not seven thousand separate inventions. A language changes as its speakers spread out and lose touch, until one tongue has become several. Languages that descend from one ancestor in this way form a language family. Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic are cousins in the Semitic family. English, Persian, Hindi and Spanish all belong to another, the Indo-European.

The world’s speakers are shared out very unevenly. Mandarin Chinese has the most native speakers of any language, close to a billion. Spanish comes next, then English, then Hindi. English leads only when everyone who learned it as a second language is counted, which takes it to about one and a half billion. At the other end, about half the world’s languages have fewer than ten thousand speakers each.

Speech vanishes as it is spoken. Writing makes it stay, and there is more than one way to do it. The oldest is to give each word its own sign. The earliest writing we know, pressed into clay in Mesopotamia from about 3300 BC to keep accounts, began like this, with a small picture for an ox or an ear of barley. The marks later became wedge-shaped, which gives the script its name, cuneiform.

A system whose signs stand for whole words is called logographic. Chinese is the great living example. Its advantage is that people whose speech sounds nothing alike can read the same page. Its cost is memory. A reader needs some three thousand characters to manage a newspaper, where an alphabet asks for a few dozen letters.

The other way is to give signs to sounds, which takes far fewer of them. Around 1050 BC the Phoenician sea traders of the eastern Mediterranean were writing with just twenty-two letters. Every letter was a consonant, and the reader supplied the vowels. A script like that is called an abjad. Arabic and Hebrew are written this way still, with the short vowels left out or added as small marks for learners.

Phoenician merchants carried their letters from port to port. The Greeks borrowed them around 800 BC and turned a few spare letters into vowels. Now every sound in a word had a sign of its own, which is the strict meaning of alphabet. From the Greek letters came the Latin ones on this page. From the same Phoenician root, by another road, came the Arabic script.

As Islam spread, peoples who had never spoken Arabic took up its letters to write their own languages: Persian, Urdu, Ottoman Turkish, Malay. The Arabic script became one of the most widely used in the world.

The new Muslims also wanted to read the Qur’an correctly, and Arabic was not their mother tongue. That need helped produce two founding works in Basra, in southern Iraq, late in the eighth century. Al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad is credited with the first Arabic dictionary; the craft of making dictionaries is called lexicography. His student Sībawayh, a Persian, wrote the first full grammar of Arabic, a description of how the language builds its words and sentences. It is known simply as al-Kitāb, the Book, and later grammarians started from it. A language that had lived in memory and poetry now had its rules set down, for any people to learn.