Language, culture, pragmatics and the varicultural versus native-speakerism

It is clear that there are deep connections between language and culture. When someone states that their language represents their culture, this is to them a real and meaningful connection. 

But I just don’t believe the common onionskin view where language is one of the locked-in layers of a closed, all-determining, essentialised national or civilisational culture. This thinking supports the false native-speakerist notion that English represents a falsely-labelled ‘critical and individualist’ ‘Western culture’. 

Then, as often the case, something happened that helped me to make sense.

I heard someone speaking Persian on the phone while walking in the street behind me in Italy, and felt a wave of emotion. There was something about the sounds, the music, the turns of phrase, the warmth, that conjured huge resonance with life in Iran. 

• Poetry – spoken while playing backgammon – in greetings – she was greeting someone on the phone – the melody of relationships
• The sound – music and poetry threaded through everyday life – political resistance
• The script – poetic in its architecture – its shapes and how it populates the page – but no more poetic than seeing English script in the mirror
• General resonance with the colours, rhythm, architectures and spaces 

The final point reminds me that everywhere these days statutory language or languages are evident on signs, with recognisably particular design in font and arrangement – car registration plates, building numbers, road markings, tickets, money and so on. 

So there is certainly something about the language that is intensely cultural. However, I wonder if it this is less to do with the particular language than with the locatedness in the cultural environment of whatever language it is.

It might be the way that I was introduced to Persian that helps me realise this. 

When I lived and worked in Iran I had to do a lot of learning of how to live in a very foreign environment. Greeting, arriving and leaving, the use of rooms, eating styles and food, what was sold in shops, being sent by the mechanic to buy parts before getting our car repaired, being expected to stay and pretend to supervise with appropriate authority while it was being repaired, how to organise and manage personal space, how to interact with elders and tradespeople, the use of honorifics, how to find small vans and to negotiate them carrying things for the right price, getting around the city in shared taxis – is a random list of what had to be learnt. 

Basic rules of grammar and vocabulary were there, which I got from Teach yourself Farsi. But more important were the highly nuanced pragmatics of how these were being used. It therefore seems that the cultural aspect is more in those pragmatics than in the particular grammar and vocabulary of ‘Persian’. That these are small discoursal elements within the language rather than large systemic  elements.

My alternative concept of the varicultural flow opens up these possibilities. Cultures from small to large are constructed out of the seamless flow of cultural diversity.

This helps me realise that working with Persian was in dialogue with my developing competence in how English operated differently in multiple small-culture settings. A time when I was just in my second major professional setting, newly a parent, with a new Iranian family, learning to drive – some of this in Persian and some in English.

It was all about pragmatic placing which was carried by personal demeanour. Looks, body language, eye contact and attitude were at least as crucial as linguistic precision. Learning not to walk around like a foreigner had a lot to do with getting served in shops and crossing the road without apparent aggression from motorists.

The varicultural flow indicates the wider environment within which cultural experience can be carried through a huge variety of locations. This therefore makes it evident that pragmatic competence that I was learning in Persian would be carried to my pragmatic competence in English and vice versa.

Language is therefore certainly part of the colours, smells, tastes, architectures, art, landscapes, sounds and music. However, less to do with ‘which language’ than with how ‘whichever language’ becomes integrated into those colours, smells etc. 

This ‘whichever’ relationship is difficult to express. Languages which have spread to multiple national or civilisational locations through accidents of history, take on very different cultural appearances in different cultural environments – from how they are displayed in street signage to poetic expression.

This is exemplified how, when speaking English when with Iranians, it takes on expressions and intonation which derive from Iranian cultural life that ‘would not be said in British English’ but which would not be any less linguistically ‘English’. For example saying to someone who cannot make an appointment ‘your place will be empty’.

But at the same time, whenever I speak with someone ‘British’, the expressions and intonation – the whole demeanour of speaking depends on the particular slice of British society to do with age, workplace, regional, subcultural and all sorts of other groups – the small culture and whoever is there constructing and reconstructing it. And these things are always on the move.

How we use language is therefore very much a cultural matter – and the use of the language can reflect and inspire cultural life. However, ‘a language’, in the sense of a recognisably regulated system of grammar, vocabulary and script, can adapt to any cultural setting.

This means that when someone says ‘in Language X there isn’t a way to talk about personal choice’, they may well be speaking about something they’ve witnessed. They may not however realise that this is the language as used in a very particular small-culture environment at a particular moment of small-culture construction. It does not mean that Language X isn’t used very differently in other settings. Neither does it mean that the people in that setting don’t talk about personal choice elsewhere in whatever language they are using.

Again, the varicultural flow enables us to see this in everyday life wherever we are – where the shifting nature of language in its response to cultural life is all around us – an experience which is our best resource for new languaging in new places.

This also means that native-speakerism is very clearly based on ideological illusion. That there can be a language, which, by its systemic nature, can be somehow culturally superior, makes no sense. While it is possible for versions of English to be generated by particular cultural forces, this is not to do with the nature of English itself. ‘Generated by’ is a crucial phrase here. It is the cultural forces that drive whatever the version of a language, not the other way round. 

In my experience of developing my pragmatic competence both in Persian and English in my 20s, both were intensely relational – responding to the deep cultural rhythms that surrounded me. No sense at all that English was somehow a more individualist language. 

It is this rationality which underpins how all language is enacted in particular cultural settings is a very valuable thing – steeped in and an outward show of identities. And when an Iranian speaks English they are carrying into it huge cultural histories. And when I hear an Iranian speaking Persian in the street in Italy, the jolting of of its unexpected insertion and the memories of another cultural place reminds me of the deeper humanity. That it’s in less familiar Italy only accentuates this jolting.

All of this is what enables me, when hearing the Welsh politician beginning his conference speech in Welsh, a language of which I can process nothing but the sound, to have such a rich sense of culture and identity which helped me understand my own.

The thinking in this blog is influenced by notions of the underlying communicative competence we all bring with us, and shared spatial repertoires (e.g. Canagarajah) and translanguaging (e.g. Li Wei). And also Lao Tzu’s (Taoist) notion of myriad creatures.