Culture: Language, Dialect & Jargon
The second aspect of culture that I’d bring into the conversation is language – the part of communication where messages are encoded and transfered to others. Language is as much representation of the culture of a person as are their physical structures and symbols.
By language I’m not limiting the term to mean dialect, although obviously that is a part of it. Language in culture includes jargon and sayings and the general make-up of the communication. What language does your business talk? What language do your competitors talk? And, when you’re dealing with everyday people, you need to be talking the same language for there to be effective communication. So it’s important. Again, language goes beyond demographics into the specifics of the person. Google employees speak Google language in the bubble of Google structures and symbols.
An example of language; do you know what a dog is? I know several seriously negative meanings to the term. Dog means animal. Dog can mean someone who is rubbish to boguns or criminals, in Australia. And dog, to an old school criminal, translates to traitor. So, considering this simple common word is widely used by these people in a cultural context, would you think twice about using terms like dog out of context? Similarly, spider is widely meant to infer someone is a child molestor. But there are a gazillion words that can strike at the heart of who we are without the speaker intending it.
Jargon are those in-house words we use to expidite the conversation – doctors and lawyers and web designers and everybody else in some way. We’ve got the ability to create shorthand conversation of greater specificity than general conversation, and jargon is the tool we use to achieve it.
Language then is the way we talk and how we talk and the means of communicating from one to the other. There’s a lot to be said for an organisation which hires a bogun then culturally trains them to fit. Or anyone, for that matter. What are the expected methods of communication? What are the expected and accepted responses?
So, in a brief look at language, we can see how armies have cultures, businesses have cultures, groups and gangs and other people all have cultures, too. The sub-cultures we mix with affect our language, as much as the environment we grew up in and where we were schooled. Again, it’s a part of what makes us really bloody interesting. Furthering the conversation on cultural artifacts, tomorrow I’ll write a bit about the importance of rituals and ceremonies.
