From people’s earliest interactions with others, they begin to develop a sense of identity as individuals and as members of groups (1993;1999). The most basic form of identity is ethnic identity which involves the understanding of an individual’s membership in a social group which has a common culture. This common culture may be manifested by shared language, history, geography and usually physical characteristics (1989; 1999).
Nevertheless, it must be noted that not all of these elements need to be shared for people to identify with a specific group. In this paper, the researcher undertakes a literature review on Stuart Hall’s articles. In these articles, Hall claims that there is an interrelationship between language, identity and cultural differences. In general, this paper will be discussing this interrelationship and the reasons as to why Hall believes that they are important.
Culture, Language and Identity
Nowadays, the term “culture” has already become one of the most common words in all kinds of public discourse. It has been constantly heard from journalists and politicians, not to mention of academics especially those in all disciplines of Humanities. “Popular culture”, “research culture”, “mass culture” – there is almost no limit as to the applicability of the term in any context. If one looks at the subject of culture in a historical way, three things came out.
The first is that culture as a subject and as a social issue is definitely not the invention of this time. as a matter of fact, the farther we go to the eighteenth century, the more we find that culture, its nature and composition is the central issue in the field of Humanities. In addition, it was not really in the 1920s and the 1930s (period of modernism in the English speaking world) that culture became another word for “high art”.
The second is that from the beginning of the argument of culture in the eighteenth century, there has been a debate regarding the relative status and merits of its parts. Even though as a general theory, the farther one goes back to the eighteenth century, the more broadly culture is defined, this does not really represent that anything goes.
Lastly, the third is that culture has always been a burning issue in times of perceived change and conflict as it is in the moments of change that is has already become relevant to ponder on what is good and worth preserving in a society, what is essentially meaningful to its experience and its civilization.
The definition of culture even up to this date continues to be debated by anthropologists and other scholars. In one concept, Garcia (1994) defines culture as “the system of understanding characteristics of that individual’s society or of some subgroup within that society” which includes “values, beliefs, notions about acceptable and unacceptable behavior and other socially constructed ideas that members of the society are taught as ‘true’” (p. 51). The members of cultures go about their daily lives within shared webs of meaning (1973). Upon associating the two definitions provided by , one can assess culture as invisible webs composed of values, beliefs, ideas about appropriate behavior and socially constructed truths.
According to (1996) and (1983), an individual’s own culture is most of the time invisible to the individual himself or herself. However, it should be noted that they are the circumstances within which people operate and make sense of the world. As individuals come across a culture which is different from their own culture, one of the issues that they face is a set of beliefs that marked themselves in behaviors that differ from their own. It is in this way that people often discuss regarding other people’s cultures and not so much on their own. It has been perceived that an individual’s own culture is usually hidden from them. People even describe it as “the way things are”. Nevertheless, one’s beliefs, ideas and actions are not any more natural or biologically predetermined than any other group’s beliefs, ideas and actions. They have simply emerged from the ways one’s own group has dealt with and deduced the particular circumstances that it has faced. As conditions change, so do cultures; hence, cultures are said to be dynamic.