Language: The root of it all!

When you sit back and think about language as a system of codes it’s actually quite interesting.  It’s a code with share with groups of people, whether it be everyone that speaks the same language as us or the we share a different lingo with at work.  Together we learn the codes both literally and culturally and we can use it to communicate with one another.  Many people talk about how we can look at different aspects of a culture to learn about and study it.  However, most people fail to realize that just by looking at the language of a culture we can really learn a lot about them.  Most people have that the Eskimo language has many different words for different types of snow where as we just have one. By looking at this we can tell or in the least infer that snow was very important to the Eskimos and not so much to us.  This idea as well as other concepts can be used to teach us a lot about modern day cultures as well.  Someone studying our culture may look as see that we have many different words for money such as cash, currency, moolah, bucks, dollars etc, and use that to figure out that our culture finds money of great importance.  A study could also be done looking at a variety of things such as facebook, books, newspaper articles, meeting transcripts, or any other variety of things and possibly find a pattern or high frequency of a certain word or topic.  These can also lead the researcher to more knowledge on our culture.  I think this is something people really tend to ignore but I feel as though language is the base of our culture and it should really be given more attention.  What we learn about our culture through language can then be applied and examined even more in almost every aspect of our culture.  In the case of pop culture, we can take the money example and see how this ideal is reinforced and displayed in pop culture.  When examining pop culture, we should really stop to think deeply about the language root and how it is all interconnected.  

Meghan  O