Cultural emphasis is an important aspect of a culture which is often reflected through language and, more specifically, vocabulary. This means that the vocabulary people use in a culture indicates what is important to that group of people. If there are many words to describe a certain topic in a specific culture, then there is a good chance that that topic is considered important to that culture.
__NOTOC__
Background
The idea of cultural emphasis is rooted form the work of Franz Boas, who is considered to be one of the founders of American Anthropology. Franz Boas developed and taught concepts such as
cultural relativism
Cultural relativism is the view that concepts and moral values must be understood in their own cultural context and not judged according to the standards of a different culture. It asserts the equal validity of all points of view and the relati ...
and the "cultural unconscious", which allowed anthropologists who studied under him, like
Edward Sapir and
Ruth Benedict
Ruth Fulton Benedict (June 5, 1887 – September 17, 1948) was an American anthropologist and folklorist.
She was born in New York City, attended Vassar College, and graduated in 1909. After studying anthropology at the New School of Social ...
, to further study and develop ideas on language and culture.
Application
One way in which cultural emphasis is exemplified is through the populace talking about the weather. For example, in a place where it is cold and it snows a lot, a large collection of words to describe the snow would be expected.
:For example:
whiteout,
blizzard
A blizzard is a severe Winter storm, snowstorm characterized by strong sustained winds and low visibility, lasting for a prolonged period of time—typically at least three or four hours. A ground blizzard is a weather condition where snow th ...
,
sleeting,
snowdrift, powder snow, packed snow, fresh snow.
In a place where it is hot, a cornucopia of associated terms would be expected.
:For example: dry heat, muggy, humid, sticky, monsoon season, sweltering.
A concentration of related terms for similar phenomena suggests the importance in distinguishing between them. Furthermore, if you are not from the area, or that culture, you might not have experienced or know the difference between, for example, a dry heat or a humid heat, when the difference may have huge implications for the outcome of a particular action.
See also
*
Eskimo words for snow, popular urban legend that the Inuit or Eskimo have an unusually large number of words for snow
*
Linguistic relativity, or "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis", the idea that the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it
References
*
*
{{Culture
Culture
Language