32
'inexorably' intertwined in the manner envisaged in the strongest interpretations of
linguistic relativity. In contrast, the relationship between languages and cultures is
viewed as emergent,
situated, and dynamic. There are a number of concepts that
are key to explicating this relationship. Adopting a critical approach to culture
deconstructs the link between languages and cultures, demonstrating both the
importance of recognising the relationship between them and the need to separate
specific languages, such as English, from particular nationally conceived cultures,
e.g. British. She proposes a distinction between culture in a 'generic' and
'differential' sense.
At the generic level, language is always intertwined with a
cultural context; it is never culturally neutral. Furthermore, for the individual users
of a language it will be inexorably linked to the historical, socio-cultural contexts
of their previous and current use and therefore inseparable. However, crucially, at
the differential level culture and language are distinct. That is, at the level of
particular descriptions of language, for example the English language, the
language
is not
a priori
associated with any specific cultural or national context e.g. the US
and American culture. So the English language can take on the cultural references
of the multitude of users and contexts in which it occurs as ''the link between
language and culture is created in every new communicative event''.
This uncoupling of the link between specific languages and cultures leads
into the notion of transcultural or global flows in which linguistic and cultural
forms are seen to exist in a constant global movement or flow between different
local
settings, adapting to and adopting from this multitude of contexts.
Canagarajah offers
57
a similar conception of language and culture in describing the
dynamism of English language use, in which language users do not identify with
single fixed communities but are constantly ''shuttling between communities''.
These conceptions of language and culture stress the inherent variety in language
use and the need for users to be able to negotiate ever changing linguistic and
cultural norms in which intercultural communication is viewed as a multilingual
57
Canagarajah, A. S. (2011). Translanguaging in the classroom: emerging issues from research and pedagogy.
Applied Linguistics Review, 2,
1-27.
33
and multicultural process. Yet such dynamic perceptions
of culture and language
also give rise to tensions between the fluidity and fixity of linguistic and cultural
forms. New fluid associations are contrasted with more established fixed
associations, and this gives rise to a constant state of flux in which the local and
global are always in process.
Similar ideas are contained within Kramsch's notion
58
of
symbolic
competence which she proposes as an alternative to her earlier idea of third
cultures, in which L2 users operate in a 'place' between the L1/C1 and L2/C2. In
contrast, Kramsch now argues that "the notion of third culture must be seen less as
a PLACE than as a symbolic PROCESS of meaning-making that sees beyond the
dualities of national languages (L1-L2) and national cultures (C1-C2)" . Here
Kramsch too recognises the tension created by received cultural ideas of national
'fixed' languages and cultures and the more dynamic practices of multilingual and
multicultural communication. However, through symbolic competence she
highlights that these notions of L1/L2 and C1/C2 are not the static definable
entities that a third place might suggest. Rather they are
situated and relationally
constructed based on ideologies, attitudes and beliefs which in turn are influenced
by surrounding discourses. Thus multilingual communicators are, according to
Kramsch, equipped with a "dynamic, flexible and locally contingent competence";
a symbolic competence that enables them to operate between languages to
construct and present a symbolic self, based on the available symbolic systems.
Importantly, while received understandings and
meanings can be drawn on in
intercultural communication, symbolic competence also allows for them to be
challenged and redefined.
This ideological dimension is a fundamental tenet of critical perspectives on
culture and language. Here again the tensions between the local/global and
fluid/fixed are apparent. Holliday takes
59
what he terms a 'critical-cosmopolitan
approach' which recognises the influence of the particularities of national cultures
58
Kramsch, C. (2010). The symbolic dimensions of the intercultural.
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