Questions about language and cultural context (1)

Does language shape culture or culture shape language?

Language and culture influence one another reciprocally. As I talked before, culture shapes language because a language is formed from its culture--language is a part of its culture. When there is no language and our ancestors start to invent a way to communicate, they originate their language based on whatever they know and are familiar to, namely, their culture. And once the language has established, people of different generations speak their mutual language, and recreate their language, as well as slightly reshape the culture of their new generation.

We can always tell the characteristics of people, such as temperance and attitude, and even guess the political and social aura in their countries or nations through their language. For example, when I saw Americans protest on the street and march down, fearlessly, I heard the straightforward slogan they used, and the mass crowds followed a leader, yelling the words (I wish I could remember what they said so that I can post them on the blog). But I can feel the anger and turbulence among the protesters. It reflects the culture in U.S., that people have free speech and express whatever they want most of the time, and facing the economic crisis and political campaign, people become emotional.

However, in the current society of China, people tend to use sarcastic language to make irony joke, attacking the government by metaphorization. When Line 10 subway had rear-end collision in Shanghai, last October, I found a really irony status crazily shared on Renren, Chinese version of Facebook, that some genius changed "Chinese pair" (I don't know how to translate this, "对联", a literary style in the form of a pair, the upper pair and lower pair need to to rhyme and there is a horizontal line called "横批" to generalize the theme and the meaning of the pair), the upper pair says "subway, railway, highway, way way to die", the lower pair says "officer, announcer, investigator, sir sir to lie", and the classic horizontal line appears "LOVE THE WAY YOU LIE". This Chinglish culture really rocks. And as we can see, Chinese people enjoy mocking, and people are becoming acrimonious and even playing code words with the governmental officials. Despite we are all Chinese, people laugh at the jokes, as if we don't see it's our government that upsets us.

So language embodies culture, and vise versa.