We can start to answer the question ‘What is culture?’ by thinking about identities. Let’s first hear from Faith.

How have parts of your identity shaped you? Why is that?

If this thought exercise resonated with you, you might have a bit of a head-start on this section. You might wonder how an identity such as being a volunteer relates to culture. Let’s now consider what culture and subculture mean.

There isn’t just one definition of culture… because it is not an easy task to define culture.

Many have attempted, and each rendition holds its own value. Your personal view of culture may differ from the definition written here, and that is okay. One of the most beautiful things about culture is that it impacts and is viewed by everyone differently.

With that said, we can keep the following definition of culture in mind: “Culture is a word that suggests social patterns of shared meaning. In essence, it is a collective understanding of the way the world works, shared by members of a group and passed down from one generation to the next” (Biswas-Diener & Thin, 2024, Defining Culture, para. 1).

But surely it’s impossible to cover an entire group’s understanding of the world under one umbrella, right? This is where sub-cultures come in.

Culture is not something that people are born with, but rather born into and develop a sense of over time. Its practices and the people within it cannot be confined to a box. In this way, because culture is so dynamic, sub-cultures may emerge. Weil (2018) notes that, “In contrast to the dominant culture of a society […] are the various subcultures, conceived as groups that are part of the dominant culture but that differ from it in important ways” (Cultures and Subcultures, para. 2).

Sub-cultures enable members to find communities of people with similar thinking patterns, values and desires, which may deviate from those of their broader culture, and share in camaraderie.

How Does Culture Relate to identity?

Good question.

Now that we have differentiated culture and sub-culture, let’s go back to the thought exercise about identity at the start of this section once more. Could the part of your identity that you selected also have a culture, or sub-culture?

Let’s hear from Faith again.

Languaculture: Living, Shifting Language

As culture is dynamic and ever-changing, so too is language. Adaptations in language over time are often attributed to changes in cultural attitudes and ideals. The term languaculture originally coined by Michael Agar in 1994, can be used to describe this “essential tie between language and culture,” (Norris & Tsedendamba, 2014, p. 205). Languaculture represents the idea that a language is made up not only of its grammatical and vocabulary elements, but also past knowledge, inventions, cultural information, and behaviors that contribute to language change over time. Culture borrows from language, and language from culture; they are deeply intertwined, making it challenging, if not impossible, to separate them entirely.

Over time, culture shifts because of the people who belong to it, as they are also the people who form it. New language forms as a result of the needs of its cultures’ speakers. Something like slang or inside jokes are just one way in which the speakers of a language create something new that evolves that culture.