56. Culture, Speech, and Nationality
This point of view raises the question whether one ought to speak of language and culture or rather of language as a part of culture. So far as the process of their transmission is concerned, and the type of mechanism of their development, it is clear that language and culture are one. For practical purposes it is generally convenient to keep them distinct. There is no doubt that two peoples can share in what is substantially the same culture and yet speak fundamentally different idioms; for instance, the Finno-Ugric Magyars or Hungarians among the adjacent Slavs, Germans, and Latins of central Europe, who are all Indo-Europeans. The other way around, the northern Hindus and west Europeans are certainly different culturally, yet their languages go back to a common origin. In fact it has become a commonplace that the arguing of connection between the three factors of race, language, and culture (or nationality), the making of inferences from one to the other, is logically unsound (§ [33]). One can no more think correctly in terms of Aryan heads or a Semitic race, for instance, than of blond linguistic types, Catholic physiques, or inflecting social institutions.
At the same time, speech and culture tend to form something of a unit as opposed to race. It is possible for a population to substitute a wholly new language and type of civilization for the old ones, as the American negro has done, and yet to remain relatively unmodified racially, or at least to carry on its former physical type unchanged in a large proportion of its members. On the other hand, a change of speech without some change of culture seems impossible. Certainly wherever Greek, Latin, Spanish, English, Arabic, Pali, Chinese have penetrated, there have been established new phases of civilization. In a lower degree, the same principle probably holds true of every gain of one language at the expense of another, even when the spreading idiom is not associated with a great or active culture.
The linkage of speech and culture is further perceptible in the degree to which they both contribute, in most cases, to the idea of nationality. What chiefly marks off the French nation from the Italian, the Dutch from the German, the Swedish from the Norwegian—their respective customs and ideals, or the language gap? It would be difficult to say. The cultural differences tend to crystallize around language differences, and then in turn are reinforced by language, so that the two factors interact complexly. Nationality, especially in its modern developments, includes another factor, that of social or political segregation, which may in some degree run counter to both speech and culture. Switzerland with its German, French, and Italian speaking population, or Belgium, almost equally divided between Flemings and Walloons, are striking examples. Yet however successfully Switzerland and Belgium maintain their national unity, it is clear that this is a composite of subnational elements, each of which possesses a certain cultural as well as linguistic distinctness. Thus the Walloon speaks a French dialect, the Fleming a Dutch one; and the point of view, temperament, historic antecedents, and minor customs of the two groups are perceptibly different. Similarly, both the history and the outlook and therefore the culture of the French and German cantons of Switzerland are definitely distinguishable.