With every chapter I read in our textbook, I think "this is what culture is". The chapter on language demonstrated this especially for me.
When I was a kid, I went to a French immersion elementary school. I had all my classes in french from kindergarten to fifth grade. But in sixth grade I switched to a regular middle school. I hadn't moved to another country, or even another state or city, but I felt like I'd entered another world. The bullies seemed meaner, the teachers stricter, and every subject, even ones I'd learned before, felt foreign to me. It took me over a year to feel comfortable in a school that was 5 minutes from my house. Since I spoke English in every other aspect of my life, you would think that the transition would be easy for me, but it was just the opposite. I think this says a lot about the setting in which language is used. Since I spoke English with my family and friends, I associated it with casual, less threatening situations. So when it was used in a school setting, the contrast stressed me out.
The reason my parents sent me to a French immersion school in the first place speaks to the importance of language in culture. My mom, who had spent time in France, thought it was important to teach children foreign languages while they could easily absorb them. She believed that being bilingual would make her children more accepting of different cultures and more able to adapt to a foreign situation. My mother seems to take more of a relativist position; that language influences the way we see the world and that speaking a different language allows you to see the world in a different way. In some ways I agree with her; while my French immersion past may have at one point stunted my academics, overall I think it has made me a more open-minded person.