ABSTRACT
The two great thinkers Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953 [2009]) and Lev Vygotsky (1978) came to agree on the same interpretation: we humans are like fish in the water of culture. That metaphor has permeated the works of other scholars of history, society and cognition (Tomasello 1999). Culture is defined as the environment in which language is used and developed. Of the two, culture is the more general, more durable and has the farthest reach. Language, meanwhile, is a substantial element of culture. It is both an essential part of its nature and its medium of expression. Culture sets the limits within which social life unfolds and where contexts and situations arise for which language is deployed. Culture and society shape language’s environment, but always within natural spaces, geophysical frameworks that determine and shape it (Auer and Schmidt 2010). Natural and cultural environments comprise the setting in which language occurs: language that is employed by speakers who live in these settings and perceive them in different, individual ways (Palmer 1996).
