Sociolinguistic

Culture in language has long been regarded as the essential component, and sometimes as the only legitimate component of culture teaching in foreign language education since no other school subjects can deal with this kind of subject matter efficiently in normal classroom situations. The traditional premise that language and culture are not separable is usually acknowledged when we teach this type of culture. In the context of English language education, we focus on culture in English, more specifically, on lexical or grammatical items that seem to exemplify typical thought patterns of English- speaking people.

( Harumi,2002:43-44)

Introduction

1.1 What is language and what is culture?

According to Oxford Dictionary 4th Edition, language is a system of sounds, words, patterns and more that used by humans to communicate their thought and feelings. An English phonetician and language scholar, Henry Sweet said that language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words, words are combined into sentences, and this combination answering to what of ideas into thoughts. In linguistic context, language is been thought to be as a set of abstract systems which meanings reside in the forms themselves rather than in the usages to which they are put. Culture, on the other hand is define as a way of life in particular group of people including their behaviors, their beliefs and values, the symbols they accept which they passed through communication and imitation from one generation to next generation. (www.tamu.edu/faculty/choudhury/culture.html). Moreover, language is a set of sentences, each finite length and constructed out of finite set of elements (Chomsky). Malaysia is one example with multicultural society. It has three main ethnic groups via Malay, Chinese and Indian. Therefore, they share different religions, customs and way of life, and the main festivals of each ethnic are public holidays. Some examples of Malaysian...