Every society has its own culture and different communities within a society may have their own distinctive subcultures. For example, America is a country of multinationalities and each nationality has its own culture characteristic of its community. All the cultural distinctions of all the nationalities constitute the American culture, which is often referred to as "a melting pot", "a pot of stew" or "a salad dish". Canada may serve as another good example. Canada is also a multicultural country of over one hundred nationalities, with each ethnic group observing its own cultural distinctions.
Generative-transformational grammarians believe that a child is born with linguistic competence, which enables him to acquire his native language. But the linguistic knowledge of his mother tongue is culturally transmitted. This is why we say language is acquired by virtue of membership of the society in which he lives. Without such a social and cultural environment, the child cannot acquire his language at all, though he is born with a linguistic mechanism. It is obvious that the process of language acquisition is also the process of recognizing and understanding the objective world, which of course covers the knowledge of culture.
Chinese and English.
Language and culture are closely related to and dependent on each other throughout their history. The native language is acquired along with the ways, attitudes and patterns of behaving of the social group, and these ways, attitudes and behaving patterns find their expression through language. In this way, language is an inseparable or integral part of culture, and the medium through which culture is acquired. Recent research revealed that language is also closely related to cognition and the cultural settings. Consequently, it is believed that the process of child language acquisition is also the process of his cognition and understanding of the world and the process of the development of his cultural competence.