Language and food : food and language

Abstract

Eating and talking are universal human traits. Every healthy human being eats and talks; every society or group eats and talks. Both language and food are culturally dependent and vary according to factors such as gender, age, or situational context, or even lifestyle. There are vast differences both in the food-related behavior of different cultures as well as in the languages of the world. There is nothing natural or inevitable about food preferences or syntactic structures. “Food is a bridge between nature and culture” (Fischler 1988 in Germov & Williams 2008: 1)1 and so is language. Brillat-Savarin, one of the earliest food writers, claimed: “Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are” (1825: 3). Again, linguists and other social scientists have shown that identity is constructed through language. Hence, “every coherent social group has its own unique foodways” (Counihan 1999: 6) and its own unique language use. You are different or you are the same depending on what you eat and how you speak. “If we are to understand women’s gender roles..., we need to study food” (Inness 2001a: 4) and, the linguist adds, language. “If there is one issue as deeply personal as food it is language and dialect” (Delamont 1995: 193).