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The connection between culture and language has been noticed for a long time. For example, the ancient Greeks distinguished between civilized peoples and barbarians, ie. those who spoke incomprehensibly and unintelligently. The fact that different groups of people speak differently is often taken as tangible evidence of cultural differences as opposed to other less obvious cultural characteristics.

19th century German romantics such as Johann Gottfried von Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt saw language not only as one of the characteristics of culture, but also as a direct expression of the national character of people and their culture in condensed form. Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology, like his German predecessors, saw the language of a community of people as a major criterion for their common culture. He also argues that the ability to understand a language of a group of people is the key to understanding their culture. He was the first anthropologist to believe that it was unthinkable to study the culture of foreign peoples without knowing their language. At the same time, however, Boas realizes that language and culture are not interchangeable and equivalent. People with radically different languages ​​may have the same cultural values, while those with similar languages ​​may be very different culturally. These ideas are similar to the idea of ​​linguistic determinism, which states that the form of language determines the thought of the individual. While Boas rejects the causal link between language and culture, some of his intellectual successors promote the idea that habitual patterns of speaking and thinking in a language can influence the culture of a language group.

In fact, the origin of language, understood as the human capacity for complex symbolic communication, and the origin of complex culture are often thought to be separated from the same evolutionary process at the beginning of human development. Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggests that language evolved when the first humans began living in large communities that required the use of complex communication to maintain social coherence. Language and culture emerge as a means of using symbols to build social identity and to maintain coherence within a social group, because one can no longer rely on the ways used before the advent of man. Because language and culture are essentially symbolic systems, 20th century cultural theorists applied the methods of language analysis developed in the science of linguistics to analyze culture. Ferdinand de Saussure's structural theory in particular, which describes symbolic systems as consisting of signs (correspondence between a form and its meaning), is widely used in the study of culture. Thus, it can be argued that culture itself is a kind of language. For example, children learn a language in the same way that they acquire the basic cultural norms of the society in which they grow up - by interacting with the adult members of their cultural group.

People use language as a way of identifying with one cultural group and distinguishing it from others. Even among speakers of the same language, there are differences between its use in different subgroups within a larger culture. For example, English is spoken differently in the United States, Canada, England, and Australia, and even in English-speaking countries, there are hundreds of dialects of English specific to a geographic area or subculture. Differences between different variants of the same language often consist in different pronunciations, slang and vocabulary, but also sometimes in different grammatical systems and very often in the use of different styles, the culture of his speech, such as "you" and "You", titles, class forms and complex language forms.

In some cultures, there is a difference in the language based on the gender you are addressing. In several East Asian languages, such as Thailand and Burma, different words are used depending on whether you are speaking to someone of a higher or lower rank. Many languages ​​have special ways of speaking for babies and children. Some languages ​​require different ways of speaking for different social classes, and often such a system is based on gender differences, such as in Japanese and Koasati.