Contents Preface SECTION 1 Survey 1 The relationship of language and culture 1Nature,culture,language 2Communities of language users 3Imagined communities 4Insiders/outsiders 5Linguistic relativity 6The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 7Summary 2 Meaning as sign 8The linguistic sign 9The meaning of sings 10Cultural encodings 11Semantic cohesion 12The non-arbitrary nature of sings 13Symbols 14Summary