In this paper; culture, gender, language and literature relationship is discussed from the sociolinguistics perspective. This complex relationship is analysed in relation with cognitive categories, Whorfian Hypothesis, grammatical markers, natural, grammatical and social gender and the notion of gendered language. Social gender is also examined within a literary lens through female issues raised by 4th year ELT students in analysing literary texts in 'Selections from Western Literature' as an elective course at an ELT department at a Turkish University. Five (5) thematic categories are gathered through inductive analysis of the presentation data as female issues which are namely; obedient and modest; beautiful, seductive or destructive; underappreciated and emotionally trapped woman; woman as an object of love and female writer expressing her love. Female issues are examined in relationship with social gender and drawing from the thematic categories; suggestions and implications regarding how to integrate literature, culture and gender relationship as a tool of teaching English in the ELT curriculum are discussed.Keywords: culture, gender, gendered language, female issues (1990: 211) states that 'the exact nature of the relationship between language and culture has fascinated, and continues to fascinate, people from a wide variety of backgrounds'. Therefore, culture needs to be examined in order to find out and demonstrate the nature of the relationship. In this study, the term culture refers to 'socially acquired knowledge', 'functioning in a particular society, 'knowing how', 'being a member of a society', and a 'conceptual system of categorising the world around us and our experience of it' rather than the 'high culture' requiring only appreciation of music, literature and fine arts (Wardhaugh, 1990;Yule, 2010). Culture and Language WardhaughLanguage communities acquire this conceptual system of categories and taxonomies like syntactic and phonological units of vowels and consonants; nouns and verbs; statements and questions, such as; pronouns, countables, uncountables, plurals, and the concept of time such as the tenses, weekend and decade (Yule, 2010). The categories of colour, prototypes and even kinship terms vary in different cultures. The Dani of New Guinea name of two colours of 'black' and 'white'; Assam people in India have dozens of words for different types of baskets, rice, and ants, and Eskimos developed a set of expressions for snow (Yule, 2010). This complex relationship is acknowledged by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf in terms of how language determines the way in which speakers of that language view the world, organise, classify, code and structure the data. They believe that the language determines cognitive categories, belief system and a way of thinking and hence phonological and morphological units and grammatical markers; for example, in Swahili there are three grammatical markers of humans, non-humans, artefacts; in Japanese the objects have grammatical markers depending on t...
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