Designed and Written by
Gregory Faircloth and Sakina Spears
Culture is the thing you learn from your mom or dad when growing up. It’s the beliefs that are instilled upon the individual throughout life. The norms and values that are shared by a family is culture. Every person has a culture, as well as every place is the same way. The
French culture has been shaped by profound historical events and by foreign and internal forces and groups. The capital if France is Paris. The city of Paris has served as a center of high culture since the 17th century. And has had an even more influential role in cinema, fashion, and cuisine since the 19th century. So many things have changed within the country throughout the centuries yet their passion for their own culture has stayed the same the French culture is defined by so many things yet in this paper we will focus on the different keys of communication.
Through Artifacts, Proxemics, paralanguage, and Aesthetics we will show you different ways that the French communicate. Culture consists of everything we learn in groups during the course of life, and the French have no shortage of things to learn.
The vitality of its philosophical background and the spreading of French as an international code of communication, France has been a privileged laboratory of this evolution.
France dominantly speaks French and the language is a prime example of paralanguage. The way one says a word and weathers it is feminine or masculine says a lot about what exactly you are saying. In the French language when adding certain letters its makes a word masculine or feminine. When asking some questions in French one must change the pitch in their voice for the statement to be perceived as a question. Since the French language does not have the same sentence structure of the English language to translate literally usually proves to be challenging. When asking a question in English you can tell it’s a question by the way the sentence is structured but the fact that in so many occasions’ words and sentences mean several different things one would have to change the pitch in their voice to make sure the other person in the conversation knows that a question is being asked. For example the questions
“do you eat pizza?” in French to say this you would say “Vous manger de la pizza?” when you literally translate the question it says you eat pizza. You eat pizza sounds more like a statement than a question. But when coupled with the French language rules and a change in pitch and voice when asking the question, makes it known it is a question. The French language has many situations where this would occur. In fact most of the language is based on how you say things and who is saying them. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013)
When you think of aesthetics as it relates to the French culture one should notice it plays a huge part. The French culture takes so much pride in their art and culture it shows. One example of how they use aesthetics is the Statue of Liberty, given by France to the United
States during a time of war as a sign of peace. It was a joint effort between the U.S. and France to commission a French sculptor, Frenchman Auguste, to create the statue. One thing that many people don’t know is the fact that there several “Statues of Liberty” in France aside from the one in New York. (Rappaport, 2011) The French actually assembled the statue of liberty that stands in New York City second. There are other noticeably smaller statues that the French artist created before ours located in France to this day. These statues are called” liberty enlightening the world”. Originally they were going to make the statue of liberty a lighthouse.
The fact that a piece of artwork symbolized so much to their culture, that is communicated so many things to the Americans is a prime example of French