Elements of Culture

Language

Language is a medium of social interact specific to each culture passed down as legacy from one generation to the other to give identity and pride with a sense of belonging to a community or even a nation that maintains distinct culture.

In a multicultural society the dominant language in the majority group becomes the social interact with the minority cultural groups who however maintain their own language to interact with their own community.
For alien language to be accepted in any culture the process of defamiliarization plays an important role in rejecting or accepting a language.

Language does not develop in a vacuum. We are all members of a social group and members of `society´ as a whole. People interact in many ways and communication is just about the most common and among the most important. Whatever is meaningful to a group, from their everyday life to their traditions constitutes their very own culture and is generally respected by all group members. Language is only one of such items. For ethnic minority groups that may have a language of their own, their language is a cornerstone in their culture. Anthropology is the science that deals with `culture´ as a whole. Linguistics deals with aspects of language and Sociolinguistics studies the way that language is used in society.

Religion

Religion serves many functions. It can be a catalyst for change, or it can serve to preserve social ideals and traditions. The role of religion as a way to preserve the traditions of the society is based in the main functions of religions. Religions are intended to reinforce group norms. This may be accomplished through defining actions as either good or evil, such as in the Western religion of Christianity. Killing is considered an evil, and so is prescribing to idolatry. By defining these actions as evil, spiritual consequences can be attributed to the actions that deter group members from participating in such activities.

The next roles of religion are to provide moral sanctions for actions and to provide values and common goals that are intended to help society function orderly. This can be accomplished by attributing certain gods, goddesses, or spirits to specific behaviors, events, or items. Each god, goddess, or spirit has a function of control over some aspect of the group member's life, and can be considered to be evil or good. In traditional Chinese societies, ancestral spirits are thought to protect current generations from harm as long as tributes of remembrance are continued. If these traditions of honoring ancestral spirits are discontinued, or are not conducted according to tradition, then the ancestral spirits will be angered and they will spread misfortune to the family. These types of mythologies uses fear to reinforce traditional rituals and practices. 

Customs and Traditions

A tradition is a ritual,belief or object passed down within a society, still maintained in the present, with origins in the past. Common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes (like lawyer wigsor military officer spurs), but the idea has also been applied to social norms such as greetings. Traditions can persist and evolve for thousands of years—the word "tradition" itself derives from the Latin tradere or traderer literally meaning to transmit, to hand over, to give for safekeeping—and new traditions continue to appear today. While it is commonly assumed that traditions have ancient history, many traditions have been invented on purpose, whether that be political or cultural, over short periods of time. Certain scholarly fields, such as anthropology and biology, have adapted the term "tradition," defining it more carefully than its conventional use in order to facilitate scholarly discourse.

The concept of tradition, as the notion of holding on to a previous time, is also found in political and philosophical discourse. For example, the political concept of traditionalism is based around it, as are strans of many world religions including traditional Catholicism. In artistic contexts, tradition is used to decide the correct display of an art form. For example, in the performance of traditional genres (such as traditional dance), adherence to guidelines dictating how an art form should be composed are given greater importance than the performer's own preferences. A number of factors can exacerbate the loss of tradition, including industrialization, globalization, and the assimilation or marginalization of specific cultural groups.

Arts & Literature

In the first, art and literature are only meant to create beau tiful or entertaining works to please and entertain people and artists themselves. They are not meant to propagate social ideas. They become propaganda. Some of the proponents of this view are Keats, Tennyson, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot in English literature; Edgar, Allan Poe in American; Agyeya and the 'Reetikal' and 'Chhaayavadi' poets in Hindi; Jigar Morabadi in Urdu; and Tagore in Bengali.

The other theory is that art and literature should serve the people, and help them in their struggle for a better life, by arousing people's emotions against oppression and increasing their sensitivity to suffering. Proponents of this school are Dickens and Bernard Shaw in English literature; Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Harriet Beacher Stowe, Upton Sinclair, and John Steinbeck in American literature; Balzac, Stendhal Flaubert and Victor Hugo in French; Goethe, Schiller and Enrich Maria Remarque in Germany; Cervantes in Spanish; Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Gorky in Russian; Premchand and Kabir in Hindi; Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyaya and Kazi Nazrul Islam in Bengali, Nazir, Faiz, Josh, and Manto in Urdu.