Social and Cultural Influence on Word Meaning

Different nations have different social cultures, and the social culture of every nation is developing with the development of the nation, language is greatly influenced by social culture, which enables language to possess national and historical characteristics. Word is the smallest, independent, meaningful linguistic unit of language. It can well reflect the national and historical characteristics. From synchronic aspect, the social and cultural influence on word meaning is mainly embodied in conceptual and associative meanings of word. The incorrespondence of word meaning is a phenomenon that exists in both conceptual and associative meanings of word among different languages. From diachronic aspect, the development of social culture causes some changes of word meaning to some extent. Therefore, social culture plays a key role in vocabulary learning and mastery of a language.