Abstract:
Language is the carrier of culture. Different country has its culture deeply rooted in its language, and in turn, the use and development of language have been greatly affected by the culture. So, learning a foreign language is to learn not only the vocabulary and grammar, but also know about the culture. The paper firstly analyzes the relation of language and culture and origins of taboo. Secondly, it is indicated in the paper that linguistic taboo exists in almost every aspect of people’s life and is a universal social phenomenon both in China and the west. Thirdly, the paper talks about the same and different taboos in Chinese and English in detail. The same taboos include aspects of religion and god, death and disease etc. Because of the different cultural background, ideologies and the concepts of value, there are some different taboos in aspects of privacy, name and number etc. Sometimes, these similarities and differences bring a lot of troubles to cross-cultural communication. How to avoid these troubles? The most important is to have a good knowledge of the taboo culture and use euphemism. This paper would help people improve their ability of cross-cultural communication and achieve better communicational effects by comparative analysis.

Key words: taboos; culture

摘  要：
语言是文化的载体，不同国家的文化都深深地根植于它的语言中。反过来，语言的应用和发展也受到文化很大的影响。因此，学习一国语言不仅要学习它的词汇和语法，还要学习其文化。本文首先简要分析了语言与文化的关系以及禁忌语的起源，接着，提出语言禁忌存在于人们生活的各个方面，是一种中西方普遍存在的社会现象，随后就汉英禁忌语的异同展开详细论述。在汉英两种语言中，有一些禁忌语是一致的。如宗教信仰、神、死亡疾病等方面。但是由于中西方文化背景、意识形态、价值观念等的不同，其禁忌语也有一些差异，如在个人隐私，姓名及数字禁忌方面。这些异同有时会给跨文化交际带来麻烦。如何避免这些麻烦，最重要的是充分了解中西方禁忌文化以及使用适当的委婉语。本文旨在通过对比分析汉英禁忌语来帮助人们提高跨文化交际的能力，从而达到理想的交际效果。

关键词: 禁忌语；文化

1 Introduction
Taboo is a kind of sociolinguistic phenomenon, which is closely related to its culture background. With the increasing inter-cultural communication, it is necessary for people to pay more attention to the taboos in different cultures. Language reflects culture and is the carrier of culture. Culture is the combination of belief, habits, living patterns and behavior, which is generally owned by the people who occupy a specific geographical area. Different country has its culture deeply rooted in its language, and in turn, the use and development of language have been greatly affected by the culture.