Understanding Cultural Diversity

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Valuing and understanding cultural diversity is an important step in being able to understand the customs and histories of a society. Culture itself is a key feature in a society’s identity as it enables people within the society to identify how they view themselves and other groups in which they identify with. Every culture, community, or ethnic group tends to have its own beliefs, values, and notions of how to lead one’s life. Every society relies on cultural expression in order to continue to keep its communities strong and its traditions alive. The key component of cultural expression is language. Language is essential as a social element and helps to establish emotional feelings of solidarity and group identity. Denying a people this particular fundamental aspect of cultural expression limits the unique perspectives of those people’s lives and the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next is immediately endangered. Language is what holds cultures together and binds people to each other. The loss of a language means an entire culture, its people, its identity are forever lost. The suppression of languages of minority groups in general has been used as a political policy throughout history in order to exterminate and suppress minority cultures. When languages disappear cultures die and dead cultures are soon lost to in the history of time. Two aboriginal tribes in North America, the Wôpanâak and the Cherokee have recognized this issue. With a decreasing number of their native speakers dying as a result of old age, the assimilation of their youth by modern day American culture, and the lack of middle age fluent speakers the Wôpanâak and Cherokee tribes have started to focus on the revitalization of their language...

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...okee Speakers Discuss Language Revitalization Efforts." Cherokee Phoenix.

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Frey, B. (2005). A Look at the Cherokee Language. 1st ed. North Carolina Museum of History:

Tar Heal Junior Historian, pp.45:1.

Indigenous Language Institute. Endangered Languages: Revitalizing Native American

Languages | Cultural Survival. [online]

"Language Specialists Racing with Time to Revitalize Cherokee Language." Language

Specialists Racing with Time to Revitalize Cherokee Language.

McCarty, T. and Littlebear, R. (2013). Language planning and policy in Native America. 1st ed.
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Tongues, O. Our Mother Tongues | Wampanoag. (2014). [online] Ourmothertongues.org.

Wampanoag Language Revitalization, (2012). Project History. [online]

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