Examples Of Cultural Relativism And Ethnocentrism

Even nowadays, there still an issue that connected with language and related to cultures such as cultural relativism and ethnocentrism. Cultural relativism is a behavior in one culture that should not be judged by another’s value system which basically is a belief of own culture practice with respect and understand the different of other culture. While ethnocentrism is the opposite of cultural relativism. It is the ideal that one’s own culture is the main standard and better than other cultures such if other’s culture practice is contrary to your cultural norm, that practice would be immediately wrong. In Language Myths provide many examples of this issue in many chapters which I will be discussing below. First, Some Language are Just

They believe education is declined nowadays when most people in the past couldn’t write their name. The eduction declined has associated with moral declined. Children are expected to meet a higher standard than the past which is why we see children can’t speak properly anymore when they ability is actually good and better than average. Also, there is no prove that the old method is better than the modern method when the old method is more likely to punish the students who are not able to spell the vocabulary correctly and this might not help students learn so much either. This show discrimination the use of language just because you think you can speak more proper than other when there is no proper way to measure since the nonstandard accent and dialects can open the discrimination and there is not really evidence to support that children can’t speak and write properly

For example, “ To say ‘John said Pip hit the fence’ you could say the equivalent of ‘Pip say John hit fence’, ‘Fence say John hit Pep’ … or any other of the 120 possible word orders” (Bauer, 78). This show that if there is no grammar, there would be no rule for the word placement and when we say it, the listener wouldn’t know what is our intended. The author proves that this myth is wrong because if there is no grammar, there wouldn’t be rules for word placement, no difference between nouns and verbs, wouldn’t be possible to mark the different of the tune of the sentence and so on. Every language has their own grammar, the only difference is that some might have more grammar than other while some have don’t much as the other such as the ending and word order that is different in each language: Latin makes extensive use of ending, Chinese use word order and English use fixed word order. The main idea of this myth is when we say there is no grammar, we mean there is no grammar book that written all the rules for that particular language. So if we start writing down all the rules, Every language has their own grammar because it exists in the head of the speaker. Even the grammar is different but the language still capable to express the same range of structure