The Story Of Marie Wilcox: The Effects Of Language

With the amount of diverse cultures in the world, the one similarity that remains across all is language. Furthermore, like most items in life, there comes a point when certain species, ways of living, and cultures with their language, dies out. Unfortunately, negative consequences will follow. By looking at various studies conducted by cultural psychologists, and the story of Marie Wilcox, it further addresses the effect language has on an individual's development as well as society as a whole. The story of Marie Wilcox is about an elderly woman whose a mother, grandmother, and the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language, a form of Native American language. Prior to the passing of Marie's grandmother, the Wukchumni language was spoken daily. Fortunately, when Marie's sisters began teaching their children the Wukchumni language, it pushed Marie to want to practice and regain her fluency in the language. Overtime, another family member passed and Marie realized that she was now the last member of the tribe that knew the language

One impactful consequence is through an individual's psychological aspect. For instance, one of the major themes in global change, language death, states how language molds how we think, as well as our emotions (lecture, 2-1-2018). This idea leads into how native languages think about and perceive the world through color, odor, and spatial perspectives, in a hypothesis known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as the linguistic relativity (lecture, 3-26-2018). In particular, the hypothesis considers how there is "much variation in psychological processes across cultures because languages diverge so much from each other" (Heine, 2016, p. 397). For instance, certain cultures rely on language to explain their particular version on different words, ways of categorizing colors, and describing