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Cultural diversity perspective
Living with Cultural Diversity
Addressing 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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Tanner, Laura E. "Uncovering the Magical Disguise of Language: The Narrative Presence in Richard Wright's Native Son." Appiah 132-146.
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Another source related to Native American languages is a Chinook vocabulary dictionary written in 1886 used to translate things into Chinook. Although Chinook is not understandable by people who speak Kalapuya, it is from the same linguistic family and could be a vital part of history. It is somewhat a handbook to Indian Languages seeing as most languages in the Oregon area have similar words and common grammatical structure.
Atiwaneto “Speech Resisting Colonial Expansion 1752”, in The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America, ed. Colin G. Calloway (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994), 127
How Native American’s and Americans communicate can vary greatly and can cause miscommunication between the two groups, or unintended nonverbal communication. Native Americans use caution with their first encounters of early communication to demonstrate humility and create harmony (Shusta, Levine, Wong,
Throughout this unique class, we have explored many amazing facets of the Dine’ people. From stories, to pieces of art, to the language itself, the beauty of Navajo culture is easily seen by all who have the fortune to come into contact with them. Unlike Navajo culture, however, the Western world uses a very loose definition for “beauty” that typically revolves around physical traits: a beautiful girl usually looks a certain way, a beautiful voice usually sounds a certain way, and a beautiful painting usually looks a certain way. The Western world merely looks at physical beauty and from this vision has developed a formula for what is and what isn’t considered beautiful. To the Navajo People, beauty is a much deeper, more meaningful concept.
Crawford, James. Effective Language Education Practices and Native Language Survival. Reyhner, Jon. Montana:8m (NALI) Institute, 1990. Print.
Senghas, Richard and Leila Monaghan. “Signs of Their Times: Deaf Communities and the Culture of Language.” Annual Review of Anthropology. 31.1 (2002): 69-90. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 9 Dec. 2013.
Some aspects of them went extinct, some changed and some stayed just as they were thousands of years ago. The cultures of native California tribes have experienced dramatic change under the direction of Spanish, Mexican and American rule. In each instance of rule there was an effort to assimilate the native Californians until the “old ways” were forgotten. As a result, languages – Sapir-Warf theory’s “distinct worlds” – were lost forever. What we newly see is native culture as a work in progress. How well native people of California could adapt to the conditions set by those in charge determined what from their cultures remained, changed and ultimately perished. I argue that nothing could have helped the native Californians preserve their cultures
Across Canada and the United States there are many First Nations languages which are a part of the Algonquian language family, all of which with varying states of health. Although these languages share many characteristics of the Algonquian language family, the cultures, systems of beliefs, and geographic location of their respective Nations differentiate them. In being shaped by the landscape, cultures, and spirituality of the First Nations, the language brings the speakers closer to their land and traditions while reaffirming their identity as First Peoples. Using the Blackfoot Nation to further explore this concept, this paper will show that while language threads together First Nations culture, spirituality, traditions and land, as well as their identity, each of these essential components also maintain and revitalize the language.
The Cherokee Indians thrived for thousand of years in the southern part of the continent we now call the United States. They learned how to farm the land, hunt, and fish. They were a peaceful, self-sufficient people when the settlers came. With the arrival of the new inhabitants, the Cherokees soon taught them how to farm, hunt, and fish. “By the 1820s, many Cherokees had adopted some of the cultural patterns of the white settlers as well” (National Park Service, n.d.). In 1827, two leaders of the Cherokee nation devised a constitution that was based primarily on the American Constitution. “Even as Major Ridge and John Ross were planning for the future of New Echota and an educated, well-governed tribe, the state of Georgia increased its pressure on the federal government to release Cherokee lands for white settlement” (National Park Service, n.d.). Once gold was discovered in Georgia, the white settlers could not resist owning the land for themselves at any cost.
Language shift, or language attrition, was a feature to a Darwinian evolution in which less complex and adaptable languages, like Creole, died and the more advanced and fittest languages, like English, survived (Carlisle, 2010). Modern linguistics challenges that it is not accurate to focus on the attrition of a language based on its structure, without looking at the social factors involved. There is very little to no development of Louisiana Creole and the reason for this is because of the restricted access to the language, through education and/or everyday interactions (Carlisle, 2010). As of today, there is no evidence of children growing up that speak Louisiana Creole French as their first language. It’s unlikely to find a fluent speaker below the age of 60. The 60-year-old-and-over generation learned the language when they were young, but after having to renounce the language in school, they only taught their children English. They came to appreciate the cultural impact of their abandonment of Louisiana Creole French in the 1960s. They then began to speak the language to their grandchildren (Audisio and Burke, 1988). For those few speakers below the age of 60, “they would be called ‘near-passive bilinguals.’ They may know many words and expressions but cannot construct or manipulate full sentences” (Brown, 1993). Current speakers speak English as well as or even better than
We need to be aware of the diversity in the classroom. Cultural diversity includes: bi-racial, adoptive, immigrant, gay, and step-families. It is a large majority of the students today even in my generation. Focusing on making a balanced curriculum that exposes the students to all of these different backgrounds is very important. I know that it is likely that a teacher will not be able to cater to every student, but it is important to involve each of them. There is a large percentage of students that have dropped out due to the lack of having a connection with the curriculum. It is frustrating that we are lacking progress in our schools to help these children connect when studies show that each cultural group will soon be equal in numbers. We need to form a better