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For this summary I watched a video called Voices of the World: The Extinction of Language and Linguistic Diversity. The video starts off with how people believe that there are about 6, 000 languages. David Crystal talks about how with all these different languages half of them are endangered of becoming extinct. Each different language offers a different point of view of the world and culture. He said that if different languages are lost then “we lose the meaning what is it to be human.” Then the video moves on to Australia and that this country has lost “95% of their linguistic heritage.” The video brings in Peter K. Austin a professor who has studied the aboriginal language for over 30 years. He says that 12 of the languages that he studies are no longer being spoken by native people. All of this language loss is due to the colonization of Australia. When people from distant lands started coming to Australia they brought sickness that the natives had no immune system against. Not only did sickness kill many people, but the foreigners that came to Australia killed locals. Western Aranda says “when the whites arrived there were 250 languages” along with 450 different dialects there was a total of 700 languages and now there is only 70 languages left. Luckily now there are radios that play the aboriginal’s …show more content…
There the video talks about how language was basically beaten from the poor. The prison has no dialect and things in the prison seem to be very hush hush. The video then moves to Mexico where Totonac is dying out because of the Spanish language. The Totonac culture is disappearing because it is basically frowned upon by many people. So all these kids that grew up speaking the Totonac language are learning Spanish and the Totonac culture is dying out. Kids that do speak and dress of Totonac are made fun of and therefore the culture will continue to die because of the way people view the
“Standard English was imposed on children of immigrant parents, then the children were separated from native English speakers, then the children were labeled “inferior” and “ignorant” (Hughes 70) because they could not speak Standard English. In addition to feeling inferior about their second language skills, these students also felt inadequate in regard to speaking their own mother tongues” (qtd in Kanae)
After I read the Smitherman's piece, the main argument that Smitherman is trying to tell us is that everyone has their own way of language. There are people with different ethnicity in America. Every communities has their own language and accents, noone should be telling anyone that they have language problem. Not allowing a person to use their language is racism. This is the problem Smitherman is trying to address in his piece of writing. I think by her writing this is to let people know and feel what is going on in the world. Her audience might be the Black American community. She wants the people to know that there is nothing wrong with speaking their own language anywhere and they should be able to speak how they want.
Today, the world has around “6,000 languages” that exist (Mcwhorter 429). According to John Mcwhorter, author of“The
‘Speaking in Tongues’ exemplifies these differing ideologies by focusing on a conversation between the uncle of the Cantonese-immersion student Kelly and his mother. Kelly’s Uncle shares the hope of all the families of language-immersion students, that the language skills gained will follow and aid their children throughout their lives. When prompted, parents explained the hope that through language-immersion children might maintain a respect for their heritage, form a competitive edge in the job market, grow into responsible and respectful world citizens and find a door to a higher class
Due to the certain accent’s stereotyping images, other “original English speaker” think they are uneducated, rude, and ignorance. TV comedy shows increased this negative image to audiences as making fun of their accent and laughed. The video introduced some words which are unfamiliar to us: cabinet is milkshake, gum band is rubber band, schlep is to carry, and pau hana means work is done. Those words and phrases are noticeable if they are native English speakers. On the other hand, I hardly notice those accents and dialects as a foreigner because I don’t have enough knowledge to judge what “standard English” is. In fact, we normally learn “standard English” in school as a foreigner, but we have a great chance to hear mixed dialects and accents everywhere because of mixed race society. Nevertheless, standard English accent is easier for me to understand. I easily distinguish and guess people’s hometown if they are foreigners by their accent. Still, it’s hard to recognize accents and dialect within states. Moreover, this video was difficult to understand because of the
What really is a language and how does it affect the world around us? Language is just a structure of words put together to communicate with one another. When one speaks all they are doing is causing their vocal cords to vibrate to produce different sound waves. This sounds so simple, but there are thousands of languages spoken throughout the world and each language is usually connected to a certain place. When someone travels to a different place where a language is foreign to them it can be life-changing as in The Naked Eye. Language constricts our thoughts and identities with the world around us. I’m arguing that language is as much of a necessity in our world as food or water, it’s the basis on how we get through each and every day.
In the United States, an emphasize in learning the dominant language, English for example, can inevitably put other languages within the country in extinction. In reality, there are many other spoken languages in the United Sates, like those spoken by Native Americans, that are becoming endangered because of the immensity of more used languages. One may ask, what is an endangered language? According to Michael Cahill (Bonvillain), who has studied and researched many different endangered languages around the world, a language is endangered when "it is in fairly eminent danger of dying out." Cahill states two ways to quickly identify when a language is on its way to becoming endangered. One is when the "children in the community do not speak the native language of their parents, and the other is when there are only a small number of people left in the ethnolinguistic community" that know how to speak the language (Bonvillain). In specific, the Cherokee language fits into the category of an endangered language in the United Sates because less and less speakers speak it and because it is taught less often to younger generations as well. Although Cherokee, a language containing its own rules in grammar, morphemes, syntax, and phonetics, was once a language spoken in vast areas around the United States by native peoples, the language struggles to survive albeit historical foreign attack and current domination of other languages such as English.
What is language death? Campbell (1994:1961) as cited in Janse, M and Tol, S (2003) describes language death as the loss of a language due to gradual shift in the dominant language. Language death sounds stark and to say language death is like saying a person is dying (Crystal, D:2000, 1). It is a protracted change of a state (Mufwene, SS: 2004, 204). What are endangered languages? They are languages that are in the process of dying (Janse, M; Tol, S:2003). They are languages that exist under the shadow of a dominant language and are on the verge of becoming extinct (Lewis, M et al: 2014). Endangered languages are a serious concern in which linguists have turned their attention too (Lewis, M et al: 2014). The death and endangerment of languages across the world is a major concern among linguists and anthropologists (Crystal, D:2000).
Have you ever wondered who taught you to talk the way you do? People learn to talk and express themselves everyday of their lives. Starting from the day you were born you used language or some form of it to communicate with those around you. As a baby you usually show your displeasure with your new surroundings by crying, and if you don’t the doctor will make sure you do. Everyday we express our point of view to others in some form of language. Whether it is through verbal communication, written discourse or through body language, you can tell if a person is upset, angry, or happy. We as human beings don’t realize how much language has to do with our lives. How can you determine if one of your friends is angry with you? Is there a different tone to their voice? Do they have a stern look on their face? Of course they do, your friend feels the need to express their anger to you by these different forms of language. Where do we learn to use these different forms of language? How are our uses of these languages shaped? The three main contributing factors to how we express ourselves through language come from our schooling, our friends, and most of all from our families.
Languages vary widely but not without limit. The central goal of linguistics is to describe the diversity of human languages and explain the constraints on that diversity. Generative linguists following Chomsky have claimed that linguistic diversity must be constrained by innate parameters that are set as a child learns a language. In contrast, other linguists following Greenberg have claimed that there are statistical tendencies for co-occurrence of traits reflecting universal systems biases, rather than absolute constraints or parametric variation. Here we use computational phylogenetic methods to address the nature of constrains on linguistic diversity in an evolutionary framework. First, contrary to the generative account of parameter setting,
Language influences the view of the world, embodies a person’s essential for survival to communicate with people, interpret ideas, and have perspective about cultural and traditional knowledge. However, Language extinction is a huge element in every day’s life. Because language extinction also means the culture, religion, social values, and its history is slowly getting loss at the same time. There are many factors to language extinction due to the population, educational, and economic principles. Melanesian is one of the rapid extinction of the world's languages that are endangered before they disappear completely.
In the view of typology, the comparison of different languages, linguists can compare and contrast languages and in turn understand people better and how communication differs around the globe. “Sure, losing an individual language doesn’t destroy everything, but each language that’s lost is one less (incredibly rich) data point which can be used to better understand how people do language, and what other ways things can be done in language. In addition, individual languages have plenty to teach us as well” (Styler). Language enables new thoughts to be brought up and as stated before from the Whorf hypothesis language shapes the way we perceive the world around us. People think differently around the world because of the way their single language allows them to think according to their environment. In the consideration of endangered languages going extinct, the diversity in ideas and conceptual views would be erased as well due to the lack of language diversity. In a bigger perspective, focusing on what the Whorf hypothesis helps to understand how diverse our world is with the way each every individual perceives the world. If endangered languages went extinct, then our world would gradually become boring and lack dissimilar ideas. In order to maintain our diverse world, endangered languages must be saved because as one
‘Language death’ does not always entail ‘language murder’. ‘Language death ' is when a community no longer speaks a language that they used to speak regularly. This may occur for many reasons such as social, economic, political and demographic factors. Along with the attitudes of the individuals within a community. ‘Language murder’ is when a community has happily left their language to die out and this can also be referred to as a shift in a language, which has the linguistic term, language shift. This is when a country will shift from using one language to another. This essay will look further into the reasons as to why some languages die.
Language has pioneered many interracial relationships and historical milestones. Language is a necessity for basic communication and cultural diversity. Being multilingual is a skill proven influential to a successful future. Due to rapid globalization, countries all over the world are stressing the importance of learning a second, or even third, language. With the exception of time and lack of resources, adults have very few widely applicable disadvantages to learning multiple languages. However, language learning as a child presents more complications. Some of those include not having enough funding at the elementary school level to introduce a program for secondary language, academic overload for the youth, stress for both the parent and student parties, and the mixing of languages. Not all of these complications are true in any or all situations, however, and the absence of them provides multitudes of opportunity for future career and academic success. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the parents or the education legislation to decide whether they encourage the learning of a secondary language at the young age necessary for retention. “The general consensus is that it takes between five to seven years for an individual to achieve advanced fluency,” therefore the younger a child begins to learn, the more likely they are to benefit to the maximum potential (Robertson). Keeping the language learning in high school or beginning the process earlier is a greatly controversial discussion that is important to address because of the topic’s already lengthy suspension.
Over the years English inarguably has reached a status of a global language and commonly is characterized as a lingua franca. It has become the language that is spoken by millions of people all over the world; as the mother tongue, as the language used for international communication and as the language learned in the millions of schools.