Cultural Diversity In Language, By Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak grew up living a life that never lacked widespread cultural diversity. From a young age, Shafak was faced with an ever changing face of scenery, and the many groups of individuals that brought the picture to life. Her talk reveals her continuously growing understanding of the world around her through identifying the “power of circles”, or in other words, how being relative to ones own being and nothing else can result in a lack of hunger for a world so abundant with things and people with the capability to bring the soul alive. Although Shafak brings forth the idea of erasing cultural homogeneity from an educated and well spoken point of view, there are some underlying factors that need to be taken into account when solving an issue

Shafak speaks about her opinion on linguistic knowledge, suggesting that people who are only relative to their own language are minimized in terms of communication and have barriers that are set into place when trying to expand the understanding they have for the world’s different cultures. Although superficially this point does seem to be true, understanding a different language does not make one accustomed to the social aspects and certain sayings that comes along with many years of living and breathing it, as well as the culture it surrounds. Shafak views language as something that is easily obtained through study by emphasizing the ability to learn a new language through cultural exposure and personal practice, while that is only the beginning. The art of words is intertwined with centuries and centuries of knowledge and experience, and would take one that wasn’t born into it, a lifetime to fully understand the true depths to the words and how language brings forth power on the individual, and cultural level. Not only do languages differ vastly on a cultivated level, they also contrast heavily in a cognitive aspect. Nicolas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson discuss this thinking in “The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and its Importance for Cognitive Science”. Evans and Levinson recognize the true mental diversity of languages by suggesting that “languages differ so fundamentally from one another at every level of description (sound, grammar, lexicon, [and] meaning) that it is very hard to find any single structural property they share”(429). Shafak appears to advert to the widespread misconception of language uniformity, both on a cognitive and cultural dimension as she fails to recognize not only the intellectual differences that make mastering a language so difficult, but more importantly the heritage