Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
The relationship between language and ethnic identity
Languages' influences on culture
The Importance Of Language To Culture
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Sociolinguistics – How language is influenced by social and cultural factor
Sociolinguistics is the internal examination of how language works. It investigates the individual and social variations in the flow or development of language. A language reflects a nation’s characteristic and contains historical and cultural backgrounds of the nation. Every nation has its own way of living their life. They have their own rules and regulations, which are handed down from generation to generation. Every nation has a different social background and geographic situation. They have different cultures which they follow according to their teachings and religions. Sociolinguistics help explain dialect, social variation, social impact on word usage and the occupational influence of language usage.
It is a common fact that we are not only taught language itself but we are also taught culture of that nation. Language is the one which reflect all the characteristics of a nation’s culture. It also stores all the social lives and experience of a nation. When a child starts learning a language of a different nation, at the same time he is learning the culture of that nation too. Learning a culture of the language is very important because if a person is not familiar with the culture of a nation, he/she cannot learn the language of the nation well. “I did not believe that the world is made of quarks or electro-magnetic waves, or stars, or planets, or of any such things, the world is made of language” (Harms 21). This shows the importance of language in today’s society. Language is a part of one’s culture and every country gives preference to its own language. As one of the founding fathers of the Afrikaans language, Rev SJ du Toit, wrote in 1891, which ...
... middle of paper ...
...the separateness to other aspect it determines the occupational duties and varieties in all perspectives. There is a profound Relationship between a dialect and a social order. Individuals gain and utilize a dialect in a social order. Dialect could be viewed as a deliberation of reflections, an arrangement of frameworks. The major shift of change can be utilized by the Educators who want to convert their learners' sociolinguistic ability overnight. However by contextualizing the presentation of dialect, normally auditing the effect of social and social components on dialect, and incorporating lessons with a practical approach, instructors can like to build the sociolinguistic familiarity with their understudies. These things require not be presented as confined activities. However a logical and social angle could be consolidated to most activities and illustrations.
As anthropologists seek to understand the culture that they are studying they must overcome the language barrier. Similar to the concept of culture, “people use language to encode their experiences, to structure their understanding of the world and themselves, and engage with on...
Most people who grow up with a foreign language spoken in there house grow up with an advantage in society. This advantage can only occur once the individual learning that foreign language also learns the dominant language spoken in that country. Once both of these languages are learned and mastered, the individual has now placed them se...
Language is a means of communication and it varies from one community to another. Everyone has a mother tongue which depended on the family’s upbringing. A second language can be learned along the way. There are also instances where a person is born in a community that speaks two languages and therefore, had to learn both languages. The quality of the languages learned will be affected by how well the community speaks both languages. This can later develop into a new form of language. The essay describes the frustration of the author who felt rejected by different groups for speaking a different form of language. Her essay aims to gain sympathy from readers by seeing the issue from her point of view. Anzaldua attempts to achieve this in her essay by raising issues on identity and discrimination. She wanted to highlight that language is not determined by a country’s physical borders.
Style has been an integral component in the field of linguistics. Linguistic style refers to a person’s speaking pattern, which can include different features such as pace, pitch, intonation, syntactic patterns, etc. Styles of speech is learned, and is often influenced by location, gender, ethnicity, and age. As different cultures and sub-cultures arise, linguistic variations occur and different sociolinguistic styles come into being. Each style can index social meanings such as group membership, personal attributes or beliefs.
Language primarily is a system of communication (Fellowes and Oakley, 2014. p. 16). It is a “socially shared code” meaning it is custom to a certain group of humans and the language is understood by all in the group (Suri, n.d.). At all stages of life, language is an expressive tool that humans’ use as a vehicle to express ones’ self, ideas and thoughts (Kilgour, 1999). When language is learnt, certain notions about what is appropriate depending on different context is learnt (Emmitt, Zbaracki, Komesaroff & Pollock, 2010. p. 73). These notions are reflective of M. Halliday’s language register, language is diverse and is representative of context of interaction, who the communication is between and the communitive purpose as well as the mode of communication [oral or written] (Fellowes and Oakley, 2014. p. 19 & 20). Variety of vernacular is a diverse language barrier that may affect a person at any stage of life; refers to our everyday language and slang that is different to another group or region (Casano, n.d.). An example would be, this language would be appropriate for friends and close family but a different variety of vernacular would be used amoung work
Socioeconomic status (SES) is a major topic of interest within the study of language development in children. It has been indicated as one of the most widely studied constructs in the social sciences (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002). Even with the wide variety of studies involving SES, there has never been a complete consensus on what SES actually represents. Beyond the development of language, SES also affects the overall development of a child. These developmental differences then further lead to differences in language acquisition. When looking at SES, there are many factors to consider. The concept of capital seems to best embody the current meaning psychologists hold of SES, according to Bradley and Corwyn (2002). Capital is favored because of its inclusion of access to financial (material resources), human (nonmaterial resources such as education) and social capital (social connections). The current working definition of SES involves family income, education level, and occupations, which influence the theories and characteristics that children develop (Hill, 2006). The effects of socioeconomic status on children are shown through many factors that affect language development through the child’s overall growth, their cognitive development, as well as their stress management and the parenting styles that they are exposed to.
In her article, How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think, Lera Boroditsky (2009) explains how the results of her experiments support the idea that the structure of language shapes the way we think. In one of her experiments, she found that English speakers would place cards showing temporal progression in temporal order from left to right, Hebrew speakers would place them right to left, and that the Kuuk Thaayorre would place them from east to west. This shows that the written language affects how time is represented to them. In another one of her experiments, she asked German and Spanish speakers to describe some items and found that the masculinity or femininity of the noun in their respective languages affects how it is ultimately described. This can also be seen in how artists represent the human form of abstract entities like death. Boroditsky concludes that “Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.” (Core reader p. 49) I would like to add that language is also the foundation of a person’s culture, pride, and self by exploring articles written by Eric Liu, Amy Tan, and Gloria Anzaldua.
Knud Knudsen and Ivar Aasen’s rivalry occurred in the the middle of the 19th century. At that time the theories and focus when planning language was on the pure linguistic aspect. That meant that the social aspect was not taking into account at that time. The practice of including the social factors in linguistics, which is called sociolinguistics, was only used later when the Nynorsk and Bokmål had been introduced and had been mandatory to be taught in schools for some time.
Sociolinguistic ethnography is a relatively new approach in sociolinguistics (SL) (Wardaugh & Fuller, 2015), which Tusting and Maybin (2007) referred to as an emerging area of work with the title linguistic ethnography (LE). LE has emerged as a cover term for research that integrates the study of linguistic practices in a particular setting with ethnographically gained knowledge about wider societal norms and ideologies. Sociolinguistics, on the other hand is concerned with language in social and cultural context, especially how people with different social identities (e.g. gender, age, race, ethnicity, class) speak and how their speech changes
Each culture has their own set of symbols with different experiences and perceptions. A symbol represents a nation, a country, rules, xan represent everything.The meaning of a symbol is not literal or instinctive, the people of the culture must interpret and share the meaning of the symbol with the next generations. Some are represented by nonverbal language, while others are represented by objects. However, the most powerful symbol is language. Language is a verbal and written representations , which convinces the world of a meaning. It is important for the continuity of the culture and crucial for the communication. Although language is part of our culture, people should not deny themselves the opportunity to learn other languages. In Canada, a group of French people refuse to learn English, this being the official language of this country, for fear of losing their cultural
Language is a part of our everyday lives, and we can describe the meaning of language in many ways. As suggested in Gee and Hayes (2011, p.6 ) people can view language as something in our minds or something existing in our world in the form of speech, audio recordings, and writings or we can view language as a way of communicating with a group of people. Language can be used to express our emotions, make sense of our mental and abstract thoughts and assists us in communicating with others around us. Language is of vital importance for children to enable them to succeed in school and everyday life. Everyone uses both oral and written language. Language developed as a common ability amongst human beings with the change
Language and ethnicity are known to be closely intertwined (Giles & Coupland 1991). However, prior to analyzing interrelation between language and ethnicity I faced the problem of identifying the concept of ‘ethnicity’ itself. Thus, Fishman (1997: 327) points out that ‘ethnicity’ like other notions it is in a close association with, i.e. ‘race’, ‘people’, ‘nation’, ‘nationality’, is not “an exact scientific term”. Therefore it is not clearly defined and thus is open to interpretations (Ibid). In my search I came across a number of rather vogue explanations, and the most common aggregated dictionary definition of ‘ethnicity’ is ‘a belonging to a particular social group that has a common national or cultural tradition’ (MacMillan Dictionary, Oxford Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Dictionary, etc.). Dictionary of Cultural Literacy does single out and include language into the ethnicity definition saying that it is an “identity with or membership in a particular racial, national, or cultural group and observance of that group's customs, beliefs, and language”. However, is language always an inevitable part of one’s ethnicity or the ethnicity of a group? Definitely, the most understandable case of interrelation between language and ethnicity is the one when a person is born and lives on a specific territory which historically had one dominant ethnos and one dominant language, so ethnicity is predetermined by close bound between language and territory (Fishman 1997). Thus, Tabouret-Keller (1997) gives an example of a school boy from Belize who identifies himself as Belizean because he was born in that country, he lives there and also is a native speaker of its Creole language. But there are two more cases when interrelation of ethnicity and...
The book An Intorduction of Sociolinguistics is an outstanding introductary book in the field of sociolinguistics. It encompasses a wide range of language issues. In chapter 13, Wardhaugh provides a good insight to the relationship between language and gender. He explains gender differences of language-in-use with concise examples. Wardhaugh riases questions about sexist language and guides readers to look closer at how people use language differently because of their own gender in daily life. According to the Whorfian hypothesis, which indicates that the way people use language reflects their thoughts, different genders adapt different communication strategies.
Language is nothing but a media which expresses feelings, ideas, experiences and even pains properly to others. Cultural background is the origin of language. Language is one of the channels which promote human relations and human affections. Language always unites the people and sometimes language itself diverse the people. Without the language we cannot imagine the existence of human beings on the earth. Language is a system of words that people used to express thoughts, feelings each other. The word ‘language’ derived from Latin “lingua” which means ‘tongue, speech’. The word sometimes used to refer to codes, ciphers and other kind of communication systems. For example computer programming.
In a sociolinguist perspective “the idea of a spoken standardized language is a hypothetical construct” (Lippi-Green, 2012, pp. 57). They are the form of Britain English and American English that are used in textbooks and on broadcasting. Giles and Coupland observe that “A standard variety is the one that is most often associated with high socioeconomic status, power and media usage in a particular community” (1991, p. 38). Both native speakers and learners of English, where English is taught as a second or foreign language (hereafter ESL/EFL), speak dialect of English in everyday conversation (Kachru, 2006, pp. 10-11; Owens 2012, p.