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The importance of language in culture
The relationship between language and cultures
The importance of language in culture
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American Indian languages is a vital importance to preserving the American Indian culture. Language is much more than communication. When we talk about it on the surface, that’s what it is. But language is the way we think. And it’s the way it’s been handed down through generations. And if you lose the way your family has been speaking, you lose who you are. If languages dies, some consequences that will occur in the family level will be the loss of inherited knowledge which includes, traditional and contemporary cultural expressions, values, cultural heritage, rituals, legends, folk tales and many more. Language and culture go hand in hand together. So if language dies, culture will go with, as well as something personal. A degree of one’s
In Marianne Mithun and Wallace L. Chafe’s article “Recapturing the Mohawk Language”, the two authors focus on an important aspect of language that I strongly agree on. Mithun and Chafe demonstrate how native Mohawk speakers acquire unconsciously all necessary rules of the Mohawk language. I find that their discovery can be used as an argument to prove professor Ray Jackendoff’s first fundamental rule: mental grammar.
The service of the code talkers was not declassified until 1969, after which public attention grew. The purpose of this investigation is to assess what factors led to differences in the amount of public attention given to the Navajo code talkers and their Comanche counterparts after the declassification. Factors possibly affecting the fame of both tribes’ code talkers will be examined to gain an understanding of why the Navajo received more public attention. These factors include circumstances surrounding their training prior to their service, their performance during the war, and their situation after the war. Due to the limited number of works regarding the Comanche co...
Pages one to sixty- nine in Indian From The Inside: Native American Philosophy and Cultural Renewal by Dennis McPherson and J. Douglas Rabb, provides the beginning of an in-depth analysis of Native American cultural philosophy. It also states the ways in which western perspective has played a role in our understanding of Native American culture and similarities between Western culture and Native American culture. The section of reading can be divided into three lenses. The first section focus is on the theoretical understanding of self in respect to the space around us. The second section provides a historical background into the relationship between Native Americans and British colonial power. The last section focus is on the affiliation of otherworldliness that exist between
The Board of Indian Commissioners was a committee that advised the United States federal government on Native American policy. The committee also had the purpose to inspect the supplies that were delivered to Indian reservations to ensure that the government fulfilled the treat obligations to tribes. The committee was established by congress on April 10th, 1869, and authorized the President of the United States to organize a board of ten or less people to oversee all aspect of Native American policy. President Ulysses S. Grant wanted to come up with a new policy, which would be more humane, with Native American tribes. The policy would be known as the Peace Policy, which aimed to be free of political corruption. This policy was prominent on
Even though the dominance of a language can allow for the loss of a culture, it can also bring awareness. In schools, local community centers and other various places, foreign languages are taught, not only do non-native speakers take on these languages but native speakers do as well to keep their culture. By doing so it “revitalizes cultures and cultural artifacts through foreign influences, technologies, and markets.” (Gerdes
Ordinarily, Native American tribes were separated by ethno-linguistic groups. The immense linguistic diversity was due to the isolation and disperses of the tribes all throughout the United States. The surviving languages were not numerous and they had the widest geographic distribution that was all over the country. A few became combined with roots of other tribe languages, which evolved new languages and dialects causing a great deal of miscellany and variety. Unfortunately, a large quantity of these languages became extinct with the European contact the...
Why is it significant that the Pueblo tradition of story telling makes no distinction between types of stories, such as historical, sacred, or just plain gossip?
There are consistent patterns or themes regarding Native American world views and the differentiation of cultural elements and society. Native Americans retained control of institutional and cultural orders against the assimilation effort because all aspects of Native American societies are interrelated, guided by the broader cultural world views. Each cultural or institutional element is, in fact, overlapped with other elements, so change in one element inevitably affects the broader cultural and social complex. While adopting to a new environment and small changes was possible in the West, where social and cultural elements are separate from each other, Native Americans were faced with conflicts and a potential, large disruption of the existing social orders.
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.
We may hear of a concept from another culture and try to make sense of it within our own culture, which evidently creates misunderstandings. We must understand how our language and culture is how we organize the world and attempt to overcome that and see the world organized from another cultures point of view and by doing so this will start the process of understanding Native American thought and thus place their philosophy beside westerns. To stress the importance of language, another example is used by Anne Waters when she states “hearing is being” meaning that our language has trained us to only hear certain sounds, or in other words, what we hear is determined by our language and culture. This stresses their influence on our lives. As mentioned above, Native Americans believe in non-propositional knowledge (such as dreams) and we have just mentioned the need to recognize assumptions and avoid them. Therefore it is extremely relevant what …. Said when stating how obscured it is that Native Americans beliefs are superstitions and
The Iroquois includes many Indian tribes speaking a language of the Iroquoian family, such as the Huron, Mohawk, Onondaga, and Seneca among others. However, the Huron is often spoken of separately. The Iroquois differs from the Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Iroquois League. All of them were affected by the arrival and colonization by Europeans. While Iroquois have a reputation of being violent, they were at times peaceful and were employed by different European companies; they also spread their culture and some European ideas with them. The Iroquois League has been said to have influenced the Founding Fathers, but is that true? Another question is whether the Iroquois were cannibals. They believed in witchcraft, but witchcraft
Like many Americans I initially grouped all Native Americans into one melting pot. During the Haskell Indian Nations cultural day, on June 21,st 2010, the speakers talked about how different tribes are not the same; they have different beliefs...
Crawford, James. Effective Language Education Practices and Native Language Survival. Reyhner, Jon. Montana:8m (NALI) Institute, 1990. Print.
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.”
The dominance of a global language will also cause cultural identities to be displaced; this is because identities and languages are inseparable, the shift of local languages will have the same dislocation on cultural identities. A half native Canadian friend of mine, who ancestors belong to the Homalco tribe, once told me that she felt pity and regretful about the fact that she was unable to speak her tribe’s dialect and would never be able to learn it as the dialect has recently extinct in 2012. In addition, she said that most people have a language they want to learn that connects them to their culture, and the only one she had is lost. This shows that when people use less of a certain language, or even stop using it, they will weaken the sense of belongingness to that certain culture. Language can help individuals link to their cultural backgrounds, and develop cultural identities, but this is not always achievable since many languages and dialects are becoming extinct due to the spread of English as discussed in the previous argument. As a result, when local languages are dislocated by English, cultural identities will also be