Language Diversity Essay

Words: 1274
Pages: 6

Bivek Ojha

English 101 SL
Mr Rothacker

Languages, Race, and Culture: Related or Not?

Language, culture and race are related but the relationship between language and either of the other elements is marginal. Language characteristically has a setting (Yule). It is quite often realized that people who speak a given language can trace their belonging to a specific human race or a set of races of people (Bartleby.com); a race being a group of people differentiated by the different physical attributes from other groups. Language also does not exist without attachment to culture (Salzmann). That is to say from the social inherited combination of beliefs and practices that determines every person’s texture of life. It is common to find many anthropologists attempting to study man under there cardinal rubrics of language, race, and culture. In most cases, the first thing anthropologists do with natural areas is mapping it out from the three cardinal points of view. The anthropologists’ maps often attempt to answer questions as to what are the key divisions of the human being, what are the most accommodative or inclusive linguistic groupings, and what the distribution of each of the inclusive languages. The other question addressed would be how these people of each given area segment themselves into cultural entities. This is a classic example of the interdependence of language with culture and race as human phenomena.
Historians and anthropologists have established that languages, races, and cultures are never disturbed in a parallel sense, and also that the areas of spread of the three human phenomena inter cross in an intriguing fashion (Bartleby.com). The history of each of these elements ought to take a distinctive course. Race has a way of intermingling with culture in a

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manner that language does not (Yon). It is typical to see language spreading far beyond the original community or home, and invading far away territories of totally new races and also new spheres of culture. A language has the possibility of dying out in its initial original area of inception and thriving in territories of persons that were violently hostile to the founding community of the language. Furthermore, historical accidents continue to constantly rearrange the borders of culture without necessarily merging the existing linguistic divisions. If we were to thoroughly convince ourselves that the human element of race is in a supreme way indifferent to the existing history of cultures and languages (Bartleby.com), that indeed these are no more explainable than complex physical sciences, then we would have gained a point of view that would have allowed for certain interests to cultural references like Anglo­saxondom and
Teutonism (Kidd). It is also important to note that a combination of languages does not have to at least necessary match a racial group or culture, and this is quite easily demonstrated. Human beings may even exhibit how a single language traverses race and cultural areas typical case is in the United States of America where there are many millions of Negroes who do not know any other language. They consider their mother tongue as English; just as much as the English language would inalienably be claimed as the language of the people from England.
Race, language, and culture are scarcely correlated (Bartleby.com). However this does not imply or mean that they never interact. There exists a tendency for racial and cultural divisions of humans to exhibit correspondence with the linguistic divisions, though in each case the linguistic divisions may not necessarily of similar extent or degree of pertinence as the others. This therefore implies that there exists a considerably fairly definite line of division between language, race and culture, despite a fairly considerable amount of overlapping of the

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three elements. In laconic terms, race, culture, and language are interrelated but the degree of importance of