Diversity Through Language
How Language Influences Society and Culture
Language is what unites us as humans. The use of a complex spoken language has always been a unifying factor among all civilizations and tribes. Other animals can make and understand sounds, but humans are the only species with the ability to convey precise information, even regarding abstract concepts.
It’s rather odd, however, that the unifying factor of language is a primary determinant of the many differences observed between cultures and across time. Communication is the transference of thought from one person to another, and the language in which communication occurs influences how that thought is processed and stored for later use.
There are around 7,000 languages spoken throughout the world today, which differ from one another in nearly every conceivable way. The words available for use and how sentences are formed play major roles in the internal thought process of an individual and a society as a whole.
Let’s look at some of the ways language impacts how we see and think about the world around us.
Language Dictates Focus
An Aboriginal community in Australia has an interesting way of denoting location. They don’t use words such as left or right, but instead use cardinal…
