Linguistic Society of America

The educational system in America has seen a great change in the way schools service their cultural and linguistic learners. Once pushed aside as bystanders by teachers waiting for the English language to arrive so instruction could begin, the professional educator today realizes a student’s primary language is a great resource to be utilized when acquiring the second language. School systems have accepted the fact cultural diversity is now the norm in education therefore, many educators like…

What are the biggest challenges immigrants face when going to America and to what extent can they be overcome? The issues focused on in the essay are the biggest challenges that immigrants face in their day-to-day lives in a new place. An immigrant is someone who moves to another country permanently. Some issues they struggle with most are the cultural differences, the language barrier and trying to make a living. Those points and more are explored through the sources used to write this essay.…

Brushing Away Bias In his article "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" Horace Miner analyzes the exotic practices of the tribal society Nacirema, developing an intricate persuasive social commentary on the prevalence and effects of cultural prejudices and ethnocentrism on the sociological imagination. In addition to utilizing kairos, ethos, pathos and logos to exhibit that language shapes perspectives generated by cultural relativism. By writing from a different cultural perspective in a…

What can strike someone more than the fact that 473 languages are currently close to extinction and in America alone, and that 182 are endangered? These statistics should make all humans consider the fact that diversity is no longer a thing, and that English is the most dominant language. Language is an aspect that makes humans unique individuals in the world and it allows them express their identity, but when languages are being endangered that means there is a threat to identity. Over the…

we come from, and who we associate with. One may be shocked to realize just how much we – as a society – tend to judge someone’s background, character, and intentions based solely on an individual’s language, dialect, or even the choice of a single word. The study of language contact focuses on how speakers of differing languages can influence one another’s speech – as well as – the origin and linguistic composition of pidgin and creole languages. These special languages form when speakers of…

once wrote in his essay, Slang In America, “Language, be it remember’d, is not an abstract construction of the learn’d, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground” (482). This quote expresses how the American language is created by the people of society, which could be said about the languages teenagers speak in America, considering how many…

attest to the Black English Vernacular (BEV) as being a remnants and a fusion of the West African Language used by enslaved persons brought to the Americas over 400 years ago. Enslaved people were denied a formal education, but were required to learn the language to communicate with white master, hence the BEV dialect was fashioned. In today’s society, this dialect has greatly influenced different sectors of the English language, from slang to highly respected fables such as the Uncle Remus…

America is a multicultural society with an abundance of accents just as diverse as its people. The documentary American Tongues explores these differences in speech and how exactly they affect and shape the lives of American speakers. It does this through an social examination of a few American accents, accompanied by commentary from professional linguistic experts. The documentary emphasized that accents can either bring us Americans together or set us apart. The accent one has can reflect a…

People do not come into contact with the language, it depends on who control’s it and has the power over it. All of the indigenous languages are threatened, and a lot of them have disappeared and the ones that haven’t are still at risk. If there is a society that speaks the same language as the other language, they are being in contact with at least one other group and most likely several relatively small groups and it is an advantage to maintain different languages. The languages that are close…

In 20th century China, political chaos dominated all aspects of society. The Chinese 1949 Communist Takeover forced many innocent citizens to relocate to America to escape persecution and turmoil. Among the many who immigrated was Amy Tan’s family, whose journey migrating sculpted themes in Tan’s writing. Tan’s firsthand experience in two settings allows her to fully immerse herself into both and present clear definitions between the two, exemplified in The Joy Luck Club, written to reflect her…