What is race?

Race as a social construction

• (read page 162) • The thought among academics is that race is

best thought of as a social construction• A social construction is an idea or concept that

doesn’t exist in nature but it is created and given meaning by people

• How have we created race?

Racism – intolerance of people perceived to be inherently or

genetically inferior

• Racism as an ideology– Nazism– Slavery – story of sugar• Human trafficking

Discrimination

• What is discrimination?• What is institutional discrimination: a situation

in which the policies, practices, or laws of an organization or government disadvantage people because of their cultural differences

• Examples? (apartheid, ghettos in Nazi Germany)

Ethnicity

• Ethnicity – a subjective identification– Personal – who we think and feel we are. We

assign qualities to ourselves and others assign qualities to us.

– Behavioral – the components of the behavioral aspect of ethnicity inclue• language, • religious beliefs • Food,• Styles of dress, dance, music or art.

Indigenous Peoples – first peoples

Characteristics– Ancestral ties to pre-colonial or pre-settler

societies– Self identification and acceptance by others as a

member of and indigenous group– Status in society as non-dominant

Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups but may prefer to identify themselves by different names.

Race and Ethnicity in the Global Context

• Why do governments identify and enumerate different racial or ethnic groups?

• (Enumerate means to count)

What is language?

Why do we need language?

Language

• A system of communication based on symbols that have agreed upon meanings.

• How and why is language a key component of culture.

• What are examples of language as part of culture?

Dialect is also part of language

• Dialect is a particular variety of a language characterized by distinct vocabulary, grammar and or pronunciation.

• For example: • http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/li

nguistics/• These people are all from the same country,

why do they sound different?

Types of language

• Sign languages – no spoken languages used to communicate with people whose hearing or speech is impaired.

• Body language – gestures, facial expressions and other body movements

• Touch/tactile language – Braille, • Specialized languages • Natural languages – languages have have emerged

and evolved within living and historic communities • Artificial languages – Elvish, Vulcan, Klingon

How many languages in the world?

• 6900 different languages in the world• See chart on page 101 for the estimated

numbers of speakers in different languages.

Language families

• Languages have been around for about 30,000 years but many people cannot agree on the origins of language because early languages weren’t written down.

• The world’s languages have been classified into language families – a collection of languages that share a common but distant ancestor.

• There about 90 different language families but 6 are considered major language families.

Major language families

• A hearth is a region or place where an innovation, idea, belief or cultural practice begins i.e. language and/or religion

• The spread of language families is associated with migrations of different groups.

Language diffusion

• Three forces that help diffuse language• Politics• Religion• Economics

• Map of the Roman World

• Linguistic dominance is a situation when one language becomes comparatively more powerful than another language

Language Dynamics

• How do languages change from one place to another

• What new words have been added to the English language?

• How do these words reflect a change in culture? • A loan word is a word that originates in one

language and is incorporated into the vocabulary of another language. What loan words can you list?

Pidgin and Creole languages

• A pidgin language is one that combines vocabulary and/or grammar from two or more languages.

• A creole language is a language that develops from a pidgin language and is taught as a first language: Ex: Hawaiian Creole English.

Lingua Franca

• A language that is used to help trade or business between people who speak different languages.

• Some say English is a lingua Franca both others say that English will not become a global language. Please read why on page 111

Language Diversity Index

• The LDI is the assortment of languages in an area. It is measured with 0.00 to .99.

• If a country has a linguistic diversity of .00 then it is likely that two people chosen at random will speak the same language.

• Countries close to a 1.0 will have considerable linquistic diversity.

• U.S officially has 176 languages with a LDI of …. .27• Look at the chart and map on 115

Languages at risk

Endangered language – a language that is no longer taught to children by their parents and is not used by conversation every

Extinct language – a language that has no living speakers