Impact Of Cultural Diversity On Language.docx

Impact of cultural diversity on language Cultural diversity is the existence of a variety of cultural or ethnic groups within a society. Every culture has uniqueness in itself and one of them is language. People from different cultures speak different languages. In my opinion, cultural diversity has both positive and negative impact on the language of a society. People from diverse cultures bring new language skills, new ways of thinking, and creative solutions to difficult problems and negotiating skills. It also brings the mixing of languages in our speech. New languages arise as the result of the fusion of different languages. For instance, Malaysia is a multicultural country. Malaysian language, which is also called ‘bahasa rojak’ has taken in many words from other countries. A person will start off speaking Bahasa Malaysia, and branch out into English, with some Chinese and Indian language, or Manglish words thrown in. As an example, "You memang gilar betul lar" which means "You are really mad", is a mix of English, Malay and Manglish. Cultural diversity encourages the occurrence of new languages. Cultural diversity leads to linguistic variety or multilinguism. Languages vary from one place to another, from one social group to another, and from one situation to another. People cannot understand each other and may deal with communication problems if they do not have a common language. For instance, in a group of people with different cultures and languages such as Korean, Chinese, French and Spanish, they are unable to interact in their own spoken languages. Without a common language, the relationship between people all over the world cannot be fostered and the communication barrier is unable to break down. Cultural diversity divides people as they possess their own languages. Moreover, cultural diversity also leads to language change. Linguistic distinctiveness can be achieved through vocabulary, pronunciation which usually via exaggeration of some variants already available in the environment, morphological processes, syntactic constructions, and so on.