Linguistic Diversity Quotes

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All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
Terry Eagleton (Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (The Terry Lectures Series))
One of the goals of education is not simply to fill students with facts and information but to help them learn how to learn.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
Both sexes have assholes, and both sexes have nipples. Yet only asshole is a genderless derogatory term. In the name of equality and linguistic diversity, I’m going to start using the word nipple as a synonym for asshole. Example: “Bra, you’re being an asshole.” “Nah, bra, you’re being the nipple.
Jarod Kintz (The Days of Yay are Here! Wake Me Up When They're Over.)
India's linguistic diversity surprises many Westerners, but there are nearly thirty languages in India with at least a million native speakers. There are more native speakers of Tamil on our planet than of Italian. Likewise, more people speak Punjabi than German, Marathi than French, and Bengali than Russian. There are more Telugu speakers than Czech, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Slovak, and Swedish speakers combined.
Bob Harris (The International Bank of Bob: Connecting Our Worlds One $25 Kiva Loan at a Time)
Can we reconcile indefinitely these two imperatives: the desire to preserve every individual's special identity and the need for Europeans to be able to communicate with one another all the time and as freely as possible? We cannot leave it to time to solve the dilemma and prevent people from engaging, a few years hence, in bitter and fruitless linguistic conflicts. We know all too well what time will do. The only possible answer is a voluntary policy aimed at strengthening linguistic diversity and based on a simple idea: nowadays everybody obviously needs three languages. The first is his language of identity; the third is English. Between the two we have to promote a third language, freely chosen, which will often but not always be another European language. This will be for everyone the main foreign language taught at school, but it will also be much more than that--the language of the heart, the adopted language, the language you have married, the language you love.
Amin Maalouf (In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong)
In the law, rights are islands of empowerment. . . . Rights contain images of power, and manipulating those images, either visually or linguistically, is central in the making and maintenance of rights. In principle, therefore, the more dizzyingly diverse the images that are propagated, the more empowered we will be as a society.
Patricia J. Williams
languages as Asians, who outnumber them nearly four to one.121 Linguistic diversity is not only a sign of cultural isolation and fragmentation, it contributes to the barriers
Thomas Sowell (Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective)
We routinely put the less experienced teachers with the neediest students. No other profession does this. A challenging medical case gets the attention of top specialists and skilled surgeons. It would be considered malpractice to put someone unskilled or new to the profession on a complicated medical case. Yet, in education, we subject our neediest dependent learners to inadequate instruction given their needs, or we allow them to lose valuable instructional time because of questionable discipline practices.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
The old adage we usually hear is that “practice makes perfect.” Based on what we know about neuroplasticity and deliberate practice, we should rephrase that to read, “practice makes permanent.” As you organize yourself for this self-reflective prep work, remember that it is not about being perfect but about creating new neural pathways that shift your default cultural programming as you grow in awareness and skill.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
Culture, it turns out, is the way that every brain makes sense of the world. That is why everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, has a culture. Think of culture as software for the brain’s hardware. The brain uses cultural information to turn everyday happenings into meaningful events. If we want to help dependent learners do more higher order thinking and problem solving, then we have to access their brain’s cognitive structures to deliver culturally responsive instruction.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.
Edward O. Wilson (The Social Conquest of Earth)
Catholicism fascinated him, the contortions it put itself through to make ends meet. Father Murray had kept returning to the word 'despair.' There'd been a little (bizarre, Luke thought) linguistic diversion into Latin. Desperare, formed by the 'de' prefex, signifying the removal of or from, and 'sperare,' meaning to hope. The removal of hope. That was despair. The reasoning being that you couldn't live without hope. What Murray hadn't said (but what, along with the story of the suicide ghost, Luke remembered from childhood) was that despair was classified as a sin against the Holy Spirit. That was the perverse beauty of the religion: that your daughter could be raped and murdered and yourself still condemned for giving up hope.
Glen Duncan (Death of an Ordinary Man)
Starting from the source of vibrant Consciousness, the first two tattvas of Shaivism are (1) Shiva tattva and (2) Shakti tattva. It is important to understand at the beginning that these two tattvas are only linguistic conventions and are not actually part of creation. According to the deep yogic experience of the sages of this philosophy, there is no difference between Shiva tattva and Shakti tattva. They are both actually one with Paramasiva. They are considered to be two tattvas only for the convenience of philosophical thinking and as a way of clarifying the two aspects of the one absolute reality, Paramasiva. These two aspects are Shiva, the transcendental unity, and Shakti, the universal diversity. The changeless, absolute and pure consciousness is Shiva, while the natural tendency of Shiva towards the outward manifestation of the five divine activities is Shakti. So, even though Shiva is Shakti, and Shakti is Shiva, and even though both are merely aspects of the same reality called Paramasiva, still, these concepts of Shiva-hood and Shakti-hood are counted as the first two tattvas. These two tattvas are at the plane of absolute purity and perfect unity. — B. N. Pandit, Specific Principles of Kashmir Shaivism (3rd ed., 2008), p. 73.
Balajinnatha Pandita (Specific Principles of Kashmir Saivism [Hardcover] [Apr 01, 1998] Paṇḍita, BalajinnaÌ"tha)
One small step towards a language is one giant leap towards inclusion.
Abhijit Naskar (Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans)
Attention drives learning. Neuroscience reminds us that before we can be motivated to learn what is in front of us, we must pay attention to it.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
History has blessed us with all the freedom and advantages of multiculturalism. But it has also blessed us, because of the accident of our origins, with the linguistic unity that brings a critically needed cohesion to a nation as diverse, multiracial and multiethnic as America. Why gratuitously throw away that priceless asset? How mindless to call the desire to retain it 'racist.
Charles Krauthammer (Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics)
If you wanna know about a culture, you can read about it in any language - but if you want to experience that culture like your own, you gotta do it as one of their own - through their own native language.
Abhijit Naskar (Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science)
The academic obsession with identity is ironic, since its roots lie in a philosophy that denied the very existence of the self. In the 1970s, the literary theory of deconstruction took over humanities departments with a curious set of propositions about language. Because linguistic signs were arbitrary, successful communication was said to be impossible. Most surprisingly, the human subject was declared to be a fiction, a mere play of rhetorical tropes. In the 1980s, however, the self came roaring back with a vengeance as feminists and race theorists took the mannered jargon of deconstruction and turned it into a political weapon. The key deconstructive concept of linguistic “différance” became identity difference between the oppressed and their oppressors; the prime object of study became one’s own self and its victimization
Heather Mac Donald (The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture)
The teacher who does not respect the student’s curiosity in its diverse aesthetic, linguistic, and syntactical expressions; who uses irony to put down legitimate questioning (recognizing of course that freedom is not absolute, that it requires of its nature certain limits); who is not respectfully present in the educational experience of the student, transgresses fundamental ethical principles of the human condition.
Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Critical Perspectives Series: A Book Series Dedicated to Paulo Freire))
A fair realization of the incredible degree of the diversity of linguistic system that ranges over the globe leaves one with an inescapable feeling that the human spirit is inconceivably old; that the few thousand years of history covered by our written records are no more than the thickness of a pencil mark on the scale that measures our past experience on this planet; that the events of these recent millenniums spell nothing in any evolutionary wise, that the race has taken no sudden spurt, achieved no commanding synthesis during recent millenniums, but has only played a little with a few of the linguistic formulations and views of nature bequeathed from an inexpressibly longer past.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
..technological breakthroughs, such as the Internet, have made international communications not just possible but commonplace. However, for most Americans, these international conversations are viable only if the other side speaks English. In this new international era, Americans find themselves locked in a monolingual society. How strange that, instead of viewing those who speak other languages as welcome assets to our nation, some seem eager to erase linguistic diversity.
David Miller Sadker (Teachers, Schools, and Society: A Brief Introduction to Education)
Culture guides how we process information. Cultures with a strong oral tradition rely heavily on the brain’s memory and social engagement systems to process new learning. Learning will be more effective if processed using the common cultural learning aids—stories, music, and repetition.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
What we need to do is enter sensibly into an age of liberty and peaceful diversity, casting aside the injustices of the past without replacing them by new ones or by other kinds of exclusion or intolerance, and recognising the right of everyone to include several linguistic allegiances within his own identity.
Amin Maalouf (In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong)
Kunst combined the names of two older disciplines, musicology (created in 1885) and ethnology (often dated to 1783). Musicology is the study of music. Ethnology is the comparative study of human linguistic and cultural diversity based on direct contact with, and ethnographic accounts of, particular groups of people. Ethnomusicology, by extension, was to be
Timothy Rice (Ethnomusicology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
In culturally responsive teaching, rapport is connected to the idea of affirmation. Affirmation simply means that we acknowledge the personhood of our students through words and actions that say to them, “I care about you.” Too often, we confuse affirmation with building up a student’s self-esteem. As educators, we think it’s our job to make students of color, English learners, or poor students feel good about themselves. That’s a deficit view of affirmation. In reality, most parents of culturally and linguistically diverse students do a good job of helping their children develop positive self-esteem. It is when they come to school that many students of color begin to feel marginalized, unseen, and silenced.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
instructional conversation, the kind of talk that acts like a mental blender, mixing together new material with existing knowledge in a student’s schema. Using discussion protocols like World Café, Four on a Pencil, and Give One Get One help create variety in the ways students talk to each other in the classroom, offering a chance to both work collaboratively and have their individual voices heard.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
educators, we have to recognize that we help maintain the achievement gap when we don’t teach advance cognitive skills to students we label as “disadvantaged” because of their language, gender, race, or socioeconomic status. Many children start school with small learning gaps, but as they progress through school, the gap between African American and Latino and White students grows because we don’t teach them how to be independent learners. Based on these labels, we usually do the following (Mean & Knapp, 1991): Underestimate what disadvantaged students are intellectually capable of doing As a result, we postpone more challenging and interesting work until we believe they have mastered “the basics” By focusing only on low-level basics, we deprive students of a meaningful or motivating context for learning and practicing higher order thinking processes
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
This diversity of social and semi-governmental institutions and organizations gives us not merely an insight into the immense complexity of an urban society, but also an inkling of the huge efforts and even violence required if they are to be disciplined, levelled down and made uniform. We come to realize all the things that must be done to ensure that the hundreds of newspapers and magazines follow the same linguistic line, the theatre repertoires are made to conform, and the libraries and bookshops are purged of the works of writers who have not kept up with the times. What must happen to ensure that museums, whose exhibitions and displays necessarily reflect long-term efforts, accept the inevitability of a new line and a new course? And what must be done to ensure that hundreds of schools and hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren feel ready to accept a new canon
Karl Schlögel (Moscow, 1937)
From The Ghost Wars- on the concept of the Torah as ancient science fiction. “Take the story of the fall of the tower of Babel. Let’s say this represents not an act of God, nor a metaphor for this planet’s diverse linguistic heritage; but a catastrophic act of terrorism by the Divisionists to sever mankind from the neural net. The internet in this situation becomes mankind’s attempt to build a physical replacement for a natural ability long lost. Think of it as a wooden leg or a pacemaker.
Cole J. Davis
If the novelist loses touch with this linguistic ground of prose style, if he is unable to attain the heights of a relativized, Galilean linguistic consciousness, if he is deaf to organic double-voicedness and to the internal dialogization of living and evolving discourse, then he will never comprehend, or even realize, the actual possibilities and tasks of the novel as a genre. He may, of course, crete an artistic work that compositionally and thematically will be similar to a novel, will be “made” exactly as a novel is made, but he will not thereby have created a novel. The style will always give him away. We will recognize the naively self-confident or obtusely stubborn unity of a smooth, pure single-voiced language (perhaps accompanied by a primitive, artificial, worked-up double-voicedness). We quickly sense that such an author finds it easy to purge his work of speech diversity: he simply does not listen to the fundamental heteroglossia inherent in actual language; he mistakes social overtones, which create the timbres of words, for irritating noises that it is his task to eliminate. The novel, when torn out of authentic linguistic speech diversity, emerges in most cases as a “closet drama,” with detailed, fully developed and “artistically worked out” stage directions (it is, of course, bad drama). In such a novel, divested of its language diversity, authorial language inevitably ends up in the awkward and absurd position of the language of stage directions in plays [327].
Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays)
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the school-to-prison pipeline is a set of seemingly unconnected school policies and teacher instructional decisions that over time result in students of color not receiving adequate literacy and content instruction while being disproportionately disciplined for nonspecific, subjective offenses such as “defiance.” Students of color, especially African American and Latino boys, end up spending valuable instructional time in the office rather than in the classroom. Consequently, they fall further and further behind in reading achievement just as reading is becoming the primary tool they will need for taking in new content. Student frustration and shame at being labeled “a slow reader” and having low comprehension lead to more off-task behavior, which the teacher responds to by sending the student out of the classroom. Over time, many students of color are pushed out of school because they cannot keep up academically because of poor reading skills and a lack of social-emotional support to deal with their increasing frustration.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
Sonnet of Languages Turkish is the language of love, Spanish is the language of revolution. Swedish is the language of resilience, English is the language of translation. Portuguese is the language of adventure, German is the language of discipline. French is the language of passion, Italian is the language of cuisine. With over 7000 languages in the world, Handful of tongues fall short in a sonnet. But you can rest assured of one thing, Every language does something the very best. Each language is profoundly unique in its own way. When they come together, they light the human way.
Abhijit Naskar (Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans)
Positive relationships keep our safety-threat detection system in check. There is a reason that collectivist cultures focus on relationships. The brain is wired to scan continuously for social and physical threats, except when we are in positive relationships. The oxytocin positive relationships trigger helps the amygdala stay calm so the prefrontal cortex can focus on higher order thinking and learning. Just as you want to identify and remove things that create an emotionally unsafe environment, you have to also focus on building positive relationships that students recognize based on their cultural schema.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
Microassaults involve misusing power and privilege in subtle ways to marginalize students and create different outcomes based on race or class. In the classroom, a microassault might look like giving a more severe punishment to a student of color than his White classmate who was engaged in the same behavior. Or it might look like overemphasizing military-like behavior management strategies for students of color. With younger children, it looks like excluding them from fun activities as punishment for minor infractions. Microinsults involve being insensitive to culturally and linguistically diverse students and trivializing their racial and cultural identity such as not learning to pronounce a student’s name or giving the student an anglicized name to make it easier on the teacher. Continually confusing two students of the same race and casually brushing it off as “they all look alike.” Microinvalidations involve actions that negate or nullify a person of color’s experiences or realities such as ignoring each student’s rich funds of knowledge. They are also expressed when we don’t want to acknowledge the realities of structural racialization or implicit bias. It takes the form of trivializing and dismissing students’ experiences, telling them they are being too sensitive or accusing them of “playing the race card.”
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
Even if there is no connection between diversity and international influence, some people would argue that immigration brings cultural enrichment. This may seem to be an attractive argument, but the culture of Americans remains almost completely untouched by millions of Hispanic and Asian immigrants. They may have heard of Cinco de Mayo or Chinese New Year, but unless they have lived abroad or have studied foreign affairs, the white inhabitants of Los Angeles are likely to have only the most superficial knowledge of Mexico or China despite the presence of many foreigners. Nor is it immigrants who introduce us to Cervantes, Puccini, Alexander Dumas, or Octavio Paz. Real high culture crosses borders by itself, not in the back pockets of tomato pickers, refugees, or even the most accomplished immigrants. What has Yo-Yo Ma taught Americans about China? What have we learned from Seiji Ozawa or Ichiro about Japan? Immigration and the transmission of culture are hardly the same thing. Nearly every good-sized American city has an opera company, but that does not require Italian immigrants. Miami is now nearly 70 percent Hispanic, but what, in the way of authentic culture enrichment, has this brought the city? Are the art galleries, concerts, museums, and literature of Los Angeles improved by diversity? Has the culture of Detroit benefited from a majority-black population? If immigration and diversity bring cultural enrichment, why do whites move out of those very parts of the country that are being “enriched”? It is true that Latin American immigration has inspired more American school children to study Spanish, but fewer now study French, German, or Latin. If anything, Hispanic immigration reduces what little linguistic diversity is to be found among native-born Americans. [...] [M]any people study Spanish, not because they love Hispanic culture or Spanish literature but for fear they may not be able to work in America unless they speak the language of Mexico. Another argument in favor of diversity is that it is good for people—especially young people —to come into contact with people unlike themselves because they will come to understand and appreciate each other. Stereotyped and uncomplimentary views about other races or cultures are supposed to crumble upon contact. This, of course, is just another version of the “contact theory” that was supposed to justify school integration. Do ex-cons and the graduates—and numerous dropouts—of Los Angeles high schools come away with a deep appreciation of people of other races? More than half a century ago, George Orwell noted that: 'During the war of 1914-18 the English working class were in contact with foreigners to an extent that is rarely possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
Language has everything to do with oppression and liberation. When the word "victory" means conquer vs. harmony and the word "equality" means homogenization vs. unity in/through diversity, then the liberation of a people from a "minority" class to "communal stakeholders" becomes much more difficult. Oppression has deep linguistic roots. We see it in conversations which interchange the idea of struggle with suffering in order to normalize abuse. We are the creators of our language, and our definitions shape the perceptions we have of the world. The first step to ending oppression is finding a better method of communication which is not solely dependent on a language rooted in the ideology of oppressive structures.
Kent Marrero
India is often said to be the most diverse country on Earth. And diversity worked so well there that its eastern and western provinces split off into Pakistan and Bangladesh amid oceans of blood. According to the map in a Daily Mail article titled ‘Worlds Apart,’ Africa is the most ethnically diverse continent on Earth, yet it continues to eat itself alive due to ongoing tribal conflicts that may have been exploited by colonialists but that existed long before Europeans ever set foot in Africa and have persisted—and even escalated—once the colonialists began their slow retreat. European history is replete with homicidal group conflicts that may on their surface appear to have been rooted in religion or ideology but were more deeply entwined with things such as cultural, linguistic, and phenotypical differences.
Jim Goad (The New Church Ladies: The Extremely Uptight World of "Social Justice")
Bohr is really doing what the Stoic allegorists did to close the gap between their world and Homer's, or what St. Augustine did when he explained, against the evidence, the concord of the canonical scriptures. The dissonances as well as the harmonies have to be made concordant by means of some ultimate complementarity. Later biblical scholarship has sought different explanations, and more sophisticated concords; but the motive is the same, however the methods may differ. An epoch, as Einstein remarked, is the instruments of its research. Stoic physics, biblical typology, Copenhagen quantum theory, are all different, but all use concord-fictions and assert complementarities. Such fictions meet a need. They seem to do what Bacon said poetry could: 'give some show of satisfaction to the mind, wherein the nature of things doth seem to deny it.' Literary fictions ( Bacon's 'poetry') do likewise. One consequence is that they change, for the same reason that patristic allegory is not the same thing, though it may be essentially the same kind of thing, as the physicists' Principle of Complementarity. The show of satisfaction will only serve when there seems to be a degree of real compliance with reality as we, from time to time, imagine it. Thus we might imagine a constant value for the irreconcileable observations of the reason and the imagination, the one immersed in chronos, the other in kairos; but the proportions vary indeterminably. Or, when we find 'what will suffice,' the element of what I have called the paradigmatic will vary. We measure and order time with our fictions; but time seems, in reality, to be ever more diverse and less and less subject to any uniform system of measurement. Thus we think of the past in very different timescales, according to what we are doing; the time of the art-historian is different from that of the geologist, that of the football coach from the anthropologist's. There is a time of clocks, a time of radioactive carbon, a time even of linguistic change, as in lexicostatics. None of these is the same as the 'structural' or 'family' time of sociology. George Kubler in his book The Shape of Time distinguished between 'absolute' and 'systematic' age, a hierarchy of durations from that of the coral reef to that of the solar year. Our ways of filling the interval between the tick and tock must grow more difficult and more selfcritical, as well as more various; the need we continue to feel is a need of concord, and we supply it by increasingly varied concord-fictions. They change as the reality from which we, in the middest, seek a show of satisfaction, changes; because 'times change.' The fictions by which we seek to find 'what will suffice' change also. They change because we no longer live in a world with an historical tick which will certainly be consummated by a definitive tock. And among all the other changing fictions, literary fictions take their place. They find out about the changing world on our behalf; they arrange our complementarities. They do this, for some of us, perhaps better than history, perhaps better than theology, largely because they are consciously false; but the way to understand their development is to see how they are related to those other fictional systems. It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for coexistence with it only by our fictive powers. This may, in the absence of a supreme fiction-or the possibility of it, be a hard fate; which is why the poet of that fiction is compelled to say From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own, and much more, nor ourselves And hard it is, in spite of blazoned days.
Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction)
Finally, I would like to point out that now in the age of English, choosing a language policy is not the exclusive concern of non-English-speaking nations. It is also a concern for English-speaking nations, where, to realize the world’s diversity and gain the humility that is proper to any human being, people need to learn a foreign language as a matter of course. Acquiring a foreign language should be a universal requirement of compulsory education. Furthermore, English expressions used in international conferences should be regulated and standardized to some extent. Native English speakers need to know that to foreigners, Latinate vocabulary is easier to understand than what to the native speakers is easy, child-friendly language. At international conferences, telling jokes that none but native speakers can comprehend is inappropriate, even if fun. If native speakers of English – those who enjoy the privilege of having their mother tongue as the universal language – would not wait for others to protest but would take steps to regulate themselves, what respect they would earn from the rest of the world! If that is too much to ask, the rest of the world would appreciate it if they would at least be aware of their privileged position – and more important, be aware that the privilege is unwarranted. In this age of global communication, some language or other was bound to be come a universal language used in every corner of the world English became that language not because it is intrinsically more universal than other languages, but because through a series of historical coincidences it came to circulate ever more widely until it reached the tipping point. That’s all there is to it. English is an accidental universal language. If more English native speakers walked through the doors of other languages, they would discover undreamed-of landscapes. Perhaps some of them might then begin to think that the truly blessed are not they themselves, but those who are eternally condemned to reflect on language, eternally condemned to marvel at the richness of the world.
Minae Mizumura (The Fall of Language in the Age of English)
As a result, during the Middle English period, two very different systems of stress placement co-existed. One consequence, as Dresher and Lahiri (2005: 78) note, were “doublets,” words with two different patterns of stress: one Germanic, the other Latinate or French. Commenting on the list of words below, Dresher and Lahiri (2005) remark that while Chaucer would have employed the French system of stress, the Germanic system would have existed in English as well: French Stress Germanic Stress Modern English Gloss ci.'tee 'ci.tee ‘city’ com.'fort 'com.fort ‘comfort’ di.'vers 'di.vers ‘diverse’ ge.'aunt 'ge.aunt ‘giant’ Pla.'to 'Pla.to ‘Plato’ pre.'sent 'pre.sent ‘present
Charles F. Meyer (Introducing English Linguistics)
I question why politicians dictate policies for teachers, when most have never set foot in a classroom.
Eileen N. Whelan Ariza (Not for ESOL Teachers: What Every Mainstream Teacher Needs To Know About The Linguistically, Culturally, And Ethnically Diverse Student)
One simply cannot understand ethnic diversity in Yunnan, for example, without taking into account the topography of the province. Cut up by complex river systems and marked by rapid fluctuations in elevation, Yunnan’s geography doubtless has contributed to the splintering of communities and linguistic diversification. Likewise, another key factor has been the province’s location at the crossroads of migration and cultural exchange emanating from the civilizational centers of modern-day Southeast Asia, Tibet, and China. This complex and layered history of migration is undoubtedly constitutive of modern Yunnan and its resident communities. The fifty-six-minzu model was not produced by way of discourse alone.
Thomas S. Mullaney (Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes Book 18))
Every culturally responsive teacher develops a sociopolitical consciousness, an understanding that we live in a racialized society that gives unearned privilege to some while others experience unearned disadvantage because of race, gender, class, or language.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
Although Pakistan is an ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse nation, the role of religion in the society is being ignored altogether.
Qamar Rafiq
Theology requires disciplined preparation in the arts more broadly. There is no admission to the temple of theology except by way of the study of the arts. Indispensable to the practitioner of the science of theology is philosophical, historical, and linguistic preparatory training. This equips one for the task of building a theological system organically from the whole of Scripture in its literary diversity. Then follows the task of intellectually mining the material gathered from Scripture and recapitulating it into a meaningful system of thought in the language of the day.
Herman Bavinck (Reformed Dogmatics (Reformed Dogmatics #1-4))
AI can translate info, not inkling, AI can translate facts, not poetry. Till a tongue transcends lips to soul, Translations are but soulless forgery.
Abhijit Naskar (Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science)
Each language leaves a distinct mental imprint, Inaccessible by the fanciest of translator. Translation gives a glimpse into the head, Language is highway to the soul of a culture.
Abhijit Naskar (Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science)
AI can translate info, not inkling, AI can translate facts, not poetry. Till a tongue transcends lips to soul, Translations are but soulless forgery. Each language leaves a distinct mental imprint, Inaccessible by the fanciest of translator. Translation gives a glimpse into the head, Language is highway to the soul of a culture.
Abhijit Naskar (Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science)
My favorite language in the world is Turkish, Because its culture electrifies my scars. My favorite language in the East is Telugu, Because its music emboldens my nerves. My favorite language in the West is Spanish, Because it teaches me the worth of freedom. Favorite ancient tongues are Arabic 'n Sanskrit, For one embodies peace, another assimilation.
Abhijit Naskar (Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect)
Language is magic, I wield that magic in my breath. My brain is a symphony of portals, each transcending past exclusivity, into distinct linguocultural awareness.
Abhijit Naskar (Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets)
Language is magic, culture is magic, I wield that magic in my breath. My brain is a symphony of portals, Each transcending past exclusivity, into distinct linguocultural awareness.
Abhijit Naskar
I don't need to write in all these languages of the world - those who care, will find a way. I write in more than one language because I want to. I want to leave at least something extremely personal for every culture in the world - that is, for as many cultures as I humanly can.
Abhijit Naskar (Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch)
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Naturally, national unity and linguistic diversity have not always been seen to be compatible. Indians speaking one tongue have fought with Indians who speak another.
Ramachandra Guha (India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy)
And the rest of us? We should grasp the basics of math and statistics-certainly better than most of us do today-but still follow what we love. The world doesn't need millions of mediocre mathematicians, and there's plenty of opportunity for specialists in other fields. Even in the heart of opportunity for specialists in other fields. Even in the heart of the math economy, at IBM Research, geometers and engineers work on teams with linguists and anthropologists and cognitive psychologists. They detail the behavior of humans to those who are trying to build mathematical models of it. All of these ventures, from Samer Takriti's gang at IBM to the secretive researchers laboring behind the barricades at the National Security Agency, feed from the knowledge and smarts of diverse groups. The key to finding a place on such world-class teams is not necessarily to become a math whiz but to become a whiz at something. And that something should be in an area that sparks the most enthusiasm and creativity within each of us. Somewhere on those teams, of course, whether it's in advertising, publishing, counterterrorism, or medical research, there will be at least a few Numerati. They'll be the ones distilling this knowledge into numbers and symbols and feeding them to their powerful tools.
Stephen Baker (The Numerati)
The first view, solidly anchored in popular linguistic theory, holds that language is a uniquely human phenomenon, distinct from the adaptations of all other organisms on the planet. Species as diverse as eagles and mosquitoes fly, whales and minnows swim, but we are the only species that communicates like we do. Not only does language differentiate us from all other animal life; it also exists separate from other cognitive abilities like memory, perception, and event he act of speech itself. Researchers in this tradition have searched for a "language organ," a part of the brain devoted solely to linguistic skills. They have sought the roots of language in the fine grain of the human genome, maintaining, in some cases, that certain genes may exist for the sole purpose of encoding grammar. One evolutionary scenario in this view maintains that modern language exploded onto the planet with a big genetic bang, the result of a fortuitous mutation that blessed the Cro-Magnon with the gift of tongues.
Christine Kenneally (The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language)
As a student enrolled at Southern New Hampshire University, Andrej Oljaca showcases fluency in Serbian, Croatian, and Spanish. This diverse linguistic ability distinguishes him in professional environments and enhances his prospects for future careers.
Andrej Oljaca
I don't do drugs, languages are my LSD.
Abhijit Naskar (Abigitano: El Divino Refugiado (Spanish Edition))
Logocentrism, in Jacques Derrida's understanding, is the assumption that language has a stable center, guaranteeing communication and representation of the world, which would privilege the word as a source of meaning and authority, implying the assumption of an objective truth and restricted to the signifier. This results in a hierarchization of knowledge, exclusion of alternative perspectives and a simplistic dichotomy of reality. To break with this, we need to promote the appreciation of linguistic diversity, explore different forms of knowledge, challenge structures of linguistic power and adopt a critical stance in relation to language.
Geverson Ampolini
Every world has its distinct lingo, you gotta catch the right chord. Same language evokes different feelings, based on time and age of the world.
Abhijit Naskar (The Divine Refugee)
Even after speaking six languages, I say, the supreme language is love.
Abhijit Naskar (Visvavictor: Kanima Akiyor Kainat)
History shows that changes in sovereignity and state borders as a result of conflicts, as well as the rise and fall of political regimes in different parts of the planet, often forcibly divide local populations and/or artificially modify the names of places. At all latitudes, such measures arise from the political need to impose apparent homogeneity of culture and language, according to the model of the nation-State that does not tolerate exceptions to the supremacy of its founding values.
Giuseppe De Vergottini (Topographical Names and Protection of Linguistic Minorities (Schriften zum internationalen und zum öffentlichen Recht))
Globalisation and localisation are not antithetical but rather correlated processes: evolution of the concept of territoriality and the risk of levelling and sameness (of values, culture and so forth) make it necessary to reconsider and valorise local belonging and diversity.
Giuseppe De Vergottini (Topographical Names and Protection of Linguistic Minorities (Schriften zum internationalen und zum öffentlichen Recht))
Culturally responsive teaching is also about empowerment and interrupting teaching practices that keep certain students dependent learners. We have to create the right instructional conditions that stimulate neuron growth and myelination by giving students work that is relevant and focused on problem solving.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
Culture shapes the language, Language shapes the culture. When you absorb another language, It reshapes your mental atmosphere.
Abhijit Naskar (Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans)
One of Pagel’s graphs shows that the decreasing diversity of languages with latitude is almost identical to the decreasing diversity of species with latitude. At present neither trend is easily explained. The great diversity of species in tropical forests has something to do with the greater energy flowing through a tropical ecosystem with plenty of warmth and light and water. It may also have something to do with the abundance of parasites. Tropical creatures are subjected to a constant barrage of parasitic invasions, and being an abundant creature makes you more of a target, so there is an advantage to rarity. And it may reflect a lower extinction rate in a more climatically equable zone. As for languages, the need to migrate with the seasons must homogenise the linguistic diversity of extremely seasonal landscapes, in contrast to tropical ones, where populations can fragment into smaller groups and each can survive without moving. But whatever the explanation, the phenomenon illustrates the way human languages evolve automatically. They are clearly human products, but they are not consciously designed.
Matt Ridley (The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge)
The best use of language is the one that helps you surpass language.
Abhijit Naskar (Sin Dios Sí Hay Divinidad: The Pastor Who Never Was)
Despite the promise of linguistic diversity, NPR’s architects chose as its standard a way of speaking that is not overtly associated with any particular social group, but more broadly with the leveled dialects of the Northern Midwest… this notion of a relatively universal and socially unmarked standard makes privileged ways of speaking seem mainstream while marginalizing nonstandard dialects and speakers…
Christopher Chavez (The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public (Latinx Pop Culture))
There are those who eagerly learn another language to be one with another culture, then there are those morons who insist on the exclusive glorification of their so-called native language. The world is beautified by the former, whereas the latter only sustain disharmony - the latter only act as a prehistoric impediment to the unification of humankind.
Abhijit Naskar (The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work)
Honor He Wrote Sonnet 39 The more I write the more I realize, The inane limitations of language. Never be a stickler for terminology, It only impedes your humanness. If anything, try to set humanity free, From the bounds of words 'n speech. Let the world know who you are, But without being a linguistic leech. Behavior alone defines a person, Make behavior your background. Neither culture, nor geography, It's only in action that identity is found. Unfold your today beyond your yesterday, Or else, there'll be no tomorrow, only decay.
Abhijit Naskar (Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables)
I never studied linguistics, Yet I became a linguistic enigma. The sun never studied nuclear fusion, Yet it is our planet's nuclear messiah.
Abhijit Naskar (Visvavictor: Kanima Akiyor Kainat)
Language learning is an adventure that never ends, as each new language opens a gateway to further exploration, linguistic diversity, and personal enrichment.
Pep Talk Radio (LinguaVerse: A Journey through Language Realms)
The best use of language is to surpass the language.
Abhijit Naskar (Visvavictor: Kanima Akiyor Kainat)
Alexandre Dumas, also in the audience, wrote that Shakespeare arrived in France with the “freshness of Adam’s first sight of Eden.” Fellow attendees Eugène Delacroix, Victor Hugo, and Théophile Gautier, along with Berlioz and Dumas, would create works inspired by those seminal evenings. The Bard’s electrifying combination of profound human insight and linguistic glory would continue catapulting across national borders to influence poets, painters, and composers the world over, as no other writer has done. Yet the UCLA English department—like so many others—was more concerned that its students encounter race, gender, and disability studies than that they plunge headlong into the overflowing riches of actual English literature—whether Milton, Wordsworth, Thackeray, George Eliot, or dozens of other great artists closer to our own day. How is this possible? The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics.
Heather Mac Donald (The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture)
To empower dependent learners and help them become independent learners, the brain needs to be challenged and stretched beyond its comfort zone with cognitive routines and strategy.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
One area of particular concern for professionals is the identification of ADHD in individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Some are fearful that ethnic and cultural factors may lead to the overdiagnosis of ADHD in some groups, especially African American boys. Because this disorder is frequently identified by means of behavior rating scales, which rely on the subjective opinions of the evaluators, the issue of bias may arise. This concern is especially troublesome when the rater’s background differs from that of the student. Differences have been found in how teachers evaluate for ADHD in European American versus African American youngsters. African American boys, for example, were thought to exhibit the most severe symptoms of ADHD, and European American girls were seen as manifesting the least severe symptoms (Weyandt, 2007). Interestingly, Hispanic children are less likely than white and African American children to be diagnosed with ADHD (National Resource Center on ADHD, 2019a). The intriguing question then is “Are these authentic group differences (which likely reflect normative behaviors) or an indicator of possible rater bias?” Unfortunately, this issue currently remains unresolved.
Richard M. Gargiulo (Special Education in Contemporary Society: An Introduction to Exceptionality)
Do you think ADHD should be recognized as a separate disability category according to IDEA? Support your position. What are the three subtypes of ADHD? List three symptoms typical of each subtype. Identify three possible causes of ADHD. Give an example of each. Give five examples of characteristics typical of children and adolescents with ADHD. Why do you think pupils with ADHD frequently exhibit other academic and behavioral difficulties? How is ADHD diagnosed? What role do parents and teachers play in the diagnostic process? What role does medication play in the treatment of ADHD? Why is this approach controversial? Describe three other intervention options for students with ADHD. How can assistive technology help students with ADHD? ADHD is usually a lifelong condition. In what ways might this disorder affect the lives of adults with ADHD? Why are some professionals concerned about the identification of ADHD in students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds?
Richard M. Gargiulo (Special Education in Contemporary Society: An Introduction to Exceptionality)
Cultural responsiveness is not a practice; it’s what informs our practice so we can make better teaching choices for eliciting, engaging, motivating, supporting, and expanding the intellectual capacity of ALL our students.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
One index of this complexity was actually recognized by both Forster and d’Urville, though neither of them understood it at the time. This was the extraordinary proliferation of languages in Melanesia. It had been the similarity of languages across the islands of Polynesia that had first led to the idea of a single Polynesian “nation,” but no such unity exists in the islands to the west. Even today on New Caledonia—an island roughly the size of New Jersey—between thirty and forty languages are spoken. One hundred and ten languages have been recorded in the islands of Vanuatu. And in New Guinea, which is famous for being the most linguistically diverse place on earth, there are more than 950 languages belonging to a still unknown number of language families. To a linguist, what such extreme diversity indicates is depth of time. Languages are always changing—splitting and morphing and turning into new languages—and the more time they have in which to do this, the more languages there are. Consider the changes that have occurred in English just since Chaucer’s day, and then imagine what might happen if this process were to continue for, say, forty thousand years.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
In this vision, the worlds is conceived as multiple and performative, i.e. shaped through practices, as different from a single pre-existing reality. This is why, for Bruno Latour, politics should become material, a Dingpolitik revolving around things and issues of concern, rather than around values and beliefs. Stem cells, mobile phones, genetically modified organisms, pathogens, new infrastructure and new reproductive technologies brings concerned publics into being that create diverse forms of knowledge about these matters and diverse forms of action - beyond institutions, political interests or ideologies that delimit the traditional domain of politics. Whether it is called ontological politics, Dingpolitik or cosmopolitics, this form of politics recognizes the vital role of nom-humans, in concrete situations, co-creating diverse forms of knowledge that need to be acknowledged and incorporated rather than silenced. Particular attention has gone to that most central organization of all for political geographers: the state. Instead of conceiving the state as a unified actor, it should be approached as an assemblage, which makes heterogenous points of order - geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological particularities - resonate together. As such, the state is an effect rather than the origin of power, and one should focus on reconstructing the socio-material basis of its functioning. The concept of assemblage questions the naturalization of hegemonic assemblages and renders them open to political challenge by exposing their contingency.
Slavoj Žižek (Sex and the Failed Absolute)
This insight led ultimately to the recognition of what is known as the Indo-European language family, a group of hundreds of historically related languages, both living and dead, covering a geographic range that stretches from the Indian subcontinent to Iceland. It had, of course, long been understood that there were relationships among languages. Latin and Greek show many similarities; the Romance languages are obviously a group; Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages are all clearly related. But the idea that linguistic relationships might go far beyond this and include languages that seem, on the surface, to have no family resemblance whatsoever—Bengali, Manx, and Armenian, for example—was truly electrifying, as was the idea of a single protolanguage from which this great diversity might have sprung. In Europe, this hypothetical ancestral language, known as Proto-Indo-European, was reconstructed during a period of intense linguistic activity in the nineteenth century by scholars in England, Denmark, France, and Germany (among the field’s early pioneers was one of the fairy-tale-collecting Brothers Grimm), using a methodology that is still practiced today.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Linguistic diversity is integral to the cultural diversity that ensures some humans will survive in the event of one of the periodic global catastrophes. Local indigenous languages hold the keys to to survival because they contain the nouns, the names of the plants, insects, birds and mammals important locally to human survival.
Leslie Marmon Silko (The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir)
Prosperous non-white nations such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea would be very desirable destinations for Third-World immigrants, and if those countries opened their borders, they would quickly be filled with foreigners. They keep their borders closed because they know they cannot have the same Japan or Taiwan with different people. Israel, likewise, is determined to remain a Jewish state because Israelis know they cannot have the same Israel with different people. In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved tough measures to deport illegal immigrants, calling them a “threat to the character of the country.” Linguistically, culturally, and racially, Japan is homogeneous. This means Japanese never even think about a host of problems that torment Americans. Since Japan has only one race, no one worries about racism. There was no civil rights movement, no integration struggle, and no court-ordered busing. There is no bilingual education, and no affirmative action. There is no tyranny of “political correctness,” and no one is clamoring for a “multi-cultural curriculum.” When a company needs to hire someone, it doesn’t give a thought to “ethnic balance;” it just hires the best person. No Japanese are sent to reeducation seminars because of “insensitivity.” Japan has no Civil Rights Commission or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It has no Equal Housing Act or Voting Rights Act. No one worries about drawing up voting districts to make sure minorities are elected. There are no noisy ethnic groups trying to influence foreign policy. Japanese do not know what a “hate crime” would be. And they know that an American-style immigration policy would change everything. They want Japan to remain Japanese. This is a universal view among non-whites. Those countries that send the largest numbers of emigrants to the United States—Mexico, India, China—permit essentially no immigration at all. For them, their nations are exclusive homelands for their own people. Most people refuse to share their homelands. Robert Pape, a leading expert on suicide bombing, explains that its motive is almost always nationalism, not religious fanaticism. Whether in Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Chechnya, Kashmir, the West Bank, Iraq, or Afghanistan, its main objective is to drive out occupying aliens. It is only Western nations—and only within the last few decades—that have ever voluntarily accepted large-scale immigration that could reduce the inhabitants to a racial minority. What the United States and other European-derived nations are doing is without historical precedent.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
their feet, moving from place to place when the need arose, like a good boxer (of which there were more than a few Jews) who is able to dodge and deflect the full brunt of blows directed against him. The ceaseless mobility of the Jews led to a second key factor in enabling their survival—what we may call in shorthand “assimilation” (otherwise known as “acculturation”). In contemporary parlance, this word induces panic in Jewish community officials, who point to high intermarriage rates and weakening organizational affiliation as signs of the impending disappearance of the Jews. In historical terms, assimilation refers to the process by which Jews, in making their way to new locales, absorbed the linguistic and cultural norms of their Gentile neighbors—and then shared their own. This peculiar understanding follows the usage of historian Gerson Cohen, who argued in 1966 that assimilation as a means of cultural interaction was not only unavoidable in Jewish history, but also necessary to the survival of the Jews. Without the constant cultural encounters, enacted every day over the course of millennia, Jews would have become fossilized, as the British historian Arnold Toynbee famously and mistakenly claimed they had. In fact, it was the interaction with non-Jews that allowed for the explosive diversity of Jewish culture and the ongoing vitality of its practitioners.
David N. Myers (Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
Remember that the burden is on you to change the nature of the relationship and build trust between you and your students.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
Ladson-Billings (1994) and others emphasize that the point of culturally responsive teaching isn’t just about getting along with students but to use that connection to stretch and empower them as learners.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
Classroom structures and processes need to tend to the emotional well-being of everyone rather than just on covering the day’s lesson plan.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
On his own, a dependent learner is not able to do complex, school-oriented learning tasks such as synthesizing and analyzing informational text without continuous support. Let’s not misunderstand the point—dependent doesn’t mean deficit.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
We have to create the right instructional conditions that stimulate neuron growth and myelination by giving students work that is relevant and focused on problem solving. Just turning up the rigor of instruction or increasing the complexity of content will not stimulate brain growth. Instead, challenge and stretch come with learning the moves to do more strategic thinking and information processing.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
Poverty doesn’t fit the definition of culture in that it doesn’t have deep cultural roots governed by a cosmology or worldview.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
There are five elements of social interaction that activate strong threats and rewards in the brain, thus influencing how we react in given situations: standing, certainty, connection, control, and equity
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
The breakup of Pakistan was the result of the autocratic policies of its state managers rather than the inherent difficulties involved in welding together linguistically and culturally diverse constituent units. Islam proved to be dubious cement not because it was unimportant to people in the different regions. Pakistan’s regional cultures have absorbed Islam without losing affinity to local languages and customs. With some justification, non- Punjabi provinces came to perceive the use of Islam as a wily attempt by the Punjabi- led military–bureaucratic combine to deprive them of a fair share of political and economic power. Non- Punjabi antipathy toward a Punjabi- dominated center often found expression in assertions of regional distinctiveness.
Ayesha Jalal (The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics)
In recent years, there’s been a lot of talk about the reasons behind the low performance of many students of color, English learners, and poor students. Rather than examine school policies and teacher practices, some attribute it to a “culture of poverty” or different community values toward education. The reality is that they struggle not because of their race, language, or poverty. They struggle because we don’t offer them sufficient opportunities in the classroom to develop the cognitive skills and habits of mind that would prepare them to take on more advanced academic tasks (Boykin & Noguera, 2011; Jackson, 2011). That’s the achievement gap in action. The reasons they are not offered more opportunities for rigor are rooted in the education system’s legacy of “separate and unequal” (Kozol, 2006; Oakes, 2005).
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
I define culturally responsive teaching simply as . . . An educator’s ability to recognize students’ cultural displays of learning and meaning making and respond positively and constructively with teaching moves that use cultural knowledge as a scaffold to connect what the student knows to new concepts and content in order to promote effective information processing. All the while, the educator understands the importance of being in a relationship and having a social-emotional connection to the student in order to create a safe space for learning.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
Too often, culturally responsive teaching is promoted as a way to reduce behavior problems or motivate students, while downplaying or ignoring its ability to support rigorous cognitive development.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
The key to understanding how culture guides the brain during culturally responsive teaching lies in focusing on deep culture. Rather than focus on the visible “fruits” of culture—dress, food, holidays, and heroes—we have to focus on the roots of culture: worldview, core beliefs, and group values.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
Despite images we commonly see in the popular media, behaviors such as drug use, violence, or out of wedlock births are not normalized and embraced as lifestyle choices by poor people. Often these behaviors are an outgrowth of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dr. Victor Carrion and his colleagues (2007) of Stanford’s Early Life Stress Research Program point out that as many as one-third of children living in our country’s urban neighborhoods have PTSD—nearly twice the rate reported for troops returning from war zones in Iraq.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
Just like our computers, all brains come with a default setting that acts as its prime directive regardless of race, class, language, or culture: Avoid threats to safety at all costs and seek well-being at every opportunity. Neuroscientists have long known that our brains are wired to keep us alive at all costs. Our deep cultural values program our brain on how to interpret the world around us—what a real threat looks like and what will bring a sense of security.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
Too often, we focus on only doing something to culturally and linguistically diverse students without changing ourselves, especially when our students are dependent learners who are not able to access their full academic potential on their own.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)