There are various dialects within any language, and English in the United States is no exception. A language tree will have language branches, a collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed thousands of years ago. Finally, a language group is a collection of languages within a single branch that share a common origin from the relatively recent past and display relatively few differences in grammar and vocabulary. However, some regions such as the European Union have 23 official languages.Ī language family is a collection of languages related through a common prehistorical language that makes up the main trunk of a language identity. Additionally, most official or governmental documents, monetary funds, and transportation signs are communicated in the official language. Most citizens of a nation with an official language speak and write in that language. Nearly all languages around the world have a literary tradition : a system of written communication. Most nations have an official language. Language is a system of communication that provides meaning to a group of people through speech. Languages relate to each other in much the same way that family groups (think of a family tree) relate to each other. Sadly, with all these ethnic conflicts, most were not officially declared as genocides by the United Nations Security Council, but the conditions on the ground and the reasons why the were occurring fit the definition. This has happened many times in recent history including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burma, Cambodia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, and now Syria. With genocide, the true intent is the death of a group of people at any scale possible until they are extinct. This could include forced migration, terror and rape, destruction of villages, and large scale death. With ethnic cleansing, the aim is to remove a group of people with similar ethnic backgrounds from a specific geographic region by any means possible. At first glance, it appears that ethnic cleansing and genocide are similar. Genocide is usually defined at the intentional killing of large sums of people targeted because of their ethnicity, political ideology, religion, or culture. Genocide is similar to ethnic cleaning, but only goes deeper. Pay attention to how the racial and ethnic landscape of the island of Hispaniola impacts cultural identity and the geopolitics both within Hispaniola and beyond its shores. Take the sorting quiz and watch The Human Family Tree and Black in Latin America: An Island Divided to "witness" how migration and geography play a role in the complex issues surrounding race and ethnicity. Ethnicity can be used by individuals to identify themselves with others who have shared geographic, cultural, historical, linguistic, and/or religious ancestry however, like race, ethnicity has been defined by the stereotypes created by dominant groups as a method of "Othering." Othering is a process in which one group, usually the dominant group, views and represents themselves as "us/same" and another group as "them/other." Shared geography, language and religion can often, but not always, factor into ethnic group categorizations. Ethnic groups distinguish themselves differently from one time period to another. PBS has created an interesting website called RACE - The Power of an Illusion that looks at whether race truly is a biological characteristic of humans or a social construct.Į thnicity refers to a population of people whose members identify with each other based on real or presumed shared ancestry (shared cultural and historical past). Race, in this sense, presumes real or assumed shared biology or genes and in 19th century, racial differences were used to justify colonization, racial inequities, immigration quotas, and slavery (in the U.S.). About 94% can be found within any continent" (p. Many social scientists argue that race is a social construct and that the scientific basis for it is very weak because, as Larry Adelman (2003) argues, "most variation is within, not between, 'races': Of the small amount of total human variation, 84% exists within any local population. Thus, classifying people by their race with any accuracy is difficult.įrom a sociological perspective, race is a social construct. Less geographic isolation results in the mixing of racial groups. Geographic isolation, since the era of colonization and even before then, has significantly decreased in most areas of the world. Shared genetic ancestry is a result of geographical isolation. Race, in biological terms, refers to the concept and practice of categorizing people into groups based on shared physical characteristics resulting from genetic ancestry.
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