Hey You

Brandon Castaneda
3/24/13
Short Paper 1 I am doing this first short paper on language and social identity. “Language is a systematic set of symbols and signs with learned and shared meanings within a culture”. It can be written, spoken, and with gestures or signs. This article is about how language shapes culture in a variety of ways. Language is the key component to a culture, without it there is no culture. Every culture has their own language, each of us might speak differently but doesn’t necessarily mean we think differently. In education, is mainly where we learn the language in whatever culture you’re from. We are taught how to speak since 2 years old and in that that’s how we are identified on what language we use. I as an American we are taught to try to speak more than one language, that’s why there offer course at school to learn to different language like Spanish or French. From experience I believe that learning another language is hard because not only you have to learn the language you have to learn the culture. So I believe it goes hand and hand with each other. You’re identified on how you look and what language you speak. “Culture refers to people’s learned and shared behaviors and beliefs”. So what is a language? A language is learned by a group of certain people and shared by a certain group of people. That is culture. Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs. Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the other way around. As we uncover how languages and their speakers differ from one another, we discover that human natures too can differ dramatically, depending on the languages we speak. Language is the single most important thing in a culture and how do we learn it, education!