What are Effects on Language from Globalization?

          Through the movement of people, grammar and vocabulary change in communities. Even though about seven thousand languages are currently used around the world, languages incorporate loanwords that are adopted by other populations. Globalization merges language use to a small cluster of languages, but also reduces language diversity and may cause extinction to many others. Former colonial languages, such as English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Russian, and Portuguese were spread beyond Europe and have made global economic and political systems accessible.

            Migration to urban places causes speakers to adopt the most widely used language in order to adapt and learn. Leading languages take over most global medias, making less used languages unneeded. English, for example, is now a prestige language that brings effectiveness to political engagement and international economic pursuit. However, anthropologists believe by the end of the twenty-first century, half of the seven thousand languages could be lost. This causes the information and local knowledge developed by that community to disappear, such as facts about medicines, plants, and animals.

            Some populations are trying to preserve their local language in written form to avoid extinction. The Summer Institute of Linguistics, for example, sends missionaries to remote areas to reside with a community to help create a written language to translate the Christian Bible into the local language. SIL produced a compendium of the word’s languages, Ethnologue, which is commonly used. Information technology is starting to renovate the techniques anthropologists preserve endangered languages. I read online about how other people feel about the language movement, how English is the most dominant, and how it’s hurting and helping the world. Alliance of Linguistic Diversity is working on a project to preserve rare languages. The Endangered Languages Project is a website that shares research of rare languages and gives advice on how to strengthen them through records and samples.

http://freakonomics.com/2008/05/28/what-will-globalization-do-to-languages-a-freakonomics-quorum/

http://www.endangeredlanguages.com

How is Globalization Changing Culture?

          Current flows of globalization are increasing the diffusion of ideas, goods, and people. Culture is influenced by these factors through trade, migration, or invasion. Globalization creates more interactions between cultures through three main effects on local cultures. Global products, markets, and corporations have contributed to a homogenized culture. Anthropologists fear this process will decrease the world’s culture diversity because foreign influences are flooding local culture’s practices and ways of thinking.

            However, global culture represents the opportunity for developing cultures to achieve economic advancements and is able to participate in middle-class lifestyle by consumption of idealized products. A two-way transference of culture through migration shows that cultures aren’t bound to a certain geographic location. Large numbers of people move with their cultural beliefs and practices. They bring practices from their culture to their new communities. For example, direct flights show links across national borders that are now common in our globalizing world. The airlines physically link immigrants to their hometowns. On the United States Department of Transportation quotes Lawrence H. Summers, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Treasury in stating transportation is the key to globalization through connecting industries. The website also gives four key action that have changed economic activities through globalization.

            Globalization has also allowed worldwide access to new and exciting cultural patterns. Local cultures have benefitted from ideas within medicine and agricultural strategies. The linking of cultural practices, values, and norms across the world has lead to a new cosmopolitanism, or an outlook that combines both universality and difference. Urban professionals travel and feel at home in different parts of the world. I came across a website depicting examples of globalization, one section dedicated to globalization in blending cultures. It stated examples such as food being served in countries where it wasn’t originally from.

http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/the_changing_face_of_transportation/html/chapter_04.html

http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-globalization.html

What is Globalization and How Does it Transform Anthropology?

Globalization is the worldwide intensification of interactions and increased movement of money, goods, ideas, and most importantly people within and across national borders. It’s the process of integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations. Globalization assists in breakthroughs in communication and transportation to bring the world’s people closer together. While new technologies allow more people to communicate in a positive way, billions of other people are still being left out from these progresses.

Key dynamics within globalization restructure the ways humans adjust to their surroundings as well as how the world adapts to humans. Time-space compression, the rapid innovation of communication and transportation technologies, has transformed the way people think about space and time. The Internet, phones, and plane travel are some examples of how technology has compressed space and time. Flexible accumulations, the increasingly flexible strategies that corporations use to accumulate profits, shows how companies have utilized advances in communication and transportation to spread their production facilities across the globe. Increasing migration has given rural workers the chance to move to urban areas in order to improve the lives of their families and themselves. Migration is constructing connections to distant parts of the world. Uneven development, the unequal distribution of globalization benefits, is a downside. Patrice Hill from The Washington Times explains the increase in immigration makes a strong growth in the economy. He thinks the bipartisan immigration bill passed by the Senate last year has advanced the economy’s accomplishments.

While the global economy creates wealth, it also has increased poverty. Many people have no access to any form of transportation. Rapid change, the dramatic transformations of economics, politics, and culture, can also be an issue. The rate of change is unlike anything humans have experienced in the past. Globalization is transforming anthropology through the creation of new diversity of experiences spreading across the world. As new ideas and customs spread, many local cultural patterns are being forced to adapt. Along with the changing communities, anthropologists need to adjust the strategies they use to study humankind. They now need to consider the global forces affecting the local community they are researching. Through research, I found an interesting piece describing negative effects of globalization, such as loss of individualism, and positive effects, such as advances in technology.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/19/economistsincreasingimmigration-is-one-of-the-wa/

http://etec.ctlt.ubc.ca/510wiki/Globalization_and_its_Effect_on_Cultural_Diversity