After watching The Linguistis and reading these chapters, write a post on your blog about what language means to its speakers. Why would it be important to hold on to a language? Why would it be important to learn another? What policies do you think could be in place to protect a linguistic group's right to its own language?

I think that it is important for speakers to hold on to their languages because it is one of the biggest things that bind him/her to the culture, society, country/region, and family that is around him/her. Language binds people to their family members who speak it because it is the primary way that they can communicate and bond with each other. It also can bind the speakers to their society because the language or even dialect they speak can sometimes be seen as an indication of their social status. Language also binds people to their cultures because the culture uses language to influence how the speaker act and think. Language also binds the speaker to the place he or she came from because people can tell where someone came from just from what language they speak or how they speak the language.

Unfortunately, many people in many different countries must learn another "dominant" language in order to function with the rest of society. It is during this process of learning the "dominant" language when many decide to leave their old language behind. In addition to losing the old language to the dominant one, in some places such as Siberia and India, boarding schools would not allow their students to speak their old languages, which forces them to throw it away, whether they want to or not.

One way to prevent the slow death of these languages is to first allow them to be spoken, and more importantly, allow the speakers to be proud of their language. Enacting laws that makes people learn an "official language" is usually necessary for the country to function, but laws or regulations that forbid people to speak a certain language should be removed, especially the ones in schools. The speakers should also increase awareness of their language and tell the world that their language is a good language full of pride and rich history.

Writing component of presentation: Review of "You Just Don't Understand" by Deborah Tannen

The book "You Just Don't Understand" by Deborah Tannen mainly talks about the two different ways men and women think, speak, and interpret the words and actions of others in a conversation. In the beginning of the book, Tannen says that she believes that men see the world as a constant contest where he must always defend his position from others and advance forward, and women see the world as a constant struggle to prevent others from pushing them away and to get closer and more intimate with others. For both, conversations are "negotiations" to do those things. For the majority of the rest of the book, she talks about how these two different "genderlects" develop as people grow up, she talks about how and why the two genderlects work when two men or two women talk to each other and why and how the two can come into conflict when they interact with each other, and she supports these points by giving many real-life, sometimes personal, examples as well as experiments and observations that many other linguists and anthropologists made.  

I think that Tannen's book is very strong because she uses a lot of real-life examples that people who are reading it can relate to. She uses scenarios and conversations that many people might have faced in their lives, and give detailed and yet simple explanations on why someone said something and why something had happened. One thing I wished that she wrote about is how and why parents and teachers seem to encourage the development of the two genderlects. I also wished that she explored is the topic of how the two genderlects evolved into what they are today in the long history of gender inequality, just as Yule talked a lot about history in many parts of his book. I really thought that historical content would have made Tannen's book even better, since gender inequality has existed for a very long time, and therefore different genderlects also may have existed and evolved with gender inequality.