Thursday, November 17, 2011

Is cultural diversity part of biodiversity?

Dr. Paul Oldham from Lancaster University, UK, collaborated with Tamara Dionne Stout and Preston Hardison to create the content for a website that explores how cultural diversity and biological diversity are enmeshed. From their website:


... biodiversity encompasses all biological life forms on this planet. We, as human beings, are also part of this diversity, yet the remarkable feature of the human species is its uniformity in purely biological terms. This is revealed when we consider that the human genome, the map of all human genes, contains an estimated 30,000 to 35,000 genes and in genetic terms every single person on this planet possesses 99.99% of the same genes. [2] As such, human beings are remarkably similar. This has led to increasing recognition that in purely biological terms, the concept of race appears to be meaningless.

Working from the opposite direction, linguists have established that the richness of human diversity lies on the cultural level. They have established that there are approximately 6,000 spoken human languages. [3] Of these between 4,000 and 5,000 are estimated to be spoken by indigenous peoples. That is, indigenous peoples speak somewhere between 67% to 83% of the world's languages. [4]

Do follow this link to read more about the connections between human diversity and biodiversity.
It seems that we are rapidly losing both. 

Also here is a lovely map of Australia showing the indigenous languages.
 You can explore the interactive indigenous map
at the Australian Broadcasting Company site.

 

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for sharing with me this! Korean is not classified as indigenous language, but it is important to appreciate my native language to sustain the Korean culture. Korean is pervasilvly invaded by many other languges such as English, Japanese and Chinese.
    Christine Kwon

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