Primordial view regards ethnicity is composed of a basic aspect of society that ethnic identity is natural and unalienable. That means, the ethnicity of a group is defined by its ‘cultural and biological heritage and is usually according to territorial boundaries.  It is basically based on the group’s prehistoric ties and bounded by the ancestors’ values, myths, languages, etc. On the other hand, instrumentalists argue that the primordial approach emphasizes too much on the objective nature of ethnicity, which stresses that ethnicity is ‘given’ and born with once a person comes into this world. To earn the highest score in your term papers and essay you should choose an academic writing service that will meet your best writing needs.

Besides language, religion is another very potent aspect of social life which separates people into different groups and communities yet, we are not Surfside to say that religion difference is often the reason for language difference. As region itself is a cultural product of a specific culture, it unavoidably bears certain emphases on the language of the culture which it originates from. For example, the official religion of Pakistan is Muslim, which regards Arabic as the sacred language. Therefore, despite the fact that the Pakistan language Urdu is almost linguistically equivalent to the Indian language of Hindi, it is written in Arabic script instead of the Hindi script and is claimed to be a separate language.

Linguistically, every regional dialect is more or less different from the neighboring dialects. Even though we may normally regard these dialects as dialects of the same language, it is so easy to take this difference as the evidence of independent ethnicity once the speakers find this parallel to their interest. Consequently, this flexibility (or otherwise ambiguity) in defining ‘language’ creates its link to ethnic identity. Similar examples are numerous. For instance, Serbian and Croatian, despite the slight divergence in the choices of vocabularies, are almost linguistically equivalent.

Their separate identities are not linguistically based, but only due to the subjective will of the speakers. From the above discussion, we see that in reality, both ethnicity and language are not objectively defined ideas. Ethnicity is often subjectively interpreted by a group and is thus a tool to fight for the social interest of the group members. Meanwhile, the very features of language serve a very good role in defining a group’s independent identity. On one hand, language plays a very important role in the social life and limits speakers of different languages into different social circles. On the other hand, the ambiguity in defining a ‘language’ makes it handy to claim linguistic independence once the need is there.