When considering what constitutes a diverse culture, people often believe that it only has to do with location, background, ethnicity, race or other similar identity. The Center for Advanced Research in Language Acquisition defines culture as “the shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialization.” This definition does not appear to require that a group of people must come directly from or descend from people who lived in a different place, instead emphasizing the importance of socialization in developing a cultural identity. Socialization also helps shape how people see their world. Many have proposed that cultural worldview is strongly influenced by language. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that language is significantly related to how people perceive and interact with the world around them (Otto). This hypothesis demonstrates the importance of language in cultural identity and suggests that the lack of a shared language is a barrier to communication. When considering language, people often do not include nonverbal language in the definition, especially American Sign Language used by those who are deaf. Many believe that deaf people share the same culture as those who can hear, as the difference between hearing and deaf individuals raised in the same society is believed to be only sensory-oriented. However, it has been proven that deaf individuals have their own culture and many choose to use ASL exclusively, teaching it to their children, as they believe it is a critical aspect of maintaining deaf culture (Gallaudet). The film Children of a Lesser God explores how hearing people can see that… half of the paper… lture. When people are too stubborn to accommodate other points of view, perspectives, definitions and belief systems, they will stop growing and learning new ways of seeing things. Likewise, when members who make up a culture view those outside their group as hostile or judgmental and keep themselves separate from anyone from an alternative culture, they are generating prejudicial attitudes and stereotypes that they find so offensive. .When people feel comfortable with their cultural identity and are aware of their strengths and weaknesses, they can explore other cultures openly without feeling threatened by the differences they encounter. This will lead to empathy and understanding between cultures such that the growing trend towards globalization will result in a richer world instead of a world marred by communication problems based on ethnocentrism..