Re: nationalists, languages and dialects

Marc Adler <marc.adler@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> hazchem wrote:
>
>> Am I the only one who thinks it is sad that nationalists in regions
>> like the Basque country and in Sardinia want to standardise their
>> languages? In Basque there are dialects that are not mutually
>> intelligible with the others and so I would count them as separate
>> languages. They are not being taught in schools, only an artificial
>> standardised language is, and so could easily become extinct.
>
> Aside from the economies of scale thing, there's also the fact that the
> "standard language" taught in school is nothing more than a standard
> _written_ language, that has very little effect on how people actually
> speak. People may not consciously approach it as an artificial
> construct, but that's how they automatically treat it. In Japan,
> "standard" Japanese (a variation of Kanto dialect) is taught throughout
> the country, and diligent schoolchildren from Hokkaido to Okinawa read
> their textbooks and write their reports in that language, but that
> doesn't stop them (and their teachers) from speaking the local dialect
> to each other, even during class, without any problems or confusion.
> Kids instinctively understand that the standard language is something
> you use when writing, listening to the news, and in other formal
> situations.

Unfortunately (or maybe not?), many countries have different situation
and expectations. E.g. in Slovakia, speaking in dialects is socially
unacceptable, e.g. if you want to get almost any non-manual job, you
have to at least try to speak standard Slovak. It is unthinkable for
teachers in schools to speak in dialect - such a teacher would be
probably fired rather quickly. Children are taught to speak "properly",
sometimes (for eastern Slovaks) in a rather strange queer language
rather different from their mother tounge.
Educated people are ashamed to speak in dialect, and children coming
from such "educated families" have standard Slovak as their mother
tounge.
Together with the influence of TV and newspapers, dialects are leveling
and being replaced with standard Slovak (albeit slowly).
The already mentioned eastern Slovak dialect could have been a different
language, had the history gone a different route (but it had not, so it
is not even considered a language now, not even by native speakers).

I

>
> I remember reading that Sabino Arana (I think) once said that for
> Basque to survive the dialects would have to die, which is poignant and
> beautiful, but false nonetheless. In this case, you can have your cake
> and eat it, too.

Well, maybe for Basque... but Slovak dialects had to merge into one
standard language in order for Slovak language (as a whole) to survive.
They even almost had to merge into Czech to survive, but managed to stay
separate (again, history could have gone differently and I would think
of my native language not as a dialect of Slovak, but as a dialect of
Czech)
You cannot have the whole cake :-)


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