Henry Luong
“ Language is a dialect with an army and a navy”.
This sentence actually came from a spectator in one of the sociolinguist – Max Weinreich – lectures in the mid-20th century. Old as this may be, its underlying messages can startle us by how relevant it still is.
To many of us reading this post, I believe it is not difficult to grab the overall idea of this sentence, which implies the arbitrariness between a language and a dialect. Even some of us can list attributing reasons to this distinction, with really sound evidence, both research-based and practice-based. According to Blommaert and Rampton (2011), “mobility, mixing, political dynamics and historical embedding are now central concerns in the study of languages, language groups and communication” (p. 3). Therefore, it is safe to say that languages’ status is significantly affected and determined by a wide range of societal factors. Otherwise, we would find research examining languages independently and separately from social influences.
In his 2018 book, Van Herk pointed out a very fascinating dilemma. On the one hand, a Serb speaks to a Croatian in their own so-called languages yet posing no challenges to mutual intelligibility (despite certain potential different vocabulary). On the other hand, a Mandarin speaker would be in huge trouble in terms of understanding when hearing someone speaking Cantonese. However, Cantonese is often labelled as a Chinese dialect rather than a distinct language. To my memory, about 3 years ago when I was still a student in Vietnam, Google Translate actually made Cantonese a separate language besides Chinese (which is Mandarin). However, I cannot find Cantonese in the list of named languages on Google Translate anymore. And to justify satisfactorily the presence of such dilemma, I am afraid we will have to delve into history events, geographical location, political agendas, social and cultural identity, etc.
To be honest, from a perspective of a language teacher, I am thinking about how we could and should cope with such dilemma if it happened to emerge in our classroom. Obviously, being resourceful enough on such differences, teachers can develop an appropriate attitude towards students’ identity, which could in turn have a positive impact on their performance. However, considering the fact that teachers suffer tremendously from various sources of stress – the amount of workload, family health, loss of control over work and their life to name a few (MacIntyre et al., 2020), I seriously do not think most teachers have enough time and mind to dig deep into such hyper-controversial resources (most of which are history and politics).
How about you? How does the aforementioned dilemma ring true to you?
References
Blommaert, J., & Rampton, B. (2011). Language and superdiversity. Diversities, 13(2), 1–22.
MacIntyre, P. D., Gregersen, T., & Mercer, S. (2020). Language teachers’ coping strategies during the Covid-19 conversion to online teaching: Correlations with stress, wellbeing and negative emotions. System, 94, 102352.
Van Herk, G. (2018). What is sociolinguistics? (Second, Ser. Linguistics in the world). John Wiley & Sons.
