Simon Agre says:
Speakers of majority languages often belittle them, claim they are not proper languages, that they don’t have their own grammar, and/or that they are ‘just’ dialects, patois, or distorted / corrupted versions of a majority language, and so on.
I wonder why people feel the need to make such comments. Any ideas?
In this post, Agre writes about Gallo, a language you’ve never heard of. (That’s a guess, of course, but it’s a pretty safe one. I for one had never heard of it before reading what Agre says, and yet the Romance languages have been a major interest of mine for 60 years!) I’ve known about a few minority languages — Catalan in Spain, Venetian in Italy, Irish in Ireland, Romansh in Switzerland — but I have clearly paid insufficient attention to the long list. The issue is not just a linguistic one, it’s also political, especially these days. The dominant culture in any country or region seems to feel impelled to make its language and dialect the only standard ones.Speaking of minority languages, I’ve written about Irish before, but unsurprisingly it mostly shows up in the Republic of Ireland. However, a relevant and interesting article recently appeared about the use of the Irish language on the other side of the Irish Sea — in England. Go read it! And then see whether you can answer Agre’s only-somewhat-rhetorical question in the opening paragraph of this post.
Karen ›
Categories: Linguistics
Learning Strategies 