LL-L: "Language maintenance" LOWLANDS-L, 04.MAR.2001 (02) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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  L O W L A N D S - L * 04.MAR.2001 (02) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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  A=Afrikaans, Ap=Appalachean, D=Dutch, E=English, F=Frisian, L=Limburgish
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From: Sandy Fleming [sandy at scotstext.org]
Subject: "Language maintenance"

> From: Criostoir O Ciardha [paada_please at yahoo.co.uk]
> Subject: LL-L: "Language maintenance" LOWLANDS-L, 03.MAR.2001 (01) [E]
>
> To a certain extent I agree with Sandy; I oscillate
> between approval of a written standard as conventional
> necessity (if we forego abject theorising for a
> moment) and denigrating it as an instrument of the
> very statism I derided in my previous post.

You say you oscillate, but the rest of the email seems to be
about the idea that standard languages are an evil which
should be abolished, mainly because literacy and good
economics aren't as important as we have been led to believe.

Are you seriously suggesting that I should be writing this
email in my local dialect?

Or can you imagine me writing an engineering report in work
in my local dialect, where "ca" = "can't" and suchlike?

As you know, people in multicultural situations normally do
have a lingua franca of some sort, such as Latin in mediaeval
and renessaince Europe, Low Saxon in northern European ports,
and sign language in North America, so characterising a
standard language as "the artifice, the deviant, the variant"
isn't right. An overlying lingua franca is just another aspect
of human language.

You should be aware also that writers like Irvine Welsh and
Alice Walker have tailored their dialect for an English-reading
audience. Irvine Welsh has a large number of bizarre phonetic
spellings to give the impression of dialect but the actual Scots
in it is very thin indeed. While I understand that you're
advocating that people should get used to reading other dialects,
these books aren't good examples of their ability to do so.

Of course I'm not saying that English (or whatever) should be
taught in schools to the exclusion of local dialect. It's true
nevertheless that in most areas of England the most of the
people themselves would never go as far as insisting that the
local dialect should be taught, and in Scotland most people
would want "guid braid Scots" taught rather than their local
dialect, assuming they want Scots taught at all.

Perhaps there's a matter of definition here - might it be true
that a dialect that's taught would soon cease to be a dialect?
I think that if my own dialect was taught in school, an ever-
expanding vocabulary and grammatical artifice would soon start
to replace our native idiom.

Sandy
http://scotstext.org
A dinna dout him, for he says that he
On nae accoont wad ever tell a lee.
                          - C.W.Wade,
                    'The Adventures o McNab'

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