Time really passes and it was time for this month's informal scientific discussion again (refer post dated 12th September 2005, Fun evening). Yeah, we had another one yesterday evening. As always, our evening was enriched and edified by intellectual scientific knowledge, wonderful tips about wine tasting accompanied by delicious food and regaling jokes and conversations.
We were a little United Nations during the meeting. All of us there are multilingual, knowing at least 2 languages and above. Somehow something triggered the discussion of language and dialect. We all understand that a dialect is just a variant of a language that is spoken by people from a region in a country. I have no problem with this definition. But then someone started claiming that a language from his neighbouring country is actually a dialect of his country of origin. Oh yes, this of course opened a door for debate that involved everyone, except me. Well, not that I wasn't interested in the discussion nor I'm not proud of my own mother tongue, but I like to be a listener there. It's more interesting to observe and listen to the flow of the debates from each individual with their own perspective there.
I am always proud that my first language is my mother tongue and on top of that I am fluent in another dialect plus I know two more other languages. This is not enough for me, I have this small dream to be good in as many languages as possible. Every language has its beauty, in fact every dialect has its own "taste" of culture and history as well. Don't you find it captivating that how can a dialect evolves from a language? Just for an example, there are hundreds of dialects (I don't know the specific number) spoken by chinese originated from China. Some understand another and some don't. As for some languages, some share some similarity with each other because some are geographically related or historically linked, yet they are not referred as a variant/dialect of each other.
Although some languages have older history and one may have some own preferences to admire, each has its own uniqueness. Is it really important to demonstrate or proof which one is more superior? I don't think so unless you're into linguistic research and you have a passion for tracking the history of linguistics. Competiting in this aspect does not seem to bring much beneficial to the world. We can be proud of whatever language we love. But if we are too obsessed about it, we might be resulting in having an ego trip and possibly disrupting the harmony that we try very hard to maintain.
Language or dialect is just a tool for communication. I want to be good in many languages so that I can travel to more places and communicate with their native spoken people. We'll see whether will I able to make my little dream comes true.
♥ every page of my imagination
