Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One: Online Version
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CHAPTER 14
TACKLING DIALECTS: WHICH VERSION OF SPANISH
ARE YOU SPEAKING?
More Sundry Dialects
France is universally regarded as the seat of French-speaking culture. French is also spoken in several other European countries, in Africa, and in the Canadian province of Quebec. The Canadian version of French seems to be particularly daunting for French students who are fresh from the classroom. I have seen dictionaries of Canadian French, but I haven’t yet seen any full-length courses based upon the Quebec dialect.
Chinese dialects used to be a major obstacle to learning any universally serviceable form of spoken Chinese. Now the dialects are merely a manageable impediment. The Mandarin dialect has been embraced throughout China and Taiwan, but regional differences in usage and pronunciation persist. Having learned the Beijing dialect, it took me a number of years to get used to speakers from Taiwan, Shanghai, and other areas.
The dialect issue is not limited to global languages like French, Spanish and Portuguese. Even Japan---a country about the size of California—is home to numerous regional language variations. “Standard” Japanese is more or less the Tokyo dialect, but differences that emerged before the age of mass communications still exist. Residents of the Kansai region—the area around the cities of Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto—speak a distinctive version of Japanese which affects the way greetings, pronunciation, and verb endings are rendered in daily communications. (If you want to hear a bit of Kansai Japanese, rent Black Rain, a 1989 American film about two New York City policemen who get mixed up in a conflict in the Japanese underworld.) In my years as a Japanese language interpreter, I was also challenged by the unique dialects of Kyushu (Southern Japan), Okinawa, and Hokkaido.
Dialects Bark Worse than they Bite
Now that I have sufficiently alarmed you over dialects, I have some good news: once you have the standard version of a language under your belt, you can usually adjust to a regional dialect with minimal difficulty. Unique English dialects—such as those of Wales, Ireland or Australia might cause confusion to the uninitiated ears of an Ohio resident. But no Ohioan has ever required an interpreter when navigating the streets of Melbourne or Dublin. Similarly, dialect confusion in a foreign language disappears with repeated exposure. While there are exceptions (recall the aforementioned Scottish movie that required subtitles) these exceptions are few and far between.
The caveat, of course, is that you must learn the standard version of the language well. Deciphering a dialect is normally a straightforward matter of untangling the standard language from the incremental modifications that have been applied within a particular region. Master the language of the Paris salons, and you will be ready for the rough-and-tumble watering holes of rural Quebec soon enough.
Should you go one step further, and actually try to speak in a regional dialect? Opinions will vary on this one, but my vote is----no. A dialect is, by definition, the nonstandard characteristic speech of a particular region. The standard language, by contrast, is universal across multiple regions. In this light, a foreigner who affects the regional speech of a dialect is kind of like a New Yorker who puts a gun rack in the back window of his BMW when driving through rural Kentucky. It is somehow just not convincing.
Once again, it is helpful to consider the matter from the opposite perspective: try to recall the last time you heard a nonnative speaker of English say, “howdy,” “jolly good,” or “right away, Bubba.”
Copyright 2005 Beechmont Crest Publishing
