We’ve looked at the Chinese dialect/language debate before.  Today, in my Chinese linguistics class (which I’m auditing this semester for fun), we had an interesting opportunity to evaluate the linguistic diversity that exists under the heading of “Chinese.”  The professor, in anticipation of today’s lecture, had invited several students from my university, all from different regions of China (and one Taiwanese) — and all speaking different dialects (in addition to Mandarin), to speak demonstrate the large differences between them*.  The students were each given a series of words and sentences in Mandarin, which they repeated in their individual dialects.  As one would predict, the class — mostly comprised of undergraduate students of Chinese (Mandarin — and many majoring in East Asian Studies) — were astounded by the fact that they could understand very little of what was said.  Of course, having studied both Taiwanese (Southern Min dialect) and Cantonese (Yue dialect), I could understand those two, but the exercise drove home two points.

The first is that “languages” really are just “dialects” with an army and a navy.  This joke, oft-repeated in linguistics circles, does underscore the political nature of the language/dialect distinction.  The differences in Chinese “dialects” are often much more pronounced than the differences between, say, Spanish and Italian, yet they are classified as dialects solely because China’s history as a singular political unit.  Even the oft-bandied-about argument that Chinese is a single language because of its unified writing system is disingenuous, as most dialects are unwritten, and those that are (like Cantonese), require multiple character additions and substitutions in order to correctly transcribe oral language.  While I can’t speak for dialects I don’t know, such as Hakka, Xiang, and Wu, I can confidently assert that Min and Yue both differ significantly in grammar from standard Mandarin, so the differences are not restricted to phonology.

The second take-away point from today’s lecture was the highly skewed view of dialects that most Americans possess.  While I don’t mean to dismiss the variety of American accents, most of the regional differences in the U.S. are of phonology.  There is a bit of specialized vocabulary (”y’all”) and differences of regional usage (i.e., the soda/pop/coke debate, or the fact that pizza in the northeast is oft referred to as a “pie”), but the vast majority of these differences are quickly resolvable with a bit of fine-tuning, and we rarely if ever enter an area of the U.S. where all attempts at communication simply break down.  The idea of mutually incomprehensible dialects is quite foreign to us, but in much of the rest of the world, dialectical differences are indeed profound. Even in Europe (especially pre-WWII), a journey of 5km could completely change what one overheard in the local tavern.  Such high variation in language is something which is quite alien to Americans (and, by and large, much less common in the Americas, in general).

*I narrowly averted being the model Cantonese speaker — which, having only studied the language for about 6 months now, would have been somewhat disingenuous.   The professor had had some trouble locating a Cantonese speaker, and had asked if I’d fill the role.  The prof had given me the heads-up last night, and I dutifully went through the sentences and determined that I could do it, but I shuddered to think what my accent would sound like to a native speaker.  Fortunately, a native speaker of Cantonese showed up at the last moment, averting the strange prospects of presenting a blond-haired, blue-eyed Cantonese model…

Absolutely.Love.It!!!  A whole story on teaching Kumho Korean executives and their spouses at the new tire plant in Georgia how to speak Southern!!!

During one class, instructor June Bryant taught them phrases such as “How ’bout them Dawgs?” Immediately, she diagrams the sentence on a dry erase board.

It only makes sense…  Usually, in foreign language classes taken in one’s own country, one will study the foreign culture only in the most general of senses, so people who then come to the foreign country are often shocked by the degree of linguistic and cultural diversity to be found therein.  I’ve found this myself.  It seems that 99% of French courses and texts assume that everyone is going to Paris, but when I studied in France, I found myself on the German border, facing a much different culture and accent from that which I had studied.  Likewise, in Japan, living at the far north of the main island, I encountered a dialect far removed from Tokyo-centric Japanese I had studied in college.  No one speaks “a language” per se…  They’re all dialects…  Some dialects are merely closer to that which forms the backbone of texts used abroad.

Anyway, with that in mind, it’s no small wonder that Koreans moving to Macon, Georgia would require a bit of additional training in order to penetrate the local vernacular.  Culturally, as well, the South is quite different in traditions and general means of social deportment, which means that international residents — even if they have previously lived or studied elsewhere — could benefit from some targeted instruction in this regard.  There are also practical things about more general American life that need to be explained.   The article alludes to spending an entire class covering tipping.  I can empathize…  I’ve taught those types of classes (English for tourists and international students), and it is more complicated than one would initially imagine (there’s a litany of places/people that should and shouldn’t be tipped, combined with appropriate amounts).  Especially if you are from a country where tipping simply isn’t done, it’s all a little overwhelming initially.  I frequently get asked about proper tipping practices by even friends who have lived in the U.S. for many years.

Note: Other things to get used to, the wives said, are American food and clothing styles. However, they all loved the concept of a baby shower, something that was unknown to them until coming here.

Funny, but true…  I’ve recently found myself at that age where seemingly everyone around me is errr.. reproducing, so my wife has been going to a lot of baby showers of late (occasionally accompanied by me — yes, apparently in this day and age there is such a thing as a co-ed baby shower!).  All my Asian friends have gone positively ga-ga for the idea (especially considering the set-up costs for a first child these days).
p.s.  This called to mind my adolescence when my mother was teaching ESL to wives of university students.  As Mom is a native daughter of Virginia, many of her students would pick up a slight southern twinge to their speech which I found positively adorable at the time.

I loved this show back in the day… And I love it more today as I feel like I’m living the role of Larry Appleton as my wife has incredibly Balki-esque moments from time to time (although she doesn’t do “the dance of joy”)…

P.S. What the hey…. Let’s do the dance of joy… Happy weekend!

I found this to be hilarious…

Apparently, there is good money to be made in coaching actors and actresses to be able to convincingly deliver their lines in other accents.  I had heard before that Renee Zellweger’s British accent in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” was simply amazing, but never having seen the film (and, to be frank, not really ever planning to), I had no opinion — besides, I’m no judge on British accents…  Still, it’s a bit jarring to think that, likewise, there are people who study hard to attain an American accent.  I have read of accent training for tech support associates in India and Philippines, but I haven’t knowingly come across the results yet…  Which is to say, that I can usually pretty accurately identify where the agent is from (although I was thrown by a Vietnamese agent before, because he was located in Canada).  I’d love to see that training sometime, though.

Click the above link and check out the video.  There are lots of “do I really sound like that?” moments.

Also, I’d have to echo the complaint of one of the commenters on the article — most foreign actors, when trying to “speak American,” tend to opt for the well-known Southern drawl, instead of the much more commonly spoken mid-western accent.  What’s with that?  Additionally, I’d like to complain that most actors (even Americans) really need some coaching on their Southern accents.  Just about everyone has to do one eventually, and the vast majority of the non-natives simply suck…  There’s nothing worse than hearing some California or NY actor dropping “y’all” in a script… Makes my skin creep — seriously…  So, Hollywood, please start taking American regional accents as seriously as you do foreign ones… 

I realize that, by blogosphere standards, this is going to smack some as being way behind, but you must understand that this post was started and interrupted 4 times already…. 

It seems that some people just want to keep digging themselves deeper…  Reverend J. Wright’s recent comments, far from apologizing or distancing himself from the perceived racist/hateful invective that he has spewed from the pulpit, have poured fuel on the fire.

The bulk of his remarks addressed, however, different groups seeing each other as deficient. He acted out the differences between marching bands at predominantly black and predominantly white colleges. “Africans have a different meter, and Africans have a different tonality,” he said. Europeans have seven tones, Africans have five. White people clap differently than black people. “Africans and African-Americans are right-brained, subject-oriented in their learning style,” he said. “They have a different way of learning.” And so on.

After jokingly mocking the Boston accents of former Presidents John F. and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., Wright said, “nobody says to a Kennedy, ‘You speak bad English,’ only to a black child was that said.”
Wright said that he believes “a change is going to come, ’cause many of us are committed to change how we see others who are different.”

Ed Morrissey makes the obligatory connection of the above comments to the controversy over The Bell Curve a few years ago.  I just wanted comment on the language-specific comments…

Wright gets it both right and wrong…  In a separate post, Ed points out:

Nobody says it to a Kennedy because the Kennedys speak English correctly, but plenty of white kids speak English badly, too. A language doesn’t have different rules for different ethnicities, although it certainly can have different dialects; American English is a different dialect than British English, but it still has rules of grammar, syntax, and spelling. Those rules don’t rest on the color of the skin of the speaker — and to claim that they do is racist in and of itself.Once again, some “yes” and some “no.”  Wright can legitimately complain that some black (as well as other minority) kids are stigmatized in school as speaking deficient English because they speak a “non-standard” dialect.  The divergence of rules of “Black English” (commonly referred to as BE) vs. standard American English have given rise to the popular misconception that BE is simply “lazy,” and that speakers are “ignoring the rules.”  In fact, BE is very-much a rule-driven system, just as is every other variant of English.  Also, to point, it’s not like BE sprang up ex-nihilo.  Many mistake BE as being derived from African tongues — and indeed some African words infused BE, and most of these loan words, in fact, have spread to standard English as well — however, this is erroneous.  BE has the same roots as most of the other major dialects to be found up and down the Eastern coast of the US.  Most of the divergent grammaticalforms have their roots in regional dialects from England, Wales, and Scotland.  If you consider the fact that, in early colonial history, many of the slaves worked side-by-side with white indentured-servants from poor rural areas in GB, the development of this variant of English makes perfect sense.  BE shares a lot of features with standard southern English which, while somewhat stigmatized in other areas of the country, is still not usually viewed by anyone as being simply incorrect.  There are certainly sociological factors at work, which I doubt would cause offense to anyone if Wright was merely pointing out the double standard by which BE is considered (by some) to be a mark of grammatical ignorance, while other dialects “scoot free” (I had to throw a colloquialism in there!).

However, where many go awry is to claim discrimination against public schools for attempting to ingrain a standard form of English on top of the dialect one learns at home.  The reason why discrimination claims just don’t wash is the fact that this happens to every single child who enters into the public education system.  African Americans are not unique in speaking a distinct dialect.  Every one of us speaks a dialect — we just normally don’t actually become aware of the fact until we encounter a distinct dialect.  One of the major jobs of the public education system is to instill a national language, which entails enforcing agreed-upon language conventions upon everyone in that society.  In English, this takes two forms: the first (and most noticeable) arena of language conformity is in writing.  Written English conventions are rather rigidly enforced (even when a linguistic rationale is notably lacking).  How many times have you heard an English teacher say, “you can’t write like you speak?”  — Right…

The other arena is in speech.  In the US, this effect is much less pronounced than, say, in Germany (where children enter kindergarten speaking dialects differing so much as to be mutually unintelligible, and by the end of elementary school, can all speak “standard German” — in addition to their individual, regional dialects), however we can still see the effects of speech classes and the like teaching formalized English for business, academic, and various professional uses. 

It is not discriminatory for a society to try to ingrain a lingua franca into its citizens.  Discrimination occurs when the government (in any agency) tries to forbid the use of local languages from all domains.  If the US government were trying to exterminate BE, Wright would have a point, but, to be frank, no one cares what dialect one speaks in private domains.  It is beneficial to the individual and to society at large that all young people be taught to express themselves in standardized English in the public sphere,but one always has the freedom to codeswitch into dialect (no matter how divergent) in private. 

I’ve mentioned this before in passing, but it’s worth going into in depth. Being a Chinese language specialist, one of my pet peeves is the lack of distinction amongst the general public between the concepts of “dialect” and “language.” Granted, the definition is not very clear-cut, and linguists are at a loss to clearly define the issue. The standard joke is that a language is simply “a dialect with an army and a navy.” This has more than a grain of truth, considering that many of what are considered distinct “languages” vary less with other languages than some “dialects,” but invariably some international border is involved. For instance, the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are all apparently quite mutually understandable, and at one point (until the break up of Yugoslavia) were actually considered to be a single language, but now, for entirely political reasons, are distinguished from one another. In fact, some from the region will go to great lengths to point out the differences. While differences do exist (and some are stark — such as variations between using the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets), most honest speakers admit that the differences are, at best, rather cosmetic. Hindi and Urdu are another example of languages which many admit are only distinguished due to their war-torn border.

What does this have to do with China, you ask? Well, China is on the opposite end of the continuum. China claims “Chinese” to be a single language with multiple dialects. Everyone from China unthinkingly parrots this line — even my fellow linguists. The immediate problem is that Chinese “dialects” like Cantonese and Mandarin vary more than many distinct “languages” do from each other. They are much more different than say Spanish and Italian. They are at least as different as German and English. They are obviously related, but a speaker of one Chinese “dialect” will almost never understand a speaker of different “dialect.”

So why do so many claim them to be a variants single language? Well, it is certainly in the interest of the Chinese government to claim as much. This is an oft-made claim to “national unity.” Another reason for the confusion is the Chinese writing system, which is arguably “the same” between dialects. This is a rather unique situation to Chinese. Because characters bear semantic meaning, and not a particular sound, this means that if the syntax (word order) and word choice is consistent between two dialects, that their written script would be identical. The problem is that the natural word order and word choice is not the same. Cantonese, Taiwanese, Mandarin, etc. all vary considerably in these terms. So why the claims of the writing being the same? Well, speakers of other dialects learn to read and write in a standardized form — which means Mandarin word order. For a basic example, Cantonese speakers, when writing the word for “he,” will write the same word as a Mandarin speaker (which incidentally is pronounced “ta” in both), but when speaking, the same person would say a completely different word — “keui.” Look here for some more variations. This split between oral and written language is called diglossia, which we’ll discuss tomorrow (next week — sorry, I’m editing this 2/1/08 — I’m just too tired this afternoon to get into this)…

An interesting outgrowth of this is the fact that, technically there is no distinct word in Chinese for the Mandarin dialect. There are plenty of terms, for sure, but they all, technically apply to Chinese in total (e.g., 中文zhong wen /中国话zhong guo hua — “Chinese language”) or are racial terms, which, once again, also cover most of the “dialects” (e.g., 汉语han yu — “the language of the Han), or they are linguistic notions — 国语guo yu (the common word for it in Taiwan, meaning “national language”) or 普通话pu tong hua (used mostly in the Mainland, meaning “common language). The dialects all bear names related to specific places, but Mandarin bears the mantle of the entirety of China.

We looked at the economic and cultural arguments.  We also looked at the problems that speakers of “unique” languages like English — which has no close cousins — have in L2 learning.  Now the looming and completely justifiable question that should occur as one ponders if English speakers have “special problems” learning other languages because there is no language that resembles English at all levels of discourse is why then can seemingly everyone learn English????

Glad you asked!  It’s not very complex really…  While ‘close-cousin’ languages are certainly easier on the learner, no one is going to suggest that one cannot learn a completely distinct language!   I speak Chinese and Japanese, which by no stretch of the imagination can be related to English on any level.  Americans, and citizens of other English-speaking countries, are as capable — in terms of mental faculties — of learning any other language as anyone else in the world.  So why don’t we?  And why do all the other nations on Earth seemingly have no problem learning English.  Let’s take this one at a time.. 

We (Americans) don’t tend towards learning other languages for the reasons I listed in part one of this series…  Namely, that America’s multi-ethnic population derives a sense of unity from common language, and that, being on top of the global economy, others will learn our language to be able to trade with us.  Americans can typically add geography to the list too.  If you aren’t on a border (like me, currently), or in a diverse, urban center, the necessity and dare-I-even-say opportunity for foreign language study and practice may be scant indeed.  Traditionally (by which I mean pretty-much until around 20 years ago), foreign travel was mainly left to the rich, and thus speaking-competence in foreign language study was not even stressed in most coursework (the assumption being that, if you were rich enough to need to be able to speak the language, you would be rich enough to afford a tutor or prep-school education).  Regardless, fluency in anything other than French (on the northern border) and Spanish (on the southern one) was rare — outside of immigrant communities (and then only for the first two generations).

As for everyone else seeming to learn English without undue difficulty, anyone who has ever taught ESL or EFL will quickly disabuse you of this notion.  Learning English is hard business, and despite being a required part of the curriculum in many countries, there are certainly a lot of people who completely suck at it who lack talent in language learning.  Japan is actually quite famous in regard to being full of people who have studied English for up to ten years (if college educated), and can still barely proceed in conversation past the initial “hello.”  The myth of “everyone speaks English” usually is fostered by the fact that, unless you go to another country, probably every foreign visitor that you have ever met probably did speak English because they had to.  By the time they came “into your world,” they have probably already passed a host of challenges, such as the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) test for U.S. university admittance.

Additionally, as one would expect we do see substantially different rates of learning between people whose mother-tongues differ more or less from English.  Just as English speakers can learn the basics of German quickly, but then get mired in the “higher registers” of the language (German newspapers are nearly incomprehensible), German (and Dutch, Danish, etc.) speakers have the same pattern in English-learning.  Romance language speakers struggle with basic phrasing, but then fly with newspaper and legal language, just as English-speakers do when learning French or Spanish.  Chinese speakers, whose language differs significantly from English at all levels, learn more slowly than Germans, on average, just as we would expect.  The only salient advantages that other people groups have over English speakers vis-a-vis in learning each others languages are 1) English learning is usually required for them; and 2) the resources available for English learning far outstrips that of any other language on Earth.  The language-learning publishing industry is awash with English learning materials.  You can find English medium newspapers almost anywhere on Earth.  Additionally, think of the pure amount of drivel that Hollywood pushes out each year.  The world is flooded with English media!

None of this is to say that we should only aim for the status quo!  Indeed, I’d be the first to argue that English-speaking nations need to get out there and face the world on their terms.  We certainly need to learn other languages.  This is merely meant to help explain how we got to the status quo in the first place….

Yesterday, we talked about how there is no “set line” between dialects and languages — instead, it’s a fluid continuum.  We ended with the question: “What language resembles English?”

It’s a fair question…  Most other languages will have close relatives that are marginally comprehensible, or a lot easier to learn due to large areas of overlap with one’s native language.  English is one of the few, odd languages in the world that doesn’t have that.  Now, that’s not to say that we don’t know where it came from.  It’s not like Japanese, where historical linguists argue back and forth on what family it belongs to, and whether it has any living relatives or not (I, personally subscribe to the hypothesis that Japanese — and Korean, for that matter — is a distant cousin in the Altaic family — but this is all conjecture at the moment).  Most people are aware or have heard at some point that English is a Germanic language.  We know that for a fact, but the problem is that English doesn’t really look much like German — especially when compared to the other “cousins:” Danish, Dutch, and the like.  I’ve been (re)reading John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel,of late, and I’m much indebted to him for the following points.  (FYI: I have to plug his books.  For my money, John McWhorter is one of the most entertaining, easy-to-read-yet-seriously-engaging linguists around.  For the non-linguist who is interested in reading up about phenomena in languages, he and Steven Pinker are both notable for the seriously rare gift of being able to put linguistic techno-speak into phrasing that is both accessible and fun for the general public.)

English is the odd-man-out in the Germanic family.  The reason is obvious if you look at history.  Upon the Norman invasion, English was flooded with French/Latin terms, and suddenly the language diverged from its Germanic roots in a big way.  This cataclysmic inundation of vocabulary caused the headache so familiar to learners of English — namely, that we have several terms for everything.  I mean, really, do we need pork vs. pig, and sheep vs. mutton.  All easily explainable French vs. Anglo roots, but this split-level lexicon (i.e., essentially two separate vocabularies operating side-by-side) is more than a little annoying to anyone trying to learn the language from outside.  Additionally, due to the mulitplicity of roots, English is rather unique amongst the world’s languages in that many of our “big words” are rather inaccessible to even native speakers without prior knowledge.  Yes, with a bit of training, we can learn the Greek, Latin, etc. roots and “figure out” words like antidisestablishmenterianism, but in most languages, knowledge of the more technical vocabulary (which is often found in the “Latinate” forms of English) are easily broken down into familiar parts.  To quote Dr. McWhorter’s examples: whereas English borrows from Latin/French to get words like “conscience” and ”succession,” German uses the words “Gewissen” (from wissen: to know) and “Reihenfolge (”row following”).  If the Norman invasion had necer transpired, English would likely phrase the two above examples as “inwit” and “oeftergengness.”  Now, English didn’t simply abandon Germanic for French, but rather blended the two, often assigning a “higher status” to the French words (they were the rulers, after all).  The curious effect upon English-speakers’ ability to study outside languages, however, is that there is no good match for English…

If you study a Romance language, you will notice a lot of “higher” vocabulary that are very similar, if not direct cognates of English.  Words like establishment, cooperation, similarity, etc., will greatly resemble their counterparts across the spectrum of Romance languages.  However the basic words like I, you, jump, play, cow, milk, etc. differ enormously.  For people studying German (or another Germanic language), the experience will be almost the exact reverse: the basic words will be quite familiar, but the hoity-toity words like “establishment” will differ enormously.  Practically speaking, that means that the learning curve for Romance languages starts slow, and then zooms upwards, whereas for Germanic languages, one can learn the basics quickly, but then get bogged down quickly.  There is no equivalent for English speakers to the situation of an Italian moving to Spain (or a Dutchman moving to Berlin), and basically just having to “adjust” their speech.  For English speakers, anything else is another language…

Yesterday, I got through the standard arguments of nationalism and economics as explanations for why English speakers (and other groups — such as the Japanese) tend towards monolingualism.  It bears noting that, as the world goes, monolinguals are the exception.  The majority of this planet’s residents speak 2 or more languages and/or dialects, but, as we’re going to see, certain languages (amongst them English) are at a bit of a disadvantage in this.

The first time I went to Europe, I was startled at how quickly dialects shift from town to town and from region to region.  Any American visitor to Europe (at least those who got off the tour bus and tried to interact with locals in the local tongue) will have stories of how they thought they could communicate, until they arrived in XXX small town, or until the locals started drinking and slipping into dialect, etc.  As I noted yesterday, America doesn’t have much in the way of real dialects, we simply have accents.  You can travel the length and breadth of the U.S., and you will probably have significant communication problems with native English speakers due to dialect less than 1% of the time.  As much trouble as I personally have deciphering the speech of friends from Brooklyn, it’s certainly still the same language, and for the most part, they’re using the same words and expressions that I would.  They are just pronouncing the words in a slightly different manner that is offsetting to my ears (which are attuned to mid-western and south-eastern speech patterns).  Understanding them is merely a matter of hearkening back to Tony Danza’s lines in old Who’s the Boss? episodes.  Europe, on the other hand, is rife with dialects, as is the entire “old world.”  Some are obvious — for instance, where I lived in France as a young college student (on the German border), the older residents spoke a dialect of German which obviously clashed wildly with the French which I used to communicate with people.  Other changes are more subtle, — the different dialects in use in London, for instance — but all tend to be much more pronounced than the “dialects” of the new world.  There’s an easy explanation for this, which we touched upon yesterday — the “old world” had hundreds or thousands of years for these dialects to form in relative peace and isolation before the printed word came and essentially “froze into place” ideas of proper wording and pronunciation.  The “new world,” on the other hand, was settled well after the spread of the printing press, and thus dialects had a lot less room to change.  They certainly do change– witness the differences between British and American speech, but the speech differences between New York and London are comparatively mild compared to the Englishes (yes, plural!) you would have found just 100 miles outside of London 100 years ago.  While mass media has had the same “squashing effect” on dialects (causing them to be more similar than was true until the advent of radio and TV) in Europe as has happened in the U.S., most European dialects still exist, but they typically exist side-by-side with the national standardized languages, and are employed only in local, intimate contexts.  More than one colleague has commented on how quickly they can loose all sense of German conversations once beer starts flowing, and the locals switch from standardized German to their individual mundarten (dialects) which are not mutually comprehensible.  A German wanting to learn an outside dialect for the most part would have to study it like one would a foreign language — albeit a foreign language with a lot of parallels to his/her mother tongue.

The oldest joke in linguistics is that “a language is merely a dialect with an army and a navy.”  All jokes aside, that’s a pretty fair assessment, because where do we draw the distinction between a dialect and a language?  The existence of the German dialect Alsacien (Elsässisch) within France can show us that political distinctions are arbitrary.  But more interestingly, why do we instinctively categorize that as a “German dialect” yet also hold that Dutch, Danish, etc. (I could add English to the list) are separate languages?  The world is full of “languages” that share complete or large mutual comprehensibility with others.  Hindi and Urdu, for instance, are largely the same, and their speakers can converse with no more difficulty than would a Brit with an American.  Yet, due to the political enmity between their respective countries, both sides hold to the notion of separateness.  On the other foot, China hosts 6-8 (depending how you count) Chinese languages which share no mutual comprehensibility (a Cantonese and Mandarin speaker can communicate about as effectively as an English speaker with a German speaker– which is to say, not much), but they consistently refer to all such as dialects.

This conceptual fuzziness between languages and dialects means, in effect, that there is no such thing as a language, per se.  There are only a vast array of dialect in the world.  There are no clear defining lines between languages — rather, they exist on a continuum, where the farther they get from each other, the less one can understand of the other.  Many languages are quite close — as a Spanish speaker, for instance, I have little trouble communicating with Portuguese and Italian speakers.  This brings us to the crux of the matter of English monolingualism, for, what language resembles English?  We’ll pick this up tomorrow…..