School

It's amazing how your life can feel so busy and at the same time so dull and uninteresting. I keep trying to come up with things to talk about, but they never seem interesting enough. In my Spanish linguistics class we were talking about the history of the Spanish language and some things came up that I thought were interesting. So, I thought I'd share.

The class started out with us working in small groups on some questions that the teacher gave us. We were to answer the questions in our groups and then we'd have a class discussion on these same questions. There was one question that particularly caught my eye and that in my group, we had a hard time answering. The question was, "What is a language?" Seems easy enough right? It is until you start trying to articulate a definition. It's one of those terms or concepts that everyone knows, but it's hard to come up with an actual working definition.

As a class we came up with a few ideas such as that language is a way of communicating to express ideas and that follows certain rules. That works pretty well until my teacher asked, "How is a language different than a dialect?" It becomes even trickier when you start thinking about what people consider to be a language and what they consider to be a dialect.

One example that I can think of that might make sense to everyone, not just those who speak Spanish and have been to Spain, is perhaps the difference between Britian English and U.S. English. Some people would consider them to be two separate languages while others would only consider them to be a dialect of each other.

As we considered this example and others in class, my teacher brought up the point that it's something political and economic that makes us consider something a language versus a dialect. When a country develops its own political and economic power, they want their language to be more unique and separate from the country that their language was associated with previously.

It's a definition that I hadn't even considered before this class. At first, it seemed like a ridiculous connection, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense, especially when we thought of other examples. We used the example of Argentina and how they speak Spanish, but to Argentines, they speak Castellano. We think of people in Brazil as speaking Portugese, but to them, they speak Brazileno. To them, they are they have their own separate country/identity with their own separate language.

It brings a whole new dimension to thinking about languages and life. I guess that's what going to school is all about.