Posts
Within one or two generations, my native dialect of TeoChew Chinese will disappear from the face of the earth.
We'll still have DVD recordings and academic linguistics articles that will preserve the existence of the language, but I'm sure no one after the time mentioned will be taught this language from one's parents.
I only know one person on earth today who can speak this dialect before modern China's education system homogenized the whole country to Mandarin, and the Chinese diaspora from WWII forced TeoChew people to move to difference foreign cultural environments.
But even by extinction standards, something weird is going to happen. Anyone who knows Chinese characters will know exactly what visual text it saying, and can reconstruct pronunciation with proper sources, but connotation will be lost. It's like someone 100 years from now watching The Simpsons.
So what's the responsibility of my generation?
Do nothing.
It may sound a bit defeatist, language can't just serve the purpose of entertainment, first and foremost it has be practical. Emperor Qin Shihuang and Sugata Mitra know that effective communication of power requires the same group to use the same terms of communication. Let's face it, everyone who wants to profit from business at some point must know English.
Is something get lost from not knowing a language? Sadly, subtle points of thought and wit will be erased. But in exchange, I get to use a language that is the keystone to my ancestral language. The corpus of knowledge gathered from the humanities is majority English. If children 100 years from now wanted to reconstruct TeoChew, or any other dying language, they just need dictionaries, academic journals, and audio-visual material to raise language from the dead. Researched and written academic material is the DNA of language.
But who's going to take the time and effort to learn an archaic language? A reliable narrative of China only existed in the English language barely 50 years ago. Yet people are now beginning to see how this narrative provides a complex view of China.
So long as a person is curious about a story, language will not die.
Random:
If you're curious about TeoChew Opera, these children are adorable.
nice post :)
ReplyDeleteI think often, a lot of people that speak TeoChew know other languages as well, like you know mandarin, i've picked up on at least conversational canto and mandarin just because teochew wasn't has a common as i thought it was [until i started discovering so many others speak it]. Also, I have met several people whose parents raised them using cantonese in the household because it was more common in our area and more beneficial for their child to learn that language, which basically contributes to your point about how language should be practical.
i'm rambling, but i hope it makes sense. :) i personally never really embraced teochew until i got older, but only because it made me unique. If no one else speaks this language, it doesn't really help for me to be able to speak it. [although i still like our language :)]
My first (and only) language is English but my parents both speak Teochew and in many ways I wish they had taught me more as I was growing up but now I am *trying* to learn but it's hard with more people telling me Mandarin will be more useful. Although I think there are some Singaporeans who speak it, some of my friends from University can which amazes me.
ReplyDelete