Comment by cmpb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmpb | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions the fact that the dialect and culture are diminishing. In Louisiana, we have the same problem happening with the Cajun and Creole cultures, and it’s very sad to see. My wife’s grandmother spoke only Cajun French for all of her youth and still doesn’t speak English very comfortably, but that generation is dying off. Unfortunately, the more thoroughly Cajun areas of Louisiana are also the poorest, and so many of the new generations are leaving to bigger cities and more opportunities, myself and my wife included.

There are attempts to keep the language alive, but I’m betting it won’t be nearly enough, and it will likely only live on in an academic sense. The culture has of course also started to dissolve, but that’s no different from what’s experienced in areas all over the US what with ever increasing exposure to the ‘common identity’ via the internet/etc.

At the very least, however, our food culture has been so well-infused into our lives that I really doubt that aspect will die off anytime soon.

The reason these dialects (I am a speaker of this) are dying is that they are discouraged at a young age by the school systems and parents who are worried that dialects like these are seen as "unintelligent" and will cause everything from bullying by children at school, to being turned down for interviews, jobs and even college.

My mother was disciplined for it repeatedly. I had to take "speech therapy" until I was much older when there was a bit of backlash growing against it locally - That was as recent as the late 90s.

Thanks for that adding perspective to the conversation. If you don't mind my asking, what specific school system(s) was it that you were a part of?

As a kid in the Louisiana public school system of the 90s, I can attest that I was not exposed to the language itself, and opportunities to learn the language in the school setting were not provided, despite having grown up in an area that I know has a high number of Cajun descendants (I'm from a family of Fontenots in Allen Parish). But my wife (who grew up in the basin/Teche area) had a wealth of opportunity at her school, even taking French immersion classes for several years. I'm curious as to how consistent and spread-out the effect that you're referring to was.

> they are discouraged at a young age by the school systems and parents who are worried that dialects like these are seen as "unintelligent" and will cause everything from bullying by children at school, to being turned down for interviews, jobs and even college.

I have two girls, and struggle with this.

At home, our language us is very different from when we're in public. I make it a point to correct my girls' grammar when outside the home (or when it's particularly egregious, like subject/verb disagreement), but generally don't at home. "I ain't gonna" is acceptable at home, but "I'm not going to" is expected elsewhere.

This approach is based on my own experiences.

On one hand, as an adult, I feel like I fit in well with the people around me even though I seem to have little in common with them - I'm a remote developer, and most of the people I interact with on a daily basis are tradesmen or other blue-collar workers. I'm convinced this is because I look, act, and sound like they do.

When I'm interacting with my colleagues I enunciate much more clearly and my grammar is significantly better, to the point that I sometimes wonder if my sentence structure makes me sound like I'm trying too hard. It seems to be effective.

On the other, I have a close family member who has struggled throughout her education with both grammar and spelling. She's a high school teacher now, but had to take her certification test numerous times due to repeatedly failing the language portion. She never learned to switch between colloquial and formal language, and never really developed a feel for what is correct grammar and what's not. She also has issues spelling many words. This could be because she is younger than I am and was taught using a different method (she learned "sight words" first; I learned phonics), or it could be because I read a lot more in childhood than she did.

At the end of the day, I want my children to be able to speak at the same level as their professional peers, and I want their peers to be educated professionals. I also want them to be able to self-identify with the people they grew up with, and not to immediately associate a dialect of any sort with intelligence.

Actually, it might be better to be who you are, isn't that the moral of My Fair Lady?

Most of the people I work with in the Fortune 10 are educated idiots. Corporate communications, especially e-mails contain egregious spelling and grammatical errors. It's constant. I have very little respect for most of these people. They believe themselves smart but in reality are merely average or even slightly below that.

Small languages are more likely to die than food.

Knowing a small language is a disadvantage: you have to put forth the effort to learn it and some other useful language. You are better off learning the language with a larger base of speakers and playing games (or finding food in poor areas). Language is about communication, if you can communicate it doesn't matter what language is used, if you can force the other person to use your language you don't have to put for the effort to learn a second.

Parents want their kids to have the best: that means they will make their kids learn the common language of their area. The grandkids generally are the last generation of this that speak the original language because it is no longer useful when everyone they know speaks something else as well.

Food doesn't have that pressure in general. Family recipes passed down for generations are a thing. Everybody needs to eat and what doesn't matter. Some people enjoy unique flavors so there is a slight advantage to knowing how to cook something "weird".

Language has a network effect!

In the case of Louisiana, I'm guessing the Cajun and Creole areas were never wealthy compared to the cities. Young people from the country seeking jobs and money in urban centers has been a theme throughout the 20th century, and geographic mobility was actually higher in the past [1], so what's causing these cultures to evaporate so quickly now?

It seems like wherever you look in the US, regional cultures are vanishing at an accelerated pace. From Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, and everywhere in between, shops and restaurants that not outright bland national chains have converged around a common contemporary hipster aesthetic optimized for Instagram. Is the Internet and social media that powerful that they are the real cause of this cultural compression, or are there other factors?

[1] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/02/american-mobility-has...

A lot of us learned that repressing the dialect what we're comfortable with made people take us more seriously. Rather than any pidgin or trade language forming to communicate effectively, it was safer to just assimilate.

The true problem is, we're unintelligible to anyone that doesn't care enough to listen. Anything with different vowels and archaic grammar and pronunciation gets tuned out immediately, or the listener gets angry (which at least shows an attempt at listening).

I was having this very conversation a couple of months ago with a colleague.

She is of Mexican descent and grew up relatively poor in Stockton, CA. I'm of Scot descent and grew up in a relatively poor area of rural AR. We mentioned that I acquired most of my vocabulary in my teen years through reading, and as a result sometimes use words that I've never heard spoken and am therefore apt to mispronounce them. It was much more of an issue when I was younger, but it still happens occasionally. She said she had much the same experience, and called it "code switching". I had heard the term before and knew approximately what it meant, but until then had never considered that it applied to my own experience. It absolutely does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

I'd say that it applies to Cajun and Creole as well, only more so.

I wonder if telecommunication advances have sped up accent homogenization

> it’s very sad to see

It's really more bitter sweet. Some amount of this has been happening forever, though mass media probably accelerated it. Yes, there is the loss of a distinct culture, but now more people can communicate with each other.

Countless numbers of cultures have risen and then faded away during the course of history. The parts deemed by others as being worth keeping are assimilated into the cultures that survive. This has been going on long before there was an internet or large media to expose a "common identity".

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