Language or dialect

This week's articles about African American vernacular language made me think about the differences between a language and a dialect. I also instantly connected the discussions in the articles with the language situation in Korea.

According to a article in linguistics that I read long time ago (I don't remember who wrote this article and what exactly this article was about), some of the indigenous tribes in New Zealand think that they use different language from other tribes. However, as a linguist observed the communicative exchanges among people from different tribes, he could only find some semantic differences among those languages that these tribes used. What I also remember is that the class talked about how we discern a dialect from a language. These indigenous tribes tried to learn each other's languages for communication, thinking that language language was equally valuable for their life.

If we live in this kind of society, people might not be worried about which language they use. However, this is not the case in every society, especially when there is a national language, standard language, or official language that have more power than other types of languages. This is also the same in Korea. In Korea, the standard language is a Seoul dialect. Other than Seoul dialect, we basically have about 5 major dialects which are used in different regions of Korea, but the varieties of each dialect are more complicated. For example, my family on my father's side use a Choong-chung dialect but it also sounds like a Chula dialect in terms of their vocabulary, and intonation. That is because they used to live in the border area between Choong-chung and Chula provinces. The Seoul dialect is used in every official sites such as education, politics, and business in an oral form and in a written form. It is also used more often in mass media than other dialects.
(Seoul dialect and other dialects are totally different from one another in terms of vocabulary, pronunciation, and intonation. If people say in a 'real' dialect, I totally do not understand what they are saying.)

Basically, Seoul dialect makes the speakers of this particular dialect more privileged in that they have more accessibility to the institutions and systems that have power. Nevertheless, I have never heard that any teacher was trying to teach how to speak Seoul dialect correctly at school. Rather, the teachers in each local area choose to communicate children in their dialect during the class. One of my friends who were grown in Kyoungsang-do, where the dialect is so distinctive), went to a university in Seoul, and went to back to her hometown to teach. For first couple of months, she tried to speak in a Seoul dialect, but soon she decided to stop using it. The reason why she stopped it was really weird to keep using the Seoul dialect with the students who are using her childhood language, and home language. She said that she really felt detached from the students when she tried to speak in the Seoul Dialect.

Even though students in other regions than Seoul and it satellite cities use the local dialect at home, with peers, and even with teachers, I don't think that this cannot prevent them from learning the Standard form of Korean either in a written or an oral form. They learn it from their textbooks, storybooks, new paper, other types of mass media, and the Internet. Like the students in Godley et. al.'s (2007) article, students know from their experiences when they need to the Seoul dialect and which dialect works better in an official context. At the same time, they appreciate the dialect they are using with their family and friends because the dialect make them bonded to each other.

I acknowledge that the situation around African American Vernacular language is more complicated than the linguistic issues in Korea due to its complex historical and political reasons. However, I think that something that can be taken from the experiences of other cultures.