Dialect Community

The essay Achieving Community, written by Suresh Canagarajah, was quite interesting and necessary related to me. In his essay, Canagarajah mentions two times when he talked to two guys, who could have same Tamil identities like him, in the car wash and gas station, and how he understands these conversations. It’s hard not to reminds me my experience in the States when I talked to people who can speak Chinese.

During the Presidential three days break, to have some fun and enjoy some good food, I went to Irivine with my friend. Irivine is pretty famous in Chinese international students who live in west coast, as aplace with tons of Chinese restaurants and other Asian restaurants selling foods like sushi and kimchi BBQ that we are familiar with. It was quite nice to walk in 99 ranch to see those food brand that I used to enjoy in my hometown, and while I was picking stuff, I heard somebody speaking Cantonese.

Mostly spoken in southeast coast area, Cantonese is a quite special dialect in China. As an native English speaker, it is not hard to find that Cantonese got its own English term, but others dialects in China did not. Cantonese was spoken by a larger number of population in the state than other language, too. The Cantonese speaking population is actually the confusing point of community identification.

I can find a Chinese international student in the crowd easily because usually they speak Mandarin. Things turn out to be more difficult when I listened to somebody who talks Cantonese. The first is, I can’t understand the conversation contents since Cantonese is quite different from my hometown dialect. Meanwhile, the second point is important that, Cantonese is also spoken by people who migrate to the States earlier. There are many stories of Cantonese families who began their journey in the States for better future. As a matter of fact their kids might not speak Mandarin but English and Cantonese, because nowadays Mandarin used to be a dialect as well. Bruce Lee, born in HongKong, could explain the idea well while he also spoke Cantonese.

Dialects and various version of Indian language represent different roots back into our hometown. I would personally argue stories and contemplation of languages and individuals themselves are impossible to be reflected in personal exprience. These stories of muti-language speakers or dialect speakers are culture phenomenons themselves.