Dialects

I've been thinking for awhile that after I finish my bachelor's degrees, I'd like to go for a master's degree in linguistics. The processes by which a language develops and people learn languages captivate me.

The other night I was watching a Brazilian film, "Ciudad de Dios," with spoken Portuguese, English subtitles and discussed it with my friends in Spanish. The movie itself is great, a shocking eye-opener, but that is not what I am meaning to talk about. As I listened to the spoken Portuguese I picked out several words I recognize from Spanish and a couple from English. One word I recognized however, that caught me off guard, was the Chilean slang word for cool, "bakan." This word is used the same as in Portuguese! So where did this word come from, was it introduced into the Chilean dialect from Portuguese or was it introduced into Portuguese through the Chilean dialect? I'm leaning towards the first theory.

Chileans have a very distinct way of speaking and a elaborate slang. The devolpment of this dialect has a strong relationship with the costal geography of the country. A mix of languages have flown in through the numerous ports with immigrants from every corner of the world to construct a tongue very unique from Castillian Spanish.

Portuguese is a mix of Spanish and Catalan or Italian. It also has a little bit of Arabic thrown in. But modern Portuguese is surely recieving a lot of new words, a remixing of Spanish words from its Spanish-speaking neighbors (Brazil is the only South American country that speaks Portuguese)and along with almost every other language of the world, a large quantity of English words. I guess I'll just have to learn Portuguese before I will really know.

English today is the Latin of the Medieval and Renaissance. People everywhere know it as an international business language. Just as the many Latin import words in English (for example the word import), there are many English import words in modern Spanish such as Internet, cookie, paddle, mouse, ticket, etc. A really funny word is "footing" for jogging.

A dictionary can list off words, but after a word goes out of use, it doesn't make any difference to have it in a dictionary. Language is a living, growing being, always changing and losing old words like a body sheds old skins cells to replace with new ones. The development of a language directly reflects the devolpment of inter-cultural relationships with the trading of words.

It also interest me that when I speak with my friends that are also bilingual, we tend to use a mixture of English and Spanish, whichever comes to mind most quickly. How could the use of "Spanglish" have an impact on the development of the two languages? It seems like Spanglish is following a similar formation process as Catalan or Portuguese. Some day will Spanglish be an official language? Spanglish is used so much in the Southern United States, but monolingual English spearkers cannot understand nor can Spanish speakers.

If you start at the bottom and go clockwise, you still get to the same point as if you go counter clockwise. Its just a different way of comprehending the same idea. Languages are exactly the same. None are better than the others, they just go about ideas in a different way. Besides, after all, is there really a difference between a papá, a padre, a fader or a father?