Thanks Carla for your insightful comments. I agree that this is a great topic for further exploration.
During my visit in 2016, I also noticed that English is now competing with French and in fact there is a push for adoption for English in the school system. How will this impact linguistic landscape remains to be seen.

Thanks for this comment, Carla! This would make a great topic for your presentation!

🥰

Hi Ingrid, I am really sorry for the late reply. I totally understand your effort when trying to pronounce Vietnamese students’ names correctly in class. It is difficult to say there are any tips to speak Vietnamese as my language is monosyllabic, and syllables are pronounced separately. If you have time, I highly recommend you start with the Vietnamese alphabet, or you can note some Vietnamese names that you often pronounce incorrectly to remember. There are just a few that can confuse you, for example, my friend’s name, “Dung”. The rest of the Vietnamese names are quite easy to speak. I believe you can probably do it in the near future.

And Chinese has neither definite nor indefinite articles 😉

Arabic has only one article, while English has two articles, “the” and “a”. If the Arabic word has the article “al”, it is equivalent to the English noun with “the”; if there is no article, which means it is to emphasize the quantities, it is equivalent to have ”a“ “one” or “some”.All kinds of Arab nouns, in the context of not emphasizing quantity, are all defaulted with the article al.

谢谢你!

I found this website and article that helps with understanding。
Please have a look!!
https://eastasiastudent.net/china/classical/first-person-pronouns/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267997013_Change_of_functions_of_the_first_person_pronouns_in_Chinese

Thanks, Chloe! Sounds fascinating – I’ll have to read up on that! Any suggestions?

In ancient time, each person had a different first person pronoun depending on their status, position, age and gender. China has a long history and is divided into several dynasties, and depending on the dynasty the first pronouns of these people would also be different. To give a simple example, in the Qin dynasty the first pronoun of the emperor was “孤&寡人” but，in the Tang dynasty it was “朕”. The term “老身” is a term used by older women to refer to themselves and “鄙人，卑人” is a term of self-effacement used for men of low status. “敝人” is the term used by people of low moral character to refer to themselves. The term ‘姑奶奶, 老娘’ is a term used by older women to refer to themselves, but it is a bit crude and can sound rude. I won’t list them all, and to be honest I don’t feel confident in saying that I know every single self pronoun from the ancient and modern worlds, because there are just too many.

Thank you, for sharing this example from Thai. Sadly, these linguistic hierarchies and the bullying, discrimination, and exclusion they give rise to seem almost universal. You might be interested in this example from Iran: https://languageonthemove.com/ridiculing-accents/

Speaking about being bullied, the origin of bullying motives are mostly from Thai soap operas or movies when they often describe the characters who speak regional dialect other than central dialect as “coming from countryside, being uneducated, low technology, for example, which in fact, is not necessarily true. These characters speaking regional dialects therefore are put as a funny role or inferior role in such movie or soap opera. The kind of activities are then passed on to reality, without questioning the truth or the morality behind this. This is the main reason how fake news or very negative stereotype are broadcast and believed from generation to generations. This vicious cycle not only make people afraid to speak in their original dialect, but it may also increase the chances of new generation stop speaking their own dialect, leading to dialect extinction the end.

In my opinion, dialects should be respected and preserved as we have learned from the beginning of Literacies class about how language was created and developed which is not an easy job at all. Also, in certain cultures including Thai culture, regional dialect is the only communication tools that new generation can use to communicate with their grandparents/older generation because they were born with such dialect, and would be so hard for them to learn new dialect/language at old age.

Thanks, Bob! Private English-medium education strikes me as problematic not because of language purity but because (1) it isolates a tiny minority elite from the rest of the population; and (2) as a form of submersion education, it damages student learning …