Re: [Lingo] British English

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Niels Kobschaetzki writes:

 > When you learn Japanese,

I assume you mean "in school"....

 > you usually learn the standard language as well and that is
 > considered the dialect spoken in Tokyo.

Actually, the orthography and standard grammar is defined by
Monbu(kagaku)sho, and the standard spoken dialect is defined by the
semi-official NHK Dictionary of Japanese Accent.

 > Never heard of anyone who learned Kanzai-ben when s/he started to
 > learn Japanese.

Some of the best game designers at Nintendo in the 90s were two
English boys (too young to legally drink when they got here), and all
they could speak was gutter Kansai-ben.  So now you have.  (The better
one later moved to SONY, which sent him to San Francisco to learn
proper English, not to mention Bezier curves and OpenGL.  He returned
to Kyoto and married a local girl with a lot of land in the hills, so
I suppose he probably has never learned NHK-ben, and he still speaks
that archaic tongue he learned from his mother.  Lucky lad. :-)

 > You always learn one dialect which is considered the standard
 > language for the country.

That's not really true in the U.S., and I wonder about Spain (though I
don't know in detail about its regional languages, I know they exist)
and China.  And I have to wonder how you apply that at all to
countries like Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland.