Dialect

The moment my mum started complaining to my dad about the poor service she encountered whilst shopping the other day, my left kidney twinged.

I don't know about you, but when it comes to matters of personal safety, I have quite the well-evolved and developed gut instinct. Left kidney twinges should never be disregarded.

Logic and rational thought reigned for a moment. Why would you be anywhere in the range of fire, they said. Your mum's talking about some young punk who couldn't be bothered to do a good job - you're not even related remotely!

Ho ho ho, my left kidney sniggered, I'm never wrong.

Logic will always fail when it comes to leaps of understanding, because it demands order and a sequential flow of information. Left kidneys grab pieces from everywhere to put two and two together. As it turned out, my left kidney was right (correct, to avoid confusion). For those more inclined to logical, Science-y thinking, I've repieced together the flow of conversation.

Bad service --> Rude and insolent staff --> Inability to understand my grandma's requests for help --> Inability to understand dialect --> Abhorent trend now --> Shameful that the young can't understand simple dialect --> For that matter, Honteng (my, ironically, dialect name) also cannot speak dialect --> Why can't you pick up dialect Honteng --> Why why why why why

It makes you pause, really, when you think about how just one generation makes so much of a difference. I can understand and speak rudimentary Cantonese and Hokkien, but it hardly counts when half your vocab's, er, anatomical terms.

It's sad, no doubt. At any community service project involving the elderly now, the peers held most highly in regard are those who understand dialect and who manage actually talk to them, instead of resorting to broken Mandarin and more gestures than a mime artist.

I wonder how the elderly feel, watching their world taken over by a tribe of monkeys gibbering away in some unintelligible language. Has it ever occurred to you that the same might happen to us, that our grandchildren might be total strangers to us by virtue of language alone?

At the present moment, however, I was a little chaffed by my parent's remarks. First, my command of English must be good, "because it is my first language". Then, I have to excel in Mandarin too, "because it is my first language". Oh my, did you actually manage to guess that dialect is incidentally "my first language" too, because I am Cantonese?

Which part of "first" do they not understand?!?

It's simply not feasible for the average person to be well-versed in all of the above. I am always mindful of the astute observation my psychologist friend Siaocharn made, that the first sign of being competent in a language, is being able to compose poems in that language.

Poems in English are fun to write, even quite rewarding at times. My poems in Chinese only make my little cousins laugh, and almost always earn me a black mark from Haoyun's family. And the dialect 'poems' I know, are firstly not original, and secondly not the kind you recite over a family dinner.

Sigh, but my parents are right. It all just boils down to effort. My friends in Medicine are struggling to pick up dialect now, in order to converse with their patients more effectively, and before long they will acquire sufficient dialect to sound halfway educated.

Oh well. One more addition to my list of New Year resolutions.