americanisms in british english

It seems that American English is everywhere - even in the UK:

Top Americanisms the British Find Annoying | Blog | Pangea Localization Services

38 Americanisms the British Can’t Bloody Stand ‹ Literary Hub

Americanisms in British English | Cambridge English

We can be positive:

Let's be smart, and reach out to Americanisms - The New European

Or not:

How Americanisms are killing the English language - BBC Culture

The New European's language columnist Peter Trudgill looks at how much US English is in UK English - but also vice versa:

A brief case for Americanisms

Many of us now use words imported from across the pond, like ’truck’ instead of ’lorry’. But the traffic isn’t only one-way...

As I was growing up in the 1950s, I was unaware that I was unwittingly using words that previous generations had considered to be Americanisms. What I called a battery had previously been known as an accumulator; my father had originally called his briefcase a portfolio. And I have written evidence in my teenage diaries that, without being aware of what I was doing, I stopped saying wireless and started saying radio some time after 1960.

Now I am very aware, as younger people presumably are not, that some words and phrases currently being employed by many British people were until recently employed only by Americans...

A brief case for Americanisms - The New European

Here's an interesting list:

Glossary of American terms not widely used in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia

And here's a very charming piece:

The Americanisation of the English language: a frightfully subtle affair

But it works the other way:

Britishisms and the Britishisation of American English - BBC News

'Britishisms' Creeping into American English | Live Science

13 Britishisms That Have Invaded American English | HuffPost UK Home & Living

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english for effective on-line business meetings

Here are some sets of very useful phrases for meetings in English:

The Language of Online Meetings - English 4 Business

Leveling Up Your Business English: Top Phrases Used in Online Meetings

Here's a very good introduction - with video:

Must-Have English Phrases for Online Meetings [Professional English]

Must-Have English Phrases for Online Meetings | Business Vocabulary - YouTube

And here's a nice interactive video showing how it can be done:

Business English for your work meetings and Zoom calls - English lesson - YouTube

There are lots of great videos out there to help you do a business meeting in English:

How To Make Small-Talk At A Business Meeting - Business English - YouTube

HOW TO SPEAK UP IN ZOOM MEETINGS - get noticed and recognized! - YouTube

3-Minute English to GET HEARD in Business Meetings - YouTube

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mr duncan's full english lessons

The English Addict with Mr Duncan is very popular - because it's fun and because folk seem to be actually learning some English from Mr Duncan:

 Learn English with English Addict with Mr Duncan - SuperEnglish

'Learning English with Misterduncan' is a very amusing series for learning English in simple & funny way presented by Mr Dunkan you can download more than 50 lessons from 'Learning English with Misterduncan'

Learn English free with Mr Duncan`s video series

The English Addict in 2023 Join in with the LIVE fun every Sunday at 2pm UK time for English Addict - Live from England. DO YOU LIKE LEARNING ENGLISH? DO YOU FEEL AS IF YOU CAN'T GET ENOUGH OF IT? THEN YOU MIGHT BE AN ENGLISH ADDICT... JUST LIKE ME. 8-) Welcome to the best kept secret on YouTube. All of my videos are free to view, as they always have been since 2006.

Show-English: English Addict with Mr Duncan на английском с субтитрами

Mister Duncan is an expressive English teacher who teaches English through his YouTube channel. He speaks British English naturally and clearly, and his videos are useful for listening practice. You can listen to more than 70 videos chronologically, or browse through the index to choose videos that interest you. The lessons include captions so that you can follow along. There is also a related channel called “Ask Misterduncan” where he answers a large selection of email questions from his viewers. Much of Mister Duncan’s inspiration comes from his own experience teaching English in China.

Misterduncan | EnglishClub

And here he is:

English Addict with Mr Duncan - YouTube

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why are most teaching materials boring?

Even the 'best' teaching materials strike as rather boring.

This is from the British Council:

Robot teachers

Robot teachers | LearnEnglish

It looks at what it obviously feels is a 'current' topic that students would be keen to look at. 

BUT:

The format is so predictable.

First there is feeding in vocab which the students can't possibly know or work out or look up for  themselves. Especially when the words are ripped out of context and presented as yet another meaningless list.

Then there is the text which is so full of assumptions and bad thinking - for example that "Teachers waste a lot of time doing non-teaching work, including more than 11 hours a week marking homework." Yes, 'teaching' is more than marking homework, but 'teaching' clearly involves giving feedback - and, anyway, there are other ways to 'mark homework' - such as getting the students to put it through an AI machine themselves...

Then there are the irritating True/False questions - which is supposed to be about 'comprehension', ie, what does the text/author actually say? But couldn't we also see these as points for discussion: why not start with these and then consider what the text/author thinks? So often these silly questions seem to be more about deliberately confusing the poor reader.

Then there are more of the sort of 'questions' which a robot could easily mark - as there will be a list of correct answers somewhere. But again, where's the nuance, the discussion, the playfulness? Yes, we need to know exactly what it says in the text - we need to stop being so lazy ourselves when 'skimming' a text. But it's all so dry!

Finally, we have the exciting 'open for debate' question which allows the students some free rein. But, again, why not put this at the beginning or have the question there throughout?

So, yes, this is lesson plan provides a framework of sorts - but we can turn it upside down and inside out - just to make it a bit more interesting for both students and teachers. 

And just maybe the students can teach the teachers something - and can give their own verdict of how good the lesson plan, the text, the author's views, etc were...

There are plenty of others thinking the same thing out there:

Why do most teachers make learning so boring? : r/TrueOffMyChest

We found that students adopt a variety of strategies to cope with boring lectures. The most popular are daydreaming (75% of students admitted doing this), doodling (66%), chatting to friends (50%), sending texts (45%), and passing notes to friends (38%).

Why do 60% of students find their lectures boring? | Sandi Mann | The Guardian

For two weeks in third grade, I preached the gospel of the wild boar. My teacher, the sprightly Mrs. DeWilde, assigned my class an open-ended research project: Create a five-minute presentation about any exotic animal. I devoted my free time before bedtime to capturing the wonders of the Sus scrofa in a 20-minute sermon. I filled a poster as big as my 9-year-old self with photographs, facts, and charts, complete with a fold-out diagram of the snout. During my presentation, I shared my five-stanza rhyming poem about the swine’s life cycle, painted the species’ desert and taiga habitats in florid detail, and made uncanny snorting impressions. I attacked each new project that year — a sketch of the water cycle, a history of the Powhatan — with the same evangelism.

Flash forward to the fall of my senior year in high school, and my near-daily lunchtime routine: hunched over at a booth in Wendy’s, chocolate Frosty in my right hand, copying calculus worksheets from Jimmy and Spanish homework from Chris with my left while they copied my notes on Medea or Jane Eyre. Come class, I spent more time playing Snake on my graphing calculator than reviewing integrals, more time daydreaming than conjugating verbs.

What happened in those nine years? Many things. But mainly, like the majority of my fellow Americans, I fell victim to the epidemic of classroom boredom. A 2013 Gallup poll of 500,000 students in grades five through 12 found that nearly eight in 10 elementary students were “engaged” with school, that is, attentive, inquisitive, and generally optimistic. By high school, the number dropped to four in 10...

Bored Out of Their Minds | Harvard Graduate School of Education

And it's happening in the EFL classroom:

Frontiers | The Effects of Boredom on EFL Learners' Engagement

Boring TEFL Lessons & Bored EFL Students • ICAL TEFL

Why Are So Many EFL Textbooks So Bland, Boring, and Culturally Tone Deaf?

English Language Teaching Now and How It Could Be - Cambridge Scholars Publishing

And the alternatives? Here's somebody really inspiring:

Most recently I have discovered mobile learning. I think it is especially promising when it recognises mobile devices as personal to the user (personalisation of features and use), as forming an integral part of the ways in which the user communicates (through call function and SMS but more importantly perhaps by giving the user access to social networks) and as a means to capture life as it happens. Pegrum nicely summarises the benefits of using mobile devices for language learning:

"[L]earners shift between contexts that feed directly into their unfolding learning. […] In the classroom or the schoolyard, as well as on excursions and outings, mobile devices support situated learning, as students receive or seek information from online sources, peers and mentors to inform their interactions with their contexts, and as they use their devise to make and share multimedia records of their contextualised learning experiences." (Pegrum, 2014: 19)

My newest discovery in this context is a book called The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies (Farman ed., 2014). It is a collection of essays aimed at making the reader reimagine the potential of the mobile phone as quintessentially a tool that we can use to tell our stories in ever new, personal, situated and creative ways. So far I have read one about dancers using Twitter to communicate ideas for dance improvisations remotely to each other. Their Tweets become embodied, situated and transformed into a new text code and improvisation continues across time and space. How fascinating!

A Principled Rejection of the Coursebook | Alex Collins on ELT Materials

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banning books, the school curriculum and critical race theory in the united states

The United States is banning books - led by Florida.

This is from the news:

Florida school districts removed approximately 300 books from library shelves last school year, according to a list of “removed or discontinued materials” that was quietly released by the state’s education department late last month. The removals were prompted by more than 1,200 objections raised by parents of public school students or other Florida residents, according to a 16-page Florida Department of Education document that included the book list.

Florida school districts removed roughly 300 books last school year

Book Bans in Florida Schools: The Complete List | Miami New Times

Now that books are being banned and disappearing from school libraries, students and parents are showing up to school board meetings in Florida to argue for access to books that take on difficult subjects. But they are losing out to a new state law that makes it easier for opponents to get books off shelves. The conservative Moms for Liberty and allied groups turned board meetings into spectacle, reading out explicit passages from books without context to argue that they should not be available to minors. This summer, a Florida law went into effect stating that if a board member stopped a reading because it was offensive, the book could be removed immediately.

Children and parents begin uphill fightback against book bans in Florida | CNN

This summer, Iris Mogul – a junior at a Miami high school – found out that she wouldn’t be able to take an AP African American history course that she had planned for the coming semester because it had been blocked by the state’s department of education. “As presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value,” the department said in a statement. “It felt so far away when I first heard about all of this,” says Mogul, who only had a passing knowledge of book challenges and changes to school curriculum previously. “But that is really when it hit me – when it started to affect me directly.” Now, Mogul is prominent among the growing number of students and parents in Miami-Dade county and across Florida who are speaking out in opposition to book challenges, the capture of Florida school boards by conservative activists and this summer’s latest policy changes, which includes the expansion of DeSantis’s Parental Rights in Education Act.

‘Reading is resistance’: students and parents take on DeSantis’s book bans | Florida | The Guardian

It's not just Florida:

Recent debates across the country have pushed for book banning and the adoption of politically motivated laws and policies on school curricula. Such measures seek to prevent teachers from providing a thorough curriculum on American history, civics, and government in U.S. public schools and deny students their rights to a complete education. At least 17 states have introduced bills containing gag orders or taken other steps that would restrict how teachers can discuss American history and current events, including pulling books off library shelves in an effort to suppress so-called “divisive concepts”—a shorthand affectation nearly always referring to issues about race and identity.

Book Banning, Curriculum Restrictions, and the Politicization of U.S. Schools - Center for American Progress

Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Ban Books - PEN America

Here's some background:

In late September 2021, Carrie Damon, a middle school librarian, celebrated “Banned Books Week,” an annual free-speech event, with her working-class Latino students by talking of literature’s beauty and subversive power.

A few weeks later, State Representative Matt Krause, a Republican, emailed a list of 850 books to superintendents, a mix of half-century-old novels — “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron — and works by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Margaret Atwood, as well as edgy young adult books touching on sexual identity. Are these works, he asked, on your library shelves? Mr. Krause’s motive was unclear, but the next night, at a school board meeting in San Antonio, parents accused a librarian of poisoning young minds.

Days later, a secretary sidled up to Ms. Damon and asked if district libraries held pornography. “‘No, no, honey, we don’t buy porno,’” Ms. Damon replied.

Texas is afire with fierce battles over education, race and gender. What began as a debate over social studies curriculum and critical race studies — an academic theory about how systemic racism enters the pores of society — has become something broader and more profound, not least an effort to curtail and even ban books, including classics of American literature. In June, and again in recent weeks, Texas legislators passed a law shaping how teachers approach instruction touching on race and gender. And Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican with presidential ambitions, took aim at school library shelves, directing education officials to investigate “criminal activity in our public schools involving the availability of pornography.” “Parents are rightfully angry,” he wrote in a separate letter. They “have the right to shield their children from obscene content.”

In Texas, Panic Over Critical Race Theory Extends to Bookshelves - The New York Times

One of the issues pushing these bans is CRT:

Critical race theory (CRT) is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing how laws, social and political movements, and media shape, and are shaped by, social conceptions of race and ethnicity. CRT also considers racism to be systemic in various laws and rules, and not only based on individuals' prejudices.[1][2] The word critical in the name is an academic reference to critical thinking, critical theory, and scholarly criticism, rather than criticizing or blaming individuals.[3][4]

Critical race theory - Wikipedia

Critical race theory - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Critical race theory (CRT) is a radical ideology asserting that races can be put into different categories: That white people are the opressor and black people and minorities are the opressed. Critical race theory is Postmodernist that pins races against each other. Critical race theory also asserts that America was founded on racism and slavery, as well as that any attempt to end racism in America, such as Brown vs. Board, is just an attempt to maintain White supremacy. Many parents have rightfully protested against critical race theory being taught in public schools.

Critical race theory - Conservapedia

Critical Race Theory (CRT) makes race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life—and do so with a degree of persistence that has helped CRT impact all of American life. CRT underpins identity politics, an ongoing effort to reimagine the United States as a nation riven by groups, each with specific claims on victimization. In entertainment, as well as the education and workforce sectors of society, CRT is well-established, driving decision-making according to skin color—not individual value and talent. As Critical Theory ideas become more familiar to the viewing public in everyday life, CRT’s intolerance becomes “normalized,” along with the idea of systemic racism for Americans, weakening public and private bonds that create trust and allow for civic engagement.

Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America | The Heritage Foundation

It is very political:

Critical race theory (CRT), taught primarily in higher education and law school, is the study of how laws and policies can drive and perpetuate racial disparities and inequities. Even though Critical Race Theory is not taught in K-12 schools, it is being attacked and subsequently banned by many state legislatures to score political points, using misinformation and fear to drive a wedge between people. The intention of these state measures is to limit and prevent teachers from discussing sexism, racism and other forms of systemic oppression. It is troublesome because teachers should be encouraged to teach about those important concepts--through social studies, literature and other parts of the curriculum... 

We know the importance of children’s books as both mirrors and windows for young people. “Mirror books” help children see themselves reflected in those books so their lived experiences are acknowledged, appreciated, and valued. "Window books” assist young people to learn from and about the experiences of others who don’t share aspects of their identity. Starting at a very young age and up to the teen years, children’s books open doors to conversations about identity, diversity, bias, and social justice—conversations that are an integral part of a young person’s education. Over the last ten years, progress has been made in the publishing of more diverse books and by authors who are representative of that diversity.

Schools Are Using Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws to Ban Children’s Literature | ADL

Last year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1557, which LGBTQ rights advocates call the “Don’t Say Gay” law because it bans classroom discussion of sexuality or gender in kindergarten through grade three, and allows parents to sue if they believe a teacher has violated the law. DeSantis also signed the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act, or the “Stop WOKE” Act, which prohibits the teaching of critical race theory in schools. The laws do not outright ban books, but due to their broad language, Florida schools are removing books that could be in violation. Teachers are stuck in the middle: they can distribute only approved books in the classroom or they could face dire consequences.

Books banned from libraries sit on a table at a Florida flower shop, June 2022 [Courtesy of Adam Tritt]

With a video discussing the issues in the States...

How teachers and librarians are subverting book bans in the US | Education News | Al Jazeera

The ban includes some classics:

Shakespeare and penguin book get caught in Florida's 'Don't Say Gay' laws | AP News

Florida schools remove books by John Milton and Toni Morrison and restrict Shakespeare under DeSantis rules | The Independent

This is not a very good example from the leader of the free world:

These efforts to censor books are an affront to the core principles of free expression and open inquiry that US democracy swears by. But equally worrying is the fact that this pattern of attacks on public education in the US appears to be inspiring similar efforts in other countries, even though such censorship campaigns haven’t had as much success there yet.

In the United Kingdom, officials are raising the spectre of critical race theory in schools — an issue that was not previously a topic of debate or concern — to try and stop the teaching of histories that explore systemic racism. That’s part of what authors and others have described as a mood “shift” in the UK — a budding “culture war” that is leading to the censorship and removal of books from school shelves. Books being removed are often children’s books that look at institutional racism, diversity and LGBTQ+ identities.

Echoes of US-based group tactics are also manifesting in Canada, with parental groups asking school boards to ban certain books — again with LGBTQ+ content — and seeking to change curricular topics that they see as being part of the teaching of critical race theory. The movement is also gaining the attention of politicians. Australia’s Senate voted against the inclusion of critical race theory in the country’s school curriculum in 2021.

Of course, educational censorship laws and book bans, particularly those aimed at silencing certain peoples, religions, or viewpoints, are tactics that have long been used by governments.

The US is inspiring education censorship elsewhere | Censorship | Al Jazeera

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ça va?! bilingualism is good for the brain

Being able to speak another language well is good for your brain: 

Psychology researchers provide new evidence that bilingualism can delay symptoms of dementia. Researchers found bilingualism provides the brain with greater cognitive reserve, delaying onset of symptoms.

Can bilingualism protect the brain even with early stages of dementia? | ScienceDaily

Speaking a second language shows benefits in Alzheimer’s - Alzheimer's Research UK

Brain scans showed that lifelong bilinguals have stronger connections between certain brain areas compared to those who only speak one language – this appears to allow their brains to cope better with damage before they start to show outward signs of dementia.

Bilingual brains are more resilient to dementia cause by Alzheimer’s disease | Alzheimer's Society

Why a bilingual brain is more resistant to dementia

My students have asked many times in which language I dream. They smile when I answer that all I can remember is how well I can, in my dreams, speak any of the languages I have learnt and the disappointment when I wake up.

It reminds me of a program I used in workshops to demonstrate the mental effort required to learn a second language in adulthood, even in old age, when your brain is monolingual. However, the benefits are equally powerful.

We all know that speaking several languages has advantages for communication. But it can have other benefits too. Could we be better at multitasking or have less risk of suffering from dementia? Scientists have debated these issues for over a decade without fully agreeing. They do know that using several languages changes our brains physically and how they work. You don't have to be bilingual from birth to leave a positive imprint on your brain. Let's see why...

Why a bilingual brain is more resistant to dementia | Sidmouth Herald

And looking more generally:

Bilingual people show increased activation in the brain region associated with cognitive skills like attention and inhibition. For example, bilinguals are proven to be better than monolinguals in encoding the fundamental frequency of sounds in the presence of background noise.

Cognitive benefits of being bilingual

In a cafe in south London, two construction workers are engaged in cheerful banter, tossing words back and forth. Their cutlery dances during more emphatic gesticulations and they occasionally break off into loud guffaws. They are discussing a woman, that much is clear, but the details are lost on me. It’s a shame, because their conversation sounds fun and interesting, especially to a nosy person like me. But I don’t speak their language.

Out of curiosity, I interrupt them to ask what language they are speaking. They both switch easily to English, explaining that they are South Africans and had been speaking Xhosa. In Johannesburg, where they are from, most people speak at least five languages, says one of them, Theo Morris. For example, Morris’s mother’s tongue is Sotho, his father’s is Zulu; he learned Xhosa and Ndebele from his friends and neighbours and English and Afrikaans at school. “I went to Germany before I came here, so I also speak German,” he adds.

Was it easy to learn so many languages? “Yes, it’s normal,” he laughs.

He’s right. Around the world, more than half of people – estimates vary from 60-75% – speak at least two languages. Many countries have more than one official national language – South Africa has 11. People are increasingly expected to speak, read and write at least one of a handful of “super” languages, such as English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish or Arabic, as well. So to be monolingual, as many native English speakers are, is to be in the minority and perhaps to be missing out.

Why being bilingual works wonders for your brain | Language | The Guardian

Why being bilingual is good for your brain | BBC Ideas - YouTube

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mazes, treasure hunts and mystery tours for the esl classroom

There are lots of mazes, treasure hunts and mystery tours for the ESL classroom

MAZES:

How to create a maze:

The holiday maze | TeachingEnglish | British Council

With more here:

FREE! - ESL Beginner Activity | Questions Maze | ESL PowerPoint Game

74 Maze English ESL worksheets pdf & doc

It can get quite interesting at a higher level, with real decisions to make:

The spending maze | TeachingEnglish | British Council

TREASURE HUNTS:

How to create a treasure hunt:

Teach English at Home with Treasure Hunts and Other Fun Games

Here are some ready-made treasure hunts:

20 Treasure hunt English ESL worksheets pdf & doc

English Scavenger Hunt! ESL/EFL Classroom Activity - English Current

MYSTERY TOURS:

These can get quite complicated - and fun:

Murder Mystery Game: Mystery at Mr. Grim's Mansion (EFL)

murder_mystery_who_killed_miss_greenspoon_·_students.pdf

And some can be based on real places!

Travel ESL Activities Role-Plays Games

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making it easier to learn english in the uk

It's not easy to travel to the UK to learn English:

No ID card travel or limited work rights for UK ELT students

There is a 'short-term study visa':

Study English in the UK (Short-term study visa): Overview - GOV.UK

But there are suggested changes:

Help us become the world’s premier ELT destination again HOW THE GOVERNMENT CAN HELP OUR INDUSTRY THRIVE English UK position paper / April 2023 (updated May 2023)

English_UK_position_paper_Apr2023_WEB.pdf

And there are specific proposals emerging:

Students from the EU are the focus of a proposed educational travel plan.
The impacts of losing freedom of movement, and the ripples of COVID-19, are starting to be felt further afield than merely the confines of the British Isles. Prior to 2019, the UK was a leader in ELT, attracting over 500,000 students a year. In 2022, the UK attracted only 239,576 – around a 45% decrease from pre-pandemic levels.
Not only does this loss impact the UK’s tourism industries, the changes to passport requirements in October 2021 makes the UK less accessible to young people learning English. Before this change, students could visit in supervised groups with just ID cards. Now, they must produce full passports, which many EU students do not have. As a result, a number of associations are trying to make a change by proposing the Youth Group Travel Scheme...

BETA propose Youth Group Travel Scheme | E L Gazette

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imposing one language on china

What's the difference between a dialect and and language:

... the difference between a language and a dialect was ultimately a political distinction and had little to do with linguistics per se. Thus, German and Dutch are separate languages, but Mandarin and Meixian Chinese are supposed dialects.

What's the difference between a dialect and a language?

I have a Swedish pal I see at conferences in Denmark. When we’re out and about there, he is at no linguistic disadvantage. He casually orders food and asks directions in Swedish despite the fact that we are in a different country from his own, where supposedly a different “language”—Danish—is spoken. In fact, I’ve watched speakers of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian conversing with each other, each in their own native tongues, as a cozy little trio over drinks. A Dane who moves to Sweden does not take Swedish lessons; she adjusts to a variation upon, and not an alternate to, her native speech. The speakers of these varieties of Scandinavian consider them distinct languages because they are spoken in distinct nations, and so be it. However, there is nothing about Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian in themselves that classifies them as “languages”; especially on the page, they resemble each other closely enough to look more like dialects of one “language.”

Meanwhile, one generally hears Mandarin, Cantonese, and Taiwanese described as “dialects” of something called Chinese. But the only single “Chinese” language that exists is on paper, in that all of its varieties have the same writing system, where each word has its own symbol that (more or less) stays the same from one Chinese “dialect” to another. Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, are more different than Spanish and Italian. I, you, and he in Mandarin are wǒ, nǐ, and tā, but in Cantonese they are, respectively, ngóh, léih, and kéuih. Dialects? A Mandarin-speaker can no more “adjust” to Cantonese than a Swede could “adjust” to German.

The Difference Between a Language and a Dialect - The Atlantic

[See also: Jay Doubleyou: idiolect vs dialect]

It's political:

United Nations’ Chinese Language Day falls on 20 April, and is one of the six UN language days, celebrating multilingualism and the use of six official languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish). Here, I want to talk about the term ‘Chinese’, a ‘simple’ term packed with linguistic and ideological complexities...

A quick internet search reveals various videos where native speakers produce scripted sentences in dialects (this one has 3 dialects – Putonghua, Cantonese, and Hakka, and this one contains 5 dialects). As a Mandarin/Putonghua speaker, I can only manage 10-20% for non-Mandarin varieties at best.

So why are vastly different varieties classified as dialects rather than languages? The reasons are deeply ideological and political, and unique to China as a nation-state. According to DeFrancis, China has for centuries maintained its status as a ‘single if occasionally disrupted political entity’ with mutually unintelligible languages/dialects, spoken by a mostly monoethnic population (92% Han vs 8% of 55 other ethnicities). Unlike nations where different varieties are closely tied with religious, ethnic, racial, and/or extreme economic differences, leading to an interruption in political and linguistic unity, China and its unity of speakers of different dialects has never been challenged by these extralinguistic factors historically. Although the tension between different social groups (e.g. different economic status) might have been building up recently, the Chinese government’s vigorous promotion of Putonghua as the sole standard and official language has certainly helped maintain its linguistic unity.

The Linguistic and Ideological Complexities of the ‘Chinese’ Language | Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies (MEITS)

Here's a list:

Languages of China - Wikipedia

Here's some history:

Mandarin, later called Putonghua, has served as the lingua franca in China, allowing those who spoke different Chinese languages to communicate with one another. The country remained linguistically diverse until the 1990s when Putonghua was promulgated as the major medium of instruction in schools.

Many complained about the arbitrary decision to make Mandarin the official tongue back in 1913, and local advocates have resisted the suppression of mother tongues. In Cantonese-speaking Guangdong province, many believe the local tongue is more authentic than Mandarin, and some even believe Cantonese nearly became China’s official language.

Aside from political consideration, from the view of many southern Chinese, Mandarin is considered a “foreignized Han tongue” 胡化漢語, as the northern part of China was under the rule of foreign tribes throughout Chinese history. According to Yuan Tengfei, a famous Chinese historian and history teacher, Mandarin was a creole language spoken by foreign tribes in the northern part of China centering around Beijing. The historian pointed out in one of his books on Chinese history...

The reasons behind the myth of Cantonese as a more authentic Chinese language · Global Voices

The Chinese government is beginning to impose one language on the country:

Jay Doubleyou: china, mandarin and domestic dominance

And it's in the news:

Chinese authorities in the northern region of Inner Mongolia have cut the number of weekly Mongolian language classes from schools across the region, Radio Free Asia has learned. The move comes as schools complete the phasing out of Mongolian in favor of Mandarin as a medium of instruction for non-language classes including history, math and science — a policy that sparked mass protests by parents and students followed by a regionwide crackdown when it was first announced in September 2020.

China bans Mongolian-medium classes, cuts language hours in schools — Radio Free Asia

Some education experts in Hong Kong have pushed for increased use of Mandarin Chinese in schools to better improve the competitiveness of the next generation. But others worry that children could suffer from a loss of ability to express themselves if they are not able to have most of their tuition in their native dialect. In the second of a two-part series about Cantonese, the Post explores the long-running and contentious debate about how to teach Chinese in the city amid its steady integration with mainland China.

Cantonese or Mandarin? A debate in Hong Kong education since 2008 | South China Morning Post

To finish:

After the implementation of compulsory education in 1986, Putonghua was promulgated as the major medium of instruction in schools. By the end of the 1990s, mother tongues were redrawn from primary school education, with the exception of a few autonomous regions, including inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, where the majority of the local population is not Han Chinese.

In 2000, the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress passed the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language Law, demanding Putonghua be used in government and public institutions, schools, and TV and radio broadcasting. In addition, the official language’s standard written form be used in textbooks, public documents, product instructions, public displays and signs, etc. As students are forbidden to speak in their mother tongues inside schools, many have lost their ability to speak in their mother tongues.

In recent years, Putonghua has replaced indigenous languages in education and other institutional settings in autonomous regions, including Xinjiang, inner Mongolia and Tibet.

While China's critics often slam the suppression of non-Han ethnic languages in autonomous regions as “cultural genocide,” Chinese state-funded media outlets rebuked the accusation as a “smear campaign” as Beijing just extended its suppression of mother tongues among Han, according to national law, to other ethnic groups. Even in Hong Kong, Putonghua is replacing Cantonese as the medium of instruction in the Chinese Language Subject in primary and secondary school education. The term “cultural genocide” cannot accurately capture the zeal for the centralization of power since the Qin Dynasty through the standardization of language.

State violence and the standardization of the Chinese language · Global Voices

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what are agglutinative languages?!

AGGLUTINATIVE LANGUAGE:

An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination.

Agglutinative language - Wikipedia

There's lots of language to unpack there!

MORPHEME:

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression.[1] The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.

In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone are considered roots (such as the morpheme cat); other morphemes, called affixes, are found only in combination with other morphemes. For example, the -s in cats indicates the concept of plurality but is always bound to another concept to indicate a specific kind of plurality.[2]

This distinction is not universal and does not apply to, for example, Latin, in which many roots cannot stand alone. For instance, the Latin root reg- ('king') must always be suffixed with a case marker: rex (reg-s), reg-is, reg-i, etc. For a language like Latin, a root can be defined as the main lexical morpheme of a word.

These sample English words have the following morphological analyses:"Unbreakable" is composed of three morphemes: un- (a bound morpheme signifying "not"), break (the root, a free morpheme), and -able (a bound morpheme signifying "an ability to be done").[3][4][5]

The plural morpheme for regular nouns (-s) has three allomorph

Morpheme - Wikipedia

SYNTHETIC LANGUAGE:

A synthetic language is a language which is statistically characterized by a higher morpheme-to-word ratio. In contrast to analytic languages, which break up concepts into separate words, synthetic languages combine (synthesize) them into a single word.

• international classical compounds based on Greek and Latin derivational synthesis

hypercholesterolemia (υπερχοληστερολαιμία)

hyper-

high

cholesterol

cholesterol

-emia

blood

the presence of high levels of cholesterol in the blood.

• alternately, cholesterol can be read as chole- + στερεός(stereós) + -ol, as in "bile + solid + [alcohol suffix]", or "the solid alcohol present in bile".

• Hungarian

házaitokban

ház

house

-a

poss

-i

pl

-tok

your.pl

-ban

in

"In your houses"

Synthetic language - Wikipedia

Going beyond Wikipedia:

Agglutinative languages form words through the combination of smaller morphemes to express compound ideas. Each of these morphemes generally has one meaning or function and retains its original form and meaning during the combination process. For languages that have agglutinative morphology, such as Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, or Korean, it is possible to produce thousands of forms for a given root word.

The following table shows a list of inflected forms for the Finnish word "talo" ("house").

Word	Translation
Talo	House
Taloni	My house
Talossa	In the house
Talossani	In my house
Taloja	Houses
Taloissa	In the houses

 Inflected languages, such as English, French, and Latin, have a very small number of possible word forms for a given root word. In inflected languages, morphemes influence one another when binding. Most changes in inflection are present in the stem or word ending. In contrast to agglutinative languages, inflected languages tend to have different functions for a single morpheme. For example, a morpheme can determine both number and case.

Agglutinative Languages | Microsoft Learn

And:

Agglutinating language is a language which has a morphological system in which words as a rule are polymorphemic and where each morpheme corresponds to a single lexical meaning.

Examples

Classical examples of agglutinating languages are Turkish and Quechua.

(i) Turkish

	ev-	ler-	i-	den
	house	PL-	POSS-	ABL
	'from their house'

(ii)Quechua

	maqa-	chi-	naku-	rka-	n
	beat	CAUS-	RECP-	PL-	3
	'They let each other be beaten.'

Agglutinating language - Glottopedia

LANGUAGE TYPES: AN OVERVIEW:

The way in which morphemes are employed to modify meaning can vary between languages.  is a method used by linguists to classify languages according to their morphological structure. While a variety of classification types have been identified, we will look at a common method of classification: analytic, agglutinative and fusional. Figure 3.2 give some examples of morphological typology across the world’s languages.

 have a low ratio of morphemes to words. They are often  in that each morpheme is also a word and vice versa. These languages create sentences with independent root morphemes with grammatical relations between words being expressed with separate words. Examples of analytics or isolating languages include Chinese languages and Vietnamese. While in English we inflect numbers: one day, two days, an analytic language such as Mandarin Chinese has no inflection: 一天, yì tiān “one day”, 三天, sān tiān “three day”. The Canadian linguist and translator Sonja Lang has created an analytic language, Toki Pona, as a minimalist creative endeavour.

Figure 3.2 Examples of Morphological Typology [Image description]

Unlike analytic languages, synthetic languages employ inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships.  combine one or more morphemes into one word. The distinguishing feature of these languages is that each morpheme is individually identifiable as a meaningful unit even after combining into a word. Examples of agglutinative languages include Tamil, Secwepemc, Turkish, Japanese, Finnish, Basque and Hungarian. Figure 3.3 shows you an example of agglutination in Turkish. Each coloured morpheme is also given an approximate English translation. Figure 3.2 give another example from Tamil.

Figure 3.3 Example from Turkish, an Agglutinative Language [Image description]

Another type of synthetic languages are . Like agglutinative languages, fusional languages also combine morphemes to modify meaning. However, these combinations often do not remain distinct and fuse together. In addition, these languages also have a tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote numerous grammatical or syntactic features. For example, the suffix -í in Spanish comí (“I ate”) denotes both first-person singular agreement and preterite tense. Examples of fusional languages include Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit, Spanish, Romanian, and German. Modern English could also be considered fusional; although it has tended to evolve to be more analytic. J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictional language Sindarin is fusional (another elvish language, Quenya, is agglutinative).

Figure 3.2 shows an additional morphological type named . These languages tend to a high morpheme-to-word ratio as well as regular morphology. They often combine a large number of morphemes to form words that are the equivalent of entire sentences in other languages. Many languages in North America such as Mohawk tend to have this type of morphology.

3.3 Morphology of Different Languages – Psychology of Language

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