Language classes in schools should be allowed to use dialects.

My opponent ask me how well North and Eastern Greenlanders do in written Greenlandic and English, compared to their counterparts, so I repeat what I said in my first argument. Because of the problems conserning teachers and schools in Eastern and Northen Greenland, they underperform in almost all tests except oral English and Greenlandic. Written languages being no exeption. My opponent argues that most countries are tied together ethnically and I agree, because an ethnical group is a group of people who are tied together by language, religion, race or other common values, such as living in the same country.(1)My opponent will have you belive that language is of little importance compared to the other elements and that America is just an abonormality, but I can find many other countries, such as Brazil where people have different race and religion, but is united by a common language. I would instead argue that it is much easier to unit a country by common language than by religion or race. You can get a common language by simple education where to get a common religion or race you will more often than not have to take more radical actions.My opponent then and points to German and Germany. What if Germany had conquered all germanic countries and made German the only legally taught germanic dialect? Well that was pretty much what happened, just without all the conquering. What we know today as German was earlier known as Hochdeutch or Standardgerman. Germany used to be a very splinttered nation with many different kingdoms, dukedoms and free cities, each with its regional dialects of which many where not mutually intelligible to each other. At the end of the 19th century Standardgerman was invented. Standardgerman was then first taught as a second language, but latter you would no longer learned your regional dialect in school and only Standardgerman was taught.(2) Giving us the Germany of today where all people understand each other. My opponent argues that pushing a standard language to much can divide a nation. I do not disagree. It just shows the power of language. The goal should still be to have only the standard dialect in language classes. How fast you can reach that goal, of course, depends on more pragmatic things such as the number of teachers able to teach the language and the mode of the people, but countries such as Germany and America have shown that it can be done and that it is something to aim for.Now my opponent point to the people with learning disabilities. People who for different reasons have problem learning one let alone multiple languages. Of course people with learning disabilities should get extra help, but if they can only hope to learn a single language then it should be that countries standard dialect. What would be better to learn for a swede in Germany? Swedish or German? Would you preffere a child who grew up in Chinatown in New York learned Mandarin over American? No, because a regional dialect or language is less usefull than a countries standard dialect or language. So if a person can only learn one dialect, then it should be the standard dialect and there for you should not have local dialects in language classes.My opponent point to a swedish study that counter acts the studies I have brought up about the positiv effects of being bilingual and we could now start to argue about quantity and quality of the studies, but I will instead point to my arguments above. Being able to talk the standard language is more important than the local language and our long term goal should be that the local language and standard language become the same, so the bilingual situation is only temporary.Now my opponents last argument for keeping the local dialect in the schools is that they may else die out, leaving only the standard dialect, and that this would be a cultural and scientific lose.The scientific lose may be very true if the local dialect disappeared from one day to another, but as said before it is a slow procces and it will be easy for scientists and linguistics to record and preserve the language for thousands of years. Helping not only research today, but also help latter researches to understand our current time. Like latin still helps us to understand the classic age.The cultural loses should be taken much more seriuse, but I will here argue that truely great works surviev and transend their language. We still read Cicero and Platon even though their original languages have been dead for quit a long time. Now neither of them where poets, but the Poetic Edda, one of my favorit books, is still around and have inspirede many writters up through history even though few people today speaks Norrï¿½ï¿½nt Mï¿½ï¿½l. Shakespear also seems like a good example even though the dialect of English he spoke is old, his works still lives on or Goethe who wrote his books before the introduction of Standard German. It doesn't matter what language a great tinker writtes in, his work will surviev his language and as such we should not fear a lose of cultur or cultural diversity.(1)http://dictionary.reference.com...(2)http://www.lrz.de...