Language classes in schools should be allowed to use dialects.

My opponent claim that learning to many languages while at the same time having to discern between your native and the standard dialect can be mentally straining upon small children. If this was true then he would have made a great argument for my chase, which is that there is no room for none-standard dialects in language classes. Alas this is not true and to prove it I shall take you from China to Greenland. Greenland is separated into three very different areas. Eastern, western and northern Greenland. Each area have a dialect and none of the dialects are mutually intelligible with each other. Western Greenland is much more populated, urbanized and in all ways richer than the rest of the country and so western Greenlandic, also known as Kalaallisoorneq, have become the standard dialect of Greenland. One of the great problems in north and eastern Greenland is schooling. It is hard to get teachers to move out there and it is even harder to keep them. It is often impossible to get to the nearest school during winter and many teachers who work there do so only as part of a rotation. Now one would expect the people of northern and eastern Greenland to be worse of in school than their western counterparts and that is also what the yearly test results points to. North and eastern greenlanders are slightly below average in most subjects, two exceptions being oral Greenlandic and English. In the average oral English test north and eastern greenlandics score almost a grade more than their western counter parts. When it comes to Greenlandic the difference is smaller, but this is an examination in Kalaallisoorneq, the native dialect of the western and still they get outperformed by the more rural north and east greenlanders. (1) Having worked as a teacher in Greenland it is also my experience that people from eastern Greenland is far better in linguistics than their western counter parts. This may seem counter intuitive, but American and international studies show that there are great benefits from learning secondary languages in an early age(2) and I will argue that learning a standard dialect that is not mutually intelligible with your native dialect is the same as learning a new language. My opponents second argument is that if you have been exposed to an incomprehensible version of the standard variety at an early age, then you can never hope to master it. Here my opponent and I agree on one thing. The importance of mastering the standard dialect and studies shows that the earlier your exposed to a new language the better you well become in it(2). That the teachers in this example are very bad at the standard dialect, because they where exposed to it late in life just shows my point. Instead of changing what languages the kids are taught the schools should instead get better teachers. A problem many nations have is that citizens don't always identify them self with each other or the country. This can in extreme situations lead to civil war or that a country break up in smaller units. There is a number of ways to create a common identity, such as public debat and common stories. A good example is America where many people partly identify them self with their ancestors and where you have certain areas where people of certain backgrounds band together. Many Asians live in Chinatown and many people are able to tell what country their ancestors came from before they moved to America. The reason America isn't more split than it is, is because they all aspire to the same common goal "The American Dream", all people see the same television, all people see the same Hollywood movies, but this can only happen because all people speak the same language(3). So as a nation it is important that all students are taught the same standard dialect, so that they can build a common identity no matter how diverse the country is. (1) . http://www.inerisaavik.gl... The full data set can be found on . http://www.inerisaavik.gl... (2) . http://www.actfl.org... . http://eacea.ec.europa.eu... . http://www.news.cornell.edu... . http://news.bbc.co.uk... . http://www.tip.duke.edu... (3) . http://rsc.jordan.house.gov...