Language classes in schools should be allowed to use dialects.

My opponent ask if I believe that the students from North and East Greenland would have done better if they where taught their own dialect instead of Kalaallisoorneq. I can honestly say that I do not. With all the problems facing the students in North and East Greenland, I find it amazing that they are ahead of the rest of Greenland in oral Kalaallisoorneq and, on a scale from 0 to 13, is only 0.07 point behind in written Kalaallisoorneq. (1) My opponent also ask why we don't unify the world and get a world language. I would here like to point out that he is from China, I am from Denmark and we are having a discussion on a public forum in English. The language he have already admitted is the international lingua franca. My opponents third, but not last question goes to Hitler. If Hitler had conquered all Germanic countries and tried to unit them through a single language, would that have been good or bad? The problem here is that this is a very vague and historical contradicting question. Hitler did conquered many Germanic nations, but instead of uniting mainly through linguistic unity, he tried to unit them through racial purity. This leads to holocaust and is the entire basis for why Hitler is still so hated. Personally I would have preferred if Hitler had tried to force Danes to speak German instead of killing Jews. My opponents last question is why we artificial try to keep and blend people together. I believe that there is a large number of reasons for this, but the most important is size and war. It is hard to run a small country. Let me bring up East Greenland as an example. It is a huge area, bigger than Germany, Italy and French combined, but they have only 3500 citizens. (2) 3500 citizens that need medicare, standard, high school and college education. It would be hard to run a college that small if it had to offer more than only a handful of courses. The other reason as I said before is war. When different people in the same nation starts to feel alienated to each other, they rarely separated peacefully. Just look at what happened when the southern states tried to leave USA, Chechnya tried to leave Russia and Tibet tried to leave China. Alienation within a nation all to often end in bloodshed or civil war. My opponent argues that learning disabled, who can for some reason only learn one language, should primarily learn their local dialect. How else can they talk with their parents or grandparents who might not have learned the standard dialect, but here he is missing two important things. First. I argue that all should first and foremost learn the standard dialect. It doesn't matter if they are sons, daughters, wife, husband, mother or grandfather. All should learn it so you can always expect everybody to speak it. Two. What if the grandparents live in a region where they speak a local dialect not mutually intelligible with the local dialect where the student in question live. The grandparents also speaks the standard dialect, as everybody else, but it doesn't help them as the student in question only learned his own dialect. People move from area to area and unless the entire family speak the same standard language they will always be at risk of not understanding each other. Now my opponent tells us how united across race and language all the different people of China is, but remember his 'Cantonese oppression' from round 3 where a small rumor about possible linguistic oppression have an extremely negative impact on society. In my opponents own word: "This has had, and continues to have, a very negative impact on the relationships between the people of Hong Kong and the Mainland. " If China is as united as my opponent say, then this just show why a common language is so important to keep good internal relationship. My very insightful opponent is right when he presume that I speak at least a couple of languages and I also agree when he say that different concepts are more easily explained in one language than in others. Danish have some very unique words to describe social structures and positive feelings, while Kalaallisoorneq is very good at explaining where and how big a lake is. This also shows that one can access and use the special properties of a language even though it is your secondary language. That is one of the reasons Latin live on vibrantly for 1400 years after the fall of the Latin empire, with works being publicised hundreds, if no thousand years after it became a dead language(3). Hardly what I would call a museums Dodo. The standard dialect should, in the name of unity, replace the local dialect as first language. That doesn't mean that the current dialect will just disappear. People in north and eastern Greenland still talk their own dialect. Even though Scotland was conquered by England hundred years ago, some people there still speaks Gaelic. The local dialect will disappear in a natural procces that can take hundred of years, much in the same way that old English, became middle English and latter modern English. There is no sudden shift that makes it impossible to transmit the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior to succeeding generations, which, by my opponents definition, is culture and as such there should be no lose in culture. Now my opponent wants us to believe that diversity accelerate social progression, but how does he then explain that the very uniform Scandinavian countries are in the top of social progression(4). Iceland is number five on the list. It is a small country where most people can track their ancestors back to the first settlers who arrived in the 9th century, extremely uniform and still in the top five. I would go as far as to say that it seems like uniformity and unity accelerate social progression. Now my opponent claim that it is often unconstitutional to wipe out a dialect in order to promote the standard and he then points to the Chinese constitution, that say 'the people of all nationalities have the freedom to use and develop their own spoken and written languages, and to preserve or reform their own ways and customs. ' But nothing I propose goes against this. I'm not talking about banning a dialect or language. People will still have the freedom to chose to talk and write the language they want to. They will just not learn or use it in language classes in public schools. (1) . http://www.inerisaavik.gl... (2) . http://www.greenland.com... (3) . http://www.newadvent.org... (4) . http://phys.org...