About halfway through MacDonald’s TEDx Talk, I was a little bit skeptical because I thought he was contradicting himself. On the one hand, he stated that there’s a lot of cultural background to tap dance, and on the other hand, he suggested that social media/technology is enhancing the art. While I agree that, as he has pointed out, technology enables the learning of tap through the increased accessibility of videos, I felt that learning through this method loses some of that rich cultural background he mentioned before. His story of Bunny Briggs cleared up this supposed contradiction and I was able to see his point of view.
As someone essentially unfamiliar with tap except for a brief segment in one Frasier episode, yet, having dabbled in music and music theory, I feel that I can appreciate the abilities for MacDonald (and tap dancers in general) to keep time and produce a rhythm using only their feet. Someone who experienced tap throughout their life might gain a far more deeper appreciation for it, and this reminds me somewhat of the Dunning-Kruger effect where while beginners may highly underestimate the skill it takes for something, eventually that illusion is shattered and people who are far more versed in something can accurately gauge the difficulty of it. That said, I feel that this applies to all types of knowledge, rather than languages.
At this point I paused and reflected: if we are to define language as a method of communication, then is there something that we can apply the previous premise, Dunning-Kruger/greater appreciation after learning more about it, to something that isn’t necessarily a form of communication? Music instruments, photography, other forms of visual art, even crafting/knitting something can be argued as a form of communication. By “knowing” one of these “languages,” we enrich our view of the world with greater understanding and appreciation of other “speakers” of that language.
As for de Luca’s video, the difference between language and dialect is a topic of discussion for my introductory epistemology course. As an instructor, I provided my students with a list of things such as “Mandarin vs Cantonese,” “Urdu vs Hindi vs Punjabi,” and “Danish vs Norwegian vs Swedish,” and “Parisian vs Quebecois,” and asked them to tell me if they’re different languages or different dialects. Mutual intelligibility is one criteria to differentiate them, but it doesn’t apply to all cases.
To bring up a personal example that answer the prompt for each video, one of the languages I speak is Taiwanese, also known as Taigi, Hokkien, and Min-nan. It originated in the Fujian province of China, and settlers from Fujian (such as my ancestors eight generations ago) brought it to Taiwan ever since the 1600s. It was the main language of Taiwan, alongside Hakka (another Chinese migration group to Taiwan) and the indigenous languages, up until 1895 when Japan colonized Taiwan. Due to draconian language policies of a totalitarian Chinese Nationalist government that took control of Taiwan after World War II, Taiwanese is now a dying language, going from 66% of people ages 65+ using it as their main language, to now only 17% or so of elementary students being able to speak it fluently. It is unintelligible from Mandarin.
I was born in Taiwan near the tail end of its martial law era (38 years, second longest in world history) and the draconian language policies have been mostly lifted. Yet, its oppression took on a different form: rather than outright punishments and/or fines if you were caught speaking Taiwanese in school which my parents experienced, the ostracization of Taiwanese became more subtle: intelligent, posh characters in media were portrayed as speaking Mandarin, while the gangsters and country bumpkins spoke Taiwanese. Because of this, and a whole slew of other reasons, though I communicated with my family in Taiwanese, in public (and at school), it was always Mandarin.
Fast forward to me moving to Canada where there were few other Mandarin speakers (this was in the mid 90’s, most Asian immigrants in Vancouver at the time were from Hong Kong), and I ended up using Taiwanese far more than Mandarin. Decades of that, and finally finding out about real Taiwanese history (I drank the Chinese Nationalist kool-aid when I went through elementary school), made me now quite proud to be a Taiwanese speaker. Whenever I meet another Taiwanese speaker, whether it’s here in Canada, back in Taiwan, or even in Japan, there’s always instant warmth and familiarity that I don’t get with Mandarin or English. This is mainly because hearing another person speak Taiwanese provides a great deal of insight towards a person: their roots in Taiwan began somewhere between 1600-1895, what geographical region in Taiwan they’re likely from, and knowing that there’s a shared history of Japanese colonial rule followed by the world’s second longest martial law under the Chinese Nationalists.