Living in Singapore, with a large population of people who are bilingual in English and Mandarin despite the fact that, in general, their ancestors spoke not Mandarin but Hokkien or other dialects of Chinese, means that a certain relevant phenomenon comes up very often - sometimes, I will ask what a certain "Chinese" word means, and the people I'm speaking to will protest, "That's not Chinese, that's dialect!" "Chinese" as defined as Mandarin, and all the other variants of Chinese (which obviously, given an army and a navy, would in many cases be considered languages of their own with only as much relationship to Mandarin as Spanish has to Italian) are just dialects. This phenomenon is slightly harder to notice in the US, but it's certainly still there - why is it that the type of English I speak is just considered to be "normal" American English, whereas, say, AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) is a special dialect which has to be studied and analyzed (or, to give a non-racist example, Southerners have a southern accent, and people who are from Long Island but from a lower-class background than I have a New York accent)?
The answer, obviously, is not about who was there first (just as with literary fiction and the other genres, all of these genres developed over the same time period, and sometimes the ones that get called dialect/genre fiction have more in common with the ancestry than the standard language/literary fiction). The answer is very clearly about prestige - what goes unmarked is the language that the elite, the people in power, speak. This seems to me to be a clear analogy with literary fiction. Of course, the interesting thing here is that I seriously doubt that most of the people in power (to the degree that they're reading fiction at all) are mostly reading literary fiction - albeit, I do remember what a big deal was made of the fact that Obama was reading Franzen's Freedom (a book which I actually read; my response to it was that it was exactly why I don't like reading most contemporary literary fiction). But literary fiction is still what children are supposed to study in school, it's what the layman, at least, would expect that English majors focus on (look at the scorn sometimes directed in the press at people who publish papers on popular TV shows or whatever), and it actually still has a level of cachet and association with ideas of prestige in our society that genre fiction does not.
As for the historical vagaries of why this particular genre was the one that was adopted as a signal of the elite, that I don't know enough to say (I suspect offhandedly that one might blame the Modernists, but I can't say if this is really true). But the fact that it was this particular genre that got adopted in that way and thus got to be a signal of eliteness surely does have some element of coincidence to it - even in the early 19th century surely realistic novels were considered dangerous trash! But this again makes it a good analogy for language - Mandarin is the standard not because of any inherent quality that makes it more elite than the other dialect but because it just happened to be the language spoken in Beijing.
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Date: 2013-08-17 12:08 am (UTC)The answer, obviously, is not about who was there first (just as with literary fiction and the other genres, all of these genres developed over the same time period, and sometimes the ones that get called dialect/genre fiction have more in common with the ancestry than the standard language/literary fiction). The answer is very clearly about prestige - what goes unmarked is the language that the elite, the people in power, speak. This seems to me to be a clear analogy with literary fiction. Of course, the interesting thing here is that I seriously doubt that most of the people in power (to the degree that they're reading fiction at all) are mostly reading literary fiction - albeit, I do remember what a big deal was made of the fact that Obama was reading Franzen's Freedom (a book which I actually read; my response to it was that it was exactly why I don't like reading most contemporary literary fiction). But literary fiction is still what children are supposed to study in school, it's what the layman, at least, would expect that English majors focus on (look at the scorn sometimes directed in the press at people who publish papers on popular TV shows or whatever), and it actually still has a level of cachet and association with ideas of prestige in our society that genre fiction does not.
As for the historical vagaries of why this particular genre was the one that was adopted as a signal of the elite, that I don't know enough to say (I suspect offhandedly that one might blame the Modernists, but I can't say if this is really true). But the fact that it was this particular genre that got adopted in that way and thus got to be a signal of eliteness surely does have some element of coincidence to it - even in the early 19th century surely realistic novels were considered dangerous trash! But this again makes it a good analogy for language - Mandarin is the standard not because of any inherent quality that makes it more elite than the other dialect but because it just happened to be the language spoken in Beijing.