National Languages

So I'm going to try something new. Instead of trying to write original material (hard to motivate myself), I'm just going to post links and comments on what I'm reading.

Drew Manchu, an English teacher somewhere in China quizzes his students on geography and what languages are spoken in each country. The answers aren't pretty. From the rest of his blog, I gather that the students he's teaching are college students.

• Afghanistan - English
• Iraq - English
• Mexico - English
• Brazil - English
• Iceland - English
• Sweden - English
• Denmark - English
• Holland - English
• Cuba - English
• Pakistan - English
• Pakistan - Arabic
• Mexico - Arabic
• Kazakhstan - Chinese
• Mongolia - Chinese

And the award goes to:

• Mexico - English and Canadian

And that was after I explained that Canadians speak English and French. This isn’t just a list of exceptionally bad responses. When the one student named couldn’t answer, I would ask the whole class. Usually, none of my students could answer correctly. Not even the smart ones. It’s easy to see the Sinocentrism here, this idea that China really is the “Middle Kingdom” around which the foreign barbarians revolve.

But, looking at the list again, it's not that bad. I didn't know all of them off the top of the head and had to look them up. Most of the errors also seem explainable, or are just the result of the student's defaulting to English. No need to attribute ignorance to some peculiar cultural trait.

Iraq and Afghanistan get labeled with English because most likely all the average Chinese student knows about these countries is that the US invaded them. And honestly, how much did any of you know about these two countries before they were invaded? Iraqis mainly speak Arabic, though interestingly Kurdish is another of the official languages for the government. Afghanis speak a Persian dialect called Dari and Pashto. I had to look up Afghanistan, I suspected some type of Persian language but wasn't sure.

Mexico, Cuba, and Brazil all get tagged with English, I suppose for being part of the America's. How they thought up Arabic or Canadian for Mexico is inexplicable. The correct answers are Spanish for Mexico and Portugese for Brazil.

Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, and Holland also get swept into the English camp, even though they speak Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch respectively. However, if any of Drew's students had ever met or seen anyone from one of these countries they most likely would've been speaking English. It is rapidly becoming the common language of Europe. And where would someone find an Icelandic speaking translator to assist a traveler in China?

One of Drew's students actually guessed correctly for Pakistan. English is the official language there, used in their constitution and by most educated elites, or so Wikipedia says. The lingua franca is Urdu.

Kazakhstan and Mongolia I had to look up. Kazakhstan I had no clue about, but correctly guessed Russian, (former USSR after all). Kazakh is also spoken there. For Mongolia, I had no idea that Mongolian was a language as well.

Still, these Chinese students seem to default heavily to English when they don't know the answer. I suspect, if the same questions were asked of American students, we would get a lot of answers like 'Cuban' or 'Pakistani' as languages. I don't think there is any 'Sinocentrism' here, as Drew sees it, just an all-around ignorance of places far away that is common to all cultures and peoples.