Spoken language and written word are two components of a language which heavily affect each other in different ways. As distinguished linguist John McWhorter mentioned, a language develops and flows through time, words slew together and form new words and sometimes even whole languages coerce together and to create new languages. Written words create a sort of standard for languages. With writing, the words and pronunciations of a language are sort of written in stone. For this reason, writing slows the pace at which languages develop tremendously, as it prevents new words and phrases to be created as easily compared to languages which are just spoken. Therefore, in regards to transferring culture across time, using writing would be much more important, but that is not to say that spoken language is lesser than writing; all languages begin through speech, after all.

I can completely relate to you on this point! In both Mandarin and Japanese, I considered myself to be moderately skilled in conversational ability, but when it came to practical translation and working with completely fluent people, I was stumped. Though I could understand everything and reply, I could tell how big of a different there was especially since it took me a while to respond more often than not. Part of the reason why is because Chinese has so many different dialects that sometimes people who naturally speak a certain dialect, incorporate the dialect into what is supposed to be the standard language so it becomes a bit harder to understand. On the flipside, some people only learn a certain dialect so then they don’t know the standard language at all! I like how you related your personal experiences to the post! Great job!

I like how you differentiated the different accents of English; even though it’s the same language, some Americans find English spoken in Britain and parts of Ireland hard to understand cause of the accents. Even recently, a friend of mine humorously told me that he thought that a person with a Wales accent was a non-native speaker of English cause of the thick accent. Another way which I see a mother language branching off into different cultures is the branching of Chinese, which can be seen in how the same word/root word sometimes appears in many other languages, such as how the word for telephone in Mandarin Chinese is pronounced “Diànhuà”, while in Japanese it’s “Denwa”, in Korean it’s “Jeonhwa”, and in Vietnamese it’s “điện thoại”. While they may look like they are completely different, there are some similarities such as the Diàn, Den, and điện which mean all sound similar and mean electricity. Also you can see similarities in huà, wa, and hwa, which are all pronounced similarly and mean talk. Good post!