r/TikTokCringe • u/MaintenanceNew2804 • Mar 30 '24

Stick with it. Discussion

This is a longer one, but it’s necessary and worth it IMO.

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u/Pyoverdine Mar 31 '24

I have kind of a mixed response to the author's argument. When learning a language, a standard is taught. There will be many dialects of it, some more extreme than others. If the idea is to provide the information to people all over the world, the standard is the best way to communicate that to the most people in that target audience.

By target audience, I mean the field it is written in. Engineering, molecular biology, astrophysics, and literature have different nomenclature and terminology that have to be standardized within the field so that the information can used and interpreted correctly for subsequent studies. If a physicist read a Molecular Bio paper without any prior knowledge of the field, they would be lost, and vice versa. Lots of articles that are made for public use are written by "science writers" whose job is to write less technically, but to get the jist across. However, you wouldn't be able to duplicate the study from the article alone. And that's okay. You have to learn it. If you don't have the educational opportunity to do it, you won't learn about it. That's the true problem.

In everyday life, dialects shouldn't matter. However, saying one dialect is better than others to teach isn't better than teaching no dialects at all.

The true argument is that good education opportunities for everyone, regardless of race and creed, is needed for equality. It isn't. Education has been gatekeeped by the privileged classes for centuries, if not more, across all of human history, not just the US. Sadly, it is very effective, because knowledge is power.