Why do even completely illiterate persons, who speak their national language poorly, speak their local dialect with perfection?

Question

Disclaimers: I have no linguistic knowledge whatsoever, I'm just fascinated by these subjects. Also, I will use the word "dialect" due to my lack of a better word, although I see that the description of the "dialects" tag talks about "mutually intelligible" while the things I'm talking about don't need to be mutually intelligible and in fact are often not. I hope someone can correct my use of the word "dialect" with the right word, but this is not my question, just a premise.

The context I have in mind is Italy, where we have a national language taught in school and a myriad of very localized dialects, which are full-blown languages with their syntax, pronunciation, rules etc. and which are often almost unintelligible by speakers of other dialects and by Italian-only speakers. But I'm sure the same phenomenon exists in many countries so my question is not specific to Italy at all.

Up until a few decades ago, most of these dialect speakers, especially the older persons and especially in the countryside, barely went to elementary school.

Most of these dialect speakers make a significant amount of errors when they speak Italian, but they speak their dialect basically without any errors at all. In the same geographical area these speakers all strictly comply with the same language rules and their compliance is very consistent among the population and the level of this compliance is certainly not inferior (and maybe superior) to the level of compliance of the average urban Italian high-school graduate speaking Italian.

What puzzles me is that their dialect was not taught to them in school (where most likely it was rather discouraged and mocked) and I doubt that people in their community taught them the rules of the dialect. I believe that the children just learn it by being raised where it is commonly spoken.

This clashes with my long-held idea that in order to learn to speak a language - even one's native language - with perfect compliance with the rules, one must have had the rules taught to him/her, while this doesn't happen for these dialect speakers, they don't have the rules taught by others.

I would expect that if one learns a language just by growing up where it's spoken, without being taught any rules, of course one would learn it (especially if one starts as a child) but this would result in a general sloppiness regarding compliance with the rules among the speakers, or even result in a scarcity of actual rules. Instead no: precise rules, full compliance, hardly an error.

So how does this aspect of languages work ? How can these dialect speakers consistently get the rules of their dialect perfectly right without having ever studied those rules ? Of course they learned that by being born and raised in a community that speaks that dialect, but why in order to get the same level of compliance with the rules in the national language we need to study it for good and still many of us hardly get as perfect at it as those dialect speakers are all perfect at their dialect ?

Answer 1

This clashes with my long-held idea that in order to learn to speak a language - even one's native language - with perfect compliance with the rules, one must have had the rules taught to him/her, while this doesn't happen for these dialect speakers, they don't have the rules taught by others.

Indeed, children are amazingly good at learning to speak, just by being exposed to a language. Experiments like the famous "wug test" show that children figure out the rules of their native language extremely quickly, without any formal education at all.

I would expect that if one learns a language just by growing up where it's spoken, without being taught any rules, of course one would learn it (especially if one starts as a child) but this would result in a general sloppiness regarding compliance with the rules among the speakers, or even result in a scarcity of actual rules, because a perfect compliance with rules would be unnecessary and overkill for the eminently practical goals of their communications.

In fact, most of the rules of language are never taught to native speakers! One of the more famous rules of English (famous because it was the subject of the "wug test" experiment) involves the plural marker -s; sometimes it's pronounced like the S in "sip", sometimes like the Z in "zip". But this was certainly never discussed in my elementary-school English classes.

So how does this aspect of languages work ? How can these dialect speakers consistently get the rules of their dialect perfectly right without having ever studied those rules ? Of course they learned that by being born and raised in a community that speaks that dialect, but why in order to get the same level of compliance with the rules in the national language we need to study it for good and still many of us hardly get as perfect at it as those dialect speakers are all perfect at their dialect ?

There are two parts to this.

One part is learning a second language—learning standard Italian when you speak Venetian, for example. This usually involves a lot of formal education, though it's also possible to learn through a long enough period of immersion.

The other part is that a lot of rules taught in schools aren't actually part of the language (at least, not the way native speakers use it)! Writing, for example, is something that's formally taught; children learn to write much later than they learn to read.

Some other rules are prescribed by official authorities, but aren't actually used by most native speakers: English rules like "don't end sentences with prepositions" and "don't split infinitives" reflect how the authorities want people to speak, not how they actually speak. Since children grow up hearing adults say things like "what did you come up with?", they absorb the descriptive rule that prepositions can come at the end of sentences; the opposite needs to be formally taught, since it doesn't match what they've grown up with.

For many dialects/smaller languages, there's no official authority setting out prescriptive rules about spelling and grammar. Therefore, whatever native speakers grow up learning is considered correct—as opposed to languages like French, which have rules set out by the government.

Answer 2

This clashes with my long-held idea that in order to learn to speak a language - even one's native language - with perfect compliance with the rules, one must have had the rules taught to him/her, while this doesn't happen for these dialect speakers, they don't have the rules taught by others.

Good, because that's false! The human brain comes pre-wired with the ability to learn and generate human language, and it's incredibly good at doing so. There's a whole section of the brain dedicated to it. The only thing it takes to reach native level ability in any human language is a sufficient amount of comprehensible input.

Children seem really good at this because they learn their native language(s) rather quickly, and without much prompting, but it's actually adults having learnt to filter out useless information that makes children seem better. Once an adult language learner teaches their brain that their target language is important, the comprehensible input starts reaching the language centre of the brain, and it gets to work figuring it out.

The reason the people to whom you refer have a poor grasp on Italian is exactly because they don't need to speak it and listen to it all the time, and were taught it. If I say to a native English speaker, (or anyone with enough experience with the language), "the green big tree", and "the big green tree", not only will they know instantly which sentence is correct, they'll not be able to describe why (unless they happen to know that obscure grammar "rule"). They'll "just know".

To someone who learnt English from a book, as it were, they would think both sentences are equally valid, unless they'd either spent enough time listening to comprehensible input to "just know", or they'd gone so deep into the academia that they knew the grammar rule, and damningly, in the latter case, they would not be able to utilise that rule at native speed in speech. To utilise conscious language knowledge, you need enough time to think it through and remember the so-called rules. Unconscious knowledge is impossible to not utilise, however. If someone says "giraffe pimp" to me, there is no force of will I can employ to hear the sounds, and not instantly understand the meaning.

There's a little value in learning some things about a target language to aid one's journey for comprehensible input - for instance, if you come across a word or phrase being said over and over again, but don't understand it, and can't figure it out from the context, you can drop it into google images, or a native language dictionary, and get a bit of conscious knowledge about it. When you keep that in mind while coming across the word again in future, it should help you understand the wider context, and if so, your unconscious mind will have an easier time working on it. Note that it's not the conscious knowledge that helped directly - it's that the conscious knowledge allowed you to understand the context, which is something much more easily digested by your mind. It's similar to how you can not understand a joke, think about it consciously for a moment, then understand it and immediately start laughing. The conscious thought brought forth the context, and the context was understood.

If you're interested in learning more, check out Stephen Krashen's seminal text on input hypothesis, and What I've Learned's and Matt vs Japan's videos on the same subject.

Answer 3

One aspect is that you're suffering from confirmation bias. Those people define their dialect. The only ones to judge the correctness of their speech are themselves. Everyone is a master in their own game. Even if it's external observer (e.g. you) who are judging their proficiency - what is the benchmark to judge them against? Themselves.

The other aspect is that language creation is an innate skill of humans. It's in our genes to create and use perfect (again, as judged by humans) language rules. More shocking is that children are way better at it. Pigdin (incoherent mix of different languages) evolves into creole (a proper language of its own) only after a new generation is born and raised. When learning their first language, children instinctively create valid rules for it and discard the conflicting parts, effectively creating new language.

The objective of teaching is not to teach children the rules. They will pick them instinctively on their own, and modify to be even better. The objective of teaching is to make sure people from different parts of the country are learning same rules. Teaching basically tries to stop language evolution, to prevent splitting it into mutually unintelligible dialects, which will then become independent languages.

Answer 4

It comes down to the difference between natural acquisition and book-learning. Everybody learns their native language perfectly, just by constant exposure and use. Nobody ever teaches you the rules of your native language, you induce the grammar from observation of language use. (Well, sometimes people try to teach other how to talk their language, but it is completely ineffective). When the standard language isn't actually spoken in a particular area, and you have to learn it at school, then it's basically a foreign language. Some people learn foreign languages in school well, others do not. Illiterate people tend to not go to school (that's where you learn to write), so pretty much by definition, illiterate people are those who don't learn to read and write the standard language.

Answer 5

As the famous saying goes, "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" and whether or not something is a language or dialect depends on historical circumstance e.g. Galician is considered a Spanish dialect, Catalan isn't, but doesn't have it's own army and navy(yet) and Portugese has it's own army and navy(and air force). From what I've heard about mutual intelligibility from Italians(a guy from Milan, to be precise), he was pretty lost when it came to understanding colloquially spoken Sardinian in some back-woods village.

If you think of the situation as a first-language Portuguese speaker in some alternate history where it doesn't have it's own army and navy, sounding weird when speaking (Castilian) Spanish, then the situation won't seem strange at all.

Answer 6

Already many very good answers, so just one additional aspect.

Have you ever been asked by a foreigner who was learning your native language about some grammar rules? I bet you won't be able to answer (unless you have been specifically educated in teaching the grammars).

It happened to me, a native German speaker, and the question was: "Is the third person plural of a German verb always identical to its infinitive?" He had found that rule in a textbook and wanted confirmation from me. The best I could do was imagine some example sentences and then compare the verb forms, but of course that didn't help him in his rule-based language-learning model.

As a native speaker, you don't think in categories of rules when speaking, you just know what words and forms to use. Learning languages by rules is un-natural.

Answer 7

Previous answers and comments have clarified the issues around your questions, but I offer Standard Chinese (putonghua) as an interesting example of the issues. It is based on - but not the same as - North Chinese dialects, and its rules were codified by the Nationalist government in the 1930s and the Communist government in the 1950s. Thereafter it became the official language and was taught in all primary and secondary schools throughout China. It is now common for Chinese citizens to use dialect for their in-group and putonghua for communication with government officials, businesses, and strangers.

The result is that, while 100% of "native Chinese speakers" are perfectly competent in their native dialect, very few of these dialects have written forms, so literacy is defined in terms of competence in putonghua. Perhaps as much as 20% of the population writes putonghua poorly or not at all, mostly the elderly, ethnic minorities, and people in remote rural areas. (Official stats claim that literacy is almost universal.)

My point is that linguistic competence is a gradient with several aspects, rather than a black/white distinction. The lines between dialect and standard language are not only blurred, they also change over time as current usage changes. A clear majority of "native speakers" are "perfectly fluent" in putonghua because they studied it from the age of 5 on, but they still retain distinctive accents and they often import dialect elements into their use of putonghua.

Answer 8

Minimising mental effort

One of the reason a language develops precise rules in the first place is so that you don't have to think about how to say something, and a listener doesn't have to think hard to understand it. The simplest example is resolving ambiguity, e.g. using word order (or inflections) to distinguish "Paul followed Ann" from "Ann followed Paul." Poetry often uses unusual ways of saying things which force you to think about it (which is probably the point.)

Our brains are pattern-matching machines and if an idea can be expressed by plugging a few things into a standard "template", and then understood by the listener by pattern-matching against common templates and stock phrases, it takes less energy and time to choose words and to understand them.

When we say things that don't quite follow the "rules", we sense that the listener is a little bit uncomfortable with this, which helps us adapt to the rules. This is much easier for children.

Of course, it is all about incentive. Your brain cares most about rapid, fluid communication with people that you meet every day, and that is ultimately the answer to the question.