Why dialects are important

They strengthen and unite a community. And according to scientific research, they're good for the brain and train the mind. More than a foreign language.

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I dialects They are important for several reasons. We must not waste them because they represent the soul, not only linguistic, of a community, which strengthens and unites in the root of a Language unique and shared.

WHY DIALECTS ARE IMPORTANT

Giovanni Spadolini, historian and scholar of national unity, said that Italy is a country of idioms, that is, dialects. And indeed, just a few kilometers away, popular language, which is expressed through dialect, changes radically. Like food, architecture, and urban planning, all factors that define a place's identity.

WHAT DOES A DIALECT REPRESENT?

If from a lexical point of view the dialect, according to what the Treccani encyclopedia writes, "is a linguistic system with a mostly limited geographical or cultural scope", in fact it is precisely in this apparent narrowness that a community has a greater chance of finding itself and uniting. With the aim of not losing its identity, of not distorting itself in the face of modernity. Dialect is like Old Town of any small town: it holds the DNA of a people, and if it is abandoned by its residents to make room for shops, grocers and holiday houses, loses its vital soul and becomes a space-amusement park.

BENEFITS OF DIALECT

Alongside the cultural and sociological importance of dialects, there are their benefits, demonstrated by a series of scientific studies. Learning a foreign language strengthens cognitive abilities and is a simple gesture that helps us keep our brains fit naturally. And not only that. foreign languages: even the dialects, sometimes unfairly underestimated, they are a real panacea for our brain.

SPEAKING A DIALECT IS GOOD FOR THE BRAIN

Our mind perceives dialect as a foreign language. In particular, a researcher of theUniversity of Cambridge, Napoleon Katsos in collaboration with a team of theUniversity of Cyprus and the Cyprus University of Technology, studied the advantages of bi-dialectism, that is, the use of two different dialects of the same language.

The research involved 64 bi-dialectal children, 47 multilingual and 25 monolingual, analyzed the cognitive performance of children raised speaking both Cypriot and Modern Greek, two closely related variants but different from each other in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation of different words. The data showed that multilingual and bi-dialectal children had an advantage over monolingual children in a composite score of cognitive processes, based on tests of the memory, attention and flexibility. But the bilingualism, in general, has several advantages: it helps to open the mind, to have new curiosities, to relate to different peoples and cultures. Furthermore, it is a driver of empathy which, according to some studies, slows down aging. Finally, once you have learned the second language, it is not difficult to master the third one as well.

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THE BENEFITS OF BILINGUALISM FOR THE BRAIN

The benefits associated with bilingualism therefore also apply to children who speak one or more dialects: one more reason to restore importance and prestige to all the dialects that have marked the history and culture of the places where we live.

TO KNOW MORE: Speaking two languages ​​increases children's memory, concentration, and tolerance.

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