Myth 10: Some languages have no grammar.

All languages have a grammar system. Otherwise, they would not be considered languages. A language consists of both spelling, vocabulary and grammar. A grammar system ties vocabulary together to make a meaningful sentence. Grammar systems date back as far as ancient Egypt, where the hieroglyphs had to be organized in a particular order to make sense and to give the correct meaning to a symbol. A symbol could mean different things, so grammar was incredibly important.

To say that some languages do not have a grammar system would just be plain ignorant. All grammar systems are different and the Chinese grammar system might be as incomprehensible to an Englishman as the English grammar system to someone from Russia. 

If a language doesn’t follow grammatical structure and rules, it might as well disband and disappear, because nobody would be able to understand what you are trying to say.

 

Myth 11: Italian is beautiful, German is ugly.

No language is beautiful or ugly. All languages have their own appeal and attractiveness. One person might think Dutch is beautiful and the other might say they like Japanese the best. It is a matter of personal taste and preference. Every language has sounds that invoke bad reactions from listeners. Some accents are considered vulgar and some ideologies of which accent is vulgar and which sounds more cultured and educated are often rooted in where we live and what we have been taught to believe. Some might even think their own accent/dialect isn’t nice to speak or listen to. This linguistic self-hatred might deter many speakers from using it and adapting a more pleasant and formal accent instead. This, in turn, might cause the decline of said accent.

In my personal opinion, some accents do sound vulgar, only because of the certain kind of people that tend to use the accent. That picture tends to stick in people’s mind and stay there for quite some time.

 

Myth 13: Black children are verbally deprived.

This myth is in my opinion just plain racist. Many African-American and African orators have been credited for their amazing contributions to the development of language and the inspiration their words have brought upon the people. This language superiority that white people tend to have over people of colour is completely unjustified. When two groups of people are segregated for a very long time, the way they communicate with one another within those groups can start to develop differently. Different words can have different meanings and the English language spoken in both of those groups can start to vary and become its own dialect, turning into two different forms of speech. Subjecting students of different communities to a wildly different dialect and then calling them linguistically retarded is an unjust treatment of the students and their cultural heritage and I would personally label this treatment as racist.

 

Myth 14: Double negatives are illogical.

Language is not mathematics. A double negative is the result of a cultural shift in language and language should not be perceived as something that has to be logical all the time. If a sentence has a double negative in it, you should not look at the double negative, but rather at the context of the sentence and use that to figure out what that person is trying to say. Just like how poetry is not always logical (which is also language), the rest of the language should also not be expected to be logical all the time.

 

Myth 15: TV makes people sound the same.

Children from deaf parents prove that this myth is not true. Mass media cannot change grammar or any linguistic rules no matter how hard they might try. The only thing mass media can do is spread certain catch phrases more effectively. Interacting with media is a good start when learning a language, just like how I watch Japanese TV to learn Japanese, someone else could watch English television to improve on their own English-skills. It remains a good way of taking the first steps to learning a language.

 

Myth 18: Some languages are spoken more quickly than others.

If you want, you could measure the speed of the language by syllable per second or syllable per minute, but most languages just sound quicker because of the sounds that it contains. We tend to forget to count the pauses in between of sentences and sounds. When I was abroad, I talked to a British girl and she told me she thought Dutch people spoke really quickly. Similarly, my parents always said French people talk really quickly. If I concentrate, I can understand why they might think that, but I never really focus on that sort of thing. I think all languages sound interesting and I am often more busy with identifying the language than measuring how quickly it is spoken.