General prejudice against southerners?
In Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma (University of Hawaii Press, 1997), a work in the DeFrancis tradition of condemning Chinese characters, Wm. C. Hannas asks why the success of modern Vietnamese orthography hasn’t shown other East Asian countries that romanization can be introduced with no problems. The answer, apparently, has to do with a common principle of which numerous examples may come to mind:
In their search for language universals, linguists seem to have overlooked a basic commonality, as well established in sociolinguistics as Murphy’s Law is in metaphysics, namely the “Principle of Substandard Southern Speech.” This principle holds that the farther south one descends in a speech community, the more barbaric the speech becomes and the less worthy these patterns are of emulation. The truism applies worldwide but is especially honored in East Asia. “Standard” Chinese Mandarin speakers in the north have little regard for the quaint “dialects” spoken in the south (and southeast and southwest) of China; they are tolerated as faits accomplis, in a gesture of Great Han magnanimity, but they have no part in the central government’s plans for the future (never mind that some users of these lesser speech forms have their own vision of how thing will turn out). In Korea, Kyongnam speech is stigmatized in the educated estimate of standard Seoul speakers, just as Kyoto-ben is a Tokyo speaker’s laughingstock. At the very bottom of the East Asian linguistic hierarchy, as the name Vietnam (lit. “south of Yue,” Yue being a southern Chinese region) implies, is Vietnamese, and within that country, the southern speech centered on what used to be Saigon is barely fit to be heard, as any Hanoi speaker will tell you.
I was thinking of this same phenomenon myself a couple of weeks ago. One can point to the historical dislike of Occitan among speakers of the northern langue d’oïl, the low esteem in which Bavarian dialect and Schwyzertütsch are held among speakers of High German, the provincial sound of southern Italian, and my own wrong-but-oh-so-ingrained prejudice against Andalucian speakers of Castilian. Examples of other geographic tendencies can be found, such as the less-than-cosmopolitan speech of northeastern Romania and Moldova, but this southern principle does seem to be true to a noticiable degree.
November 3rd, 2005 at 14:40
The Southern principle is certainly not true in the Dutch language area, where speakers of the Randstad dialect (Netherlands provinces of North Holland, South Holland and Utrecht) set the language standard. They see the Southern speech (i.e. Flemish), even the Flemish accent in the standard language, as inferior.
November 6th, 2005 at 21:27
This is also utterly untrue of British English.
November 11th, 2005 at 23:00
True in America, though. Somewhat true in Italy.
Mostly untrue in Sweden and Norway.
In every language, there will be a strong presumtion of superiority by those in the wealthiest city/district, and as people will wish to move there and see power as coming from there, they will often be able to convince the others as well. Unless there is some geographic pattern favoring the northern part of an area as the capital, I don’t see how another factor would consistently overwhelm it.
There might be something to the capital or wealthier districts being in a more temperate area, so that being nearer or farther from certain lines of latitude shows a pattern.