The Vagaries of Language: Two Accounts

Tricky business, language. Two illustrations. First, a discussion of how folks in the Italian corner of Switzerland manage "dialect":

Dialect...in Italian Switzerland...runs along the edges of social divisions, age, sex and class in fascinating and complex ways. ...Dialect is the language of neighbourliness and the commune, but ... its use reflects very subtle canons of social behaviour. The country man or woman in a city shop may use dialect with impunity, but the middle-class city-dweller wil use Italian, certainly at first, less the shop girl feel insulted by such excessive familiarity. Similarly, the middle-class city dweller who returns to the village of his origin would give even greater offence if he did not speak dialect from the beginning.

...In traditional middle-class families, parents speak dialect with each other, as do the children, but children speak to parents and parents to children in Italian. ... Teachers chat in dialect int he common room but speak Italian to pupils in the classroom and in all other encounters. Children speak dialect among themselves and, of course, Italian to teachers. ... [In one research study] the boys spoke dialect among themselves but Italian to the girls, and the girls dialect among themselves but Italian to the boys. ... Adult men use dialect more than adult women, especially in towns and cities. ... Italian is the language of public life and dialect the language of private social relations. Hence it is not surprising that, as soon as a political organization or government body becomes larger than, say, twenty people, which it will generally not do on village level, Italian replaces dialect

--Jonathan Steinberg, Why Switzerland? 143-4 (2d ed. 1996)

And here, a more straightforward of all solutions, from the most British of azll 20th Century political leaders, India's Jawarhalal Nehru (Harrow, Cambridge, Inner Temple), who spoke English far more easily than he spoke any Indian language:

In any discussion Nehru would listen carefully to his interlocutor's accent, then carefully calibrate his own so that it would sound at least one social cut above.

--Arthur Herman, Gandhi & Churchill(Kindle 2009)

[Sourcing Nirad Chaudhuri,]