Oh God, I allowed my child to speak Bavarian! - The issue of linguistic competence of dialect speakers

This essay aims at strengthening parents, families, educators and teachers, but also didacticians and cultural politicians in their basic feeling that children can best learn a language if it is as close as possible to their mothers' and if the mother tongue can develop in natural surroundings. It is not only in the German speech area that for this purpose a local patois, a dialect or a colloquial language is often more useful than a standardized language, whose acquisition if required later usually poses no great problem for a child. For the idea that long lists of standardized lexemes and grammatical paragraphs must be stored up in a child is untenable, worries parents and causes a great deal of useless work at school. Whereas the intensive personal dialogue between child and mother, father, teacher, ... in which all human senses are employed, is absolutely irreplaceable for the development of the mother tongue. The way the evolution of man has taken is valid also in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.