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Isn’t Flemish a dialect? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| guiguixx1 Octoglot Senior Member Belgium guillaumelp.wordpres Joined 4089 days ago 163 posts - 207 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Dutch, Portuguese, Esperanto, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 1 of 19 28 May 2015 at 1:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have just realized that Flemish seems to be seen as a real, apart language, on this forum. It is actually seen as a dialect of Dutch. Then, why is there a distinction on this forum? I speak the dialect, the "language" spoken in Belgium. I should thus write on my profile that I speak Flemish and not Dutch?
I don't understand why a distinction is made here. We could then also add all dialects as real languages (with the hundreds of dutch dialects spoken in both the Netherlands, Belgium, and even France). Can anyone explain the reason? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6058 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 2 of 19 28 May 2015 at 2:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm not in the least qualified to discuss the subtleties of your question but it seems it has already been addressed in this thread.
In any case, it seems that there are dialectal differences, and that they're not necessarily determined by national borders. Interesting. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5056 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 3 of 19 28 May 2015 at 2:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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I wouldn't read too much into the menu of languages built into this site. It's got all kinds of weird stuff in it:
-Duplicate languages: Serbian, Croatian, and Serbo-Croatian (but no Bosnian); Taiwanese and Hokkien -Groups of related languages that are not actually a single language (e.g. Sami) -Groups of related languages explicitly marked as groups (e.g. "Mayan languages") -Groups of unrelated languages treated as one ("Sign Language") Where does the list even come from? It seems to be more or less adequate in that it has enough options for almost all members to list almost all of their languages in a satisfactory way, but from a linguistic point of view it's pretty shaky and biased. Edited by robarb on 28 May 2015 at 2:43am 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6594 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 4 of 19 28 May 2015 at 4:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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Most of the ones you mentioned have been added by the administrator in response to specific requests. I think with Serbo-Croatian/Serbian and Croatian the idea was to let people choose whether they study just one form or both/whether they consider them separate languages or not. For example, many might not feel comfortable claiming fluency in Serbo-Croatian or Hindi/Urdu if they can't even read the other variety. And honestly I'm glad we don't get angry comments trying to prove whether Serbian and Croatian should be listed as separate languages or not. We do have occasional discussions but they would be much more heated if someone else's judgement restricted what you can put into your profile.
BTW we've had a nice member called winters who considers herself natively trilingual in Croatian, Serbian and Russian. As far as I understand, she can really speak Croatian and Serbian as separate languages. (ugh I miss her... too bad I wasn't learning Croatian when she still participated here) On the other hand, with some languages it was decided to group them together. According to this thread it seems like administrator meant to replace "Maya languages" with a few major languages but never got around to it. As for the OP, assuming you can speak with Dutch people or watch TV from the Netherlands, I think it's fine to keep it as it is. Edited by Serpent on 28 May 2015 at 4:31am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4704 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 5 of 19 28 May 2015 at 4:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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Flemish is not a dialect, it's the name for a whole subgroup of dialects spoken in
Flanders. The question is, which dialect? Otherwise you're speaking Dutch. Standard Belgian Dutch is still Dutch with a few vocab changes and a different pronunciation. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5056 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 6 of 19 28 May 2015 at 6:30am | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks for the info about how it got that way. I pretty much agree with that, except that it doesn't get around the issue that the options that are given are quite arbitrary. I agree it's a good thing that a speaker of the language spoken in Zagreb may decide whether to identify that language as Croatian or as Serbo-Croatian, rather than be forced into one or the other. But then there should also be an option for Bosnian and even Montenegrin. Why can you put Hindi or Urdu, but not Hindustani? Why can you put Norwegian, but not Bokmål or Nynorsk or Scandinavian? Why can't you put Brazilian or European Portuguese? It's not a fault of the site. It's simply saying that there is no simple, good solution to give all people equal freedom in specifying what they call the languages they study, while also having standardized language names that don't allow obscure or made-up alternatives or typos.
That's cool, and I don't doubt it. There are also probably millions of people in the world who can speak "Beijing dialect" and "Standard Mandarin" each without too much contamination from the other. Luckily, we don't have to deal with the shortcomings of our language definitions because such people either aren't here or don't care. Personally, if there were an option for "American English," I'd still pick "English." Edited by robarb on 28 May 2015 at 6:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3539 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 7 of 19 28 May 2015 at 10:54am | IP Logged | |||||
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I can't speak to the official distinction between dialect vs. language vs. accent but I get the impression from a learner's perspective that the difference between the standard language spoken in Flanders and standard Dutch is quite small. When asked about the specific differences Flamingen seem to focus on preferences of specific words. For example:
(1) ik heb er zin in / I would like some (2) ik heb er goesting in / I would like some The problem with citing such examples is that they are invariably chosen by the speakers to highlight difference in what words they prefer or don't prefer for a certain situation. They don't demonstrate characteristics of the language that actually make your speech understandable or not understandable. For example, in my Dutch class in Belgium we learned (1) as the model sentence to use, even though (2) is typically described as the "Flemish" thing to say. But even not ever having heard (2), there is no particular reason why even a beginner in the language wouldn't be able to understand it. Expressing an idea with a slightly different word is hardly something to write home about. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 19 28 May 2015 at 12:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have just noticed that the further North you go in the Benelux area (minus Wallonia and a few German or Frisian pockets) the more guttural the local vernacular becomes. Maybe there are people who can learn to speak Dutch and Flemish as separate languages, but for me it is not a priority - and this effectively means that I treat them as dialect bundles arbitrarily grouped into two groups according to nationality.
OK, then some dialects may be so different from the others that it would be possible to treat them as languages, but few outsiders need to care about this. And Frisian - which officially is a language on a different branch of the Germanic 'Stammbaum' - has a dialect named Stadsfrys which has been so strongly influenced by Dutch that it apparently has become half Dutch, half hardcore Frisian. This effectively reestablishes the old Sprachbund known as Ingwäonisch, which also comprised Low German. Edited by Iversen on 28 May 2015 at 12:25pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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