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Do dialects count as ’languages’? | ||
Tags: Language Politics | Dialect | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 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 17 of 27 05 May 2009 at 2:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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There is not a simple way to distinguish languages and dialects, but a number of relevant factors.
Interintelligibility is an important factor, but in practice it depends as much on exposure and attitude as on the actual differences between the speech variants of two persons (though the actual differences can become so big that even the best will in the world can't save you). Besides interintelligibility can be onesided, and it can be limited to writing or to speech. Official status can be a decisive factor, as in the case of Croatian and Serbian or that of Czech and Slovaque. This also has repercussions on the school system: If you officially recognize something as a language, then you are also supposed to deliver a school system to teach it. And most governments would prefer one standard in their schools. Submission under another language form is a factor, - take Swiss German which is rather different from standard High German, but its speakers have chosen to write everything in High German, and they almost treat their daily speak as a secret when there are aliens around. Gradual erosion is a factor: when German TV station NDR still took Low German seriously it was clear that their interviewees represented all levels of competence: some spoke pure unadulterated Platt, while others basically spoke High German with a few Low German words thrown in for local color. If you can glide imperceptibly towards another language form then it doesn't matter that your own original language form has 1000 years of more of independent history - it is essentially dead. Nowadays TV and other media has such a strong effect on the speech of people that physical distance becomes less important. This means that the old geographical differences will tend to disappear, - and in this situation it is very important to control the media. So while it still may be relevant to say that a language is a dialect that has an army and a fleet, it now is necessary also to have TV stations and newspapers. Edited by Iversen on 06 May 2009 at 8:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6378 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 18 of 27 05 May 2009 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Too easy.
A dialect is a variation on a language. Some dialects are not mutually intelligible in speech. The test is to write down the dialect. If the speaker of another dialect can then understand it better or completely, you are dealing with a dialect. Some dialects of the same language are called different languages for no more than political reasons. But linguistically they are not. Flemish and Dutch are the same language. I'd hazard at a guess that Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish are far reaching dialects of what is really one language. But I don't speak them. And I bet someone here will bite my head of for saying that. This is a little crude but it works. You are right. The problem is that you are trying to say where do you draw the line. But there is no line. Human beings seem not to like ambiguity. We want everything to fit into a nice neat packaged box we can label. But languages exist on a sliding scale of slight differences. A huge accumulation will turn Latin into French. It's like evolution. What I look for is how many language families the person's languages span. There is no cheating in language learning since it is not actually a competition. Ignorant monolinguals will be amazed by someone who says "I speak 5 languages: English, Flemish, Dutch, Afrikaans, and Frisian" but an educated individual will not. Since 90%+ of the population are severely mentally handicapped it's not advised to care what they are all getting excited about. :D Edited by zerothinking on 05 May 2009 at 4:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5771 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 19 of 27 08 May 2009 at 3:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yeah. I was trying to make the point that grammatical identity and a large shared vocabulary isn't everything. So speaking fluent pure Schwaebisch alongside Standard German should justly be called speaking two languages, indeed, even if the grammar is similar and the non-colloquial Schawbisch words look just like corruptions of the Standard German. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 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 20 of 27 08 May 2009 at 3:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I basically agree with minus273. It is one thing to decide whether Schwäbisch is a language or not, but from the moment that you decide to learn both High German and Schwäbisch, then you must treat both as languages in their own right, with their own vocabulary, prenunciation and cilture. EVen if it may be easier to learn trwo near relatives because they have a lot in common, you cannot trust anything in one of them to be found in the other. And if you learn them then there will be two small machines inside your cranium, not just one machine with two function modes (which is the case if you just get accostumed to understand a dialect or closely related language without really learning them).
Edited by Iversen on 08 May 2009 at 10:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5771 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 21 of 27 08 May 2009 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
(Speaking strictly for myself, I would rather learn to speak very bad Schwaebisch and very, very bad Portuguese, though. That would be a beep lot easier.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6665 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 22 of 27 08 May 2009 at 7:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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If you have to seriously study it to speak it or understand it, it's a language.
If it's something more like switching mental gears, it's a dialect. Edited by SamD on 08 May 2009 at 8:00pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6445 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 23 of 27 08 May 2009 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I really don't like that definition. By it, Spanish is a dialect of Italian, but Italian dialects are separate languages - at least to me, from the view of understanding. Actually, it's a bit worse than that - any 'heavy' dialect is a separate language by that definition, while the fairly standardized 'newscaster' registers of the major Germanic and Romance languages are two languages, albeit somewhat unwieldy ones - they require some study to understand, but not 'serious' study - and it definitely takes less study than understanding those entities traditionally called dialects. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 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 24 of 27 08 May 2009 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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There are two different issues at stake here. One is how to draw a line between languages and dialects on the systematic level OR as a listener/reader. The other is what to do if you decide to learn something that may be seen as a dialect or a related language from the first point of view.
If you want to learn Schwäbisch and already speak High German, then you MUST learn it from scratch, - pronunciation, morphology, vocabulary, everything. The only difference is that you may get faster and easier through each stage because you already know something related. Otherwise you will end up with something that is just a garbled dialectified version of the base language. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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