Language & Dialect

What They Are

Different language communities have certain ways of talking that set them apart from others. Those
differences may be thought of as dialects not just accents (the way words are pronounced) but also
grammar, vocabulary, syntax and common expressions. Often a group that is somewhat isolated
regionally or socially from other groups will develop a characteristic dialect.
Many people wonder, "Whats the difference between a language and a dialect?" There are no
universally accepted criteria for distinguishing them, and the difference is often a matter of degree
rather than of kind. The Dictionary of Linguistics defines dialect as a variety of a language used by people
from a particular geographic area. Many historical linguists view every speech form as a dialect of the
older medium from which it was developed; for example, modern Romance languages such as French
and Italian developed from dialects of Latin. Other linguists point out the role of historical and political
developments in the formation of a dialect
Regardless how one defines them, dialects are fascinating and relevant to the general study of language
differences.
Why They Matter
Research in dialects helps scientists understand the fundamental principles that underlie language
differences, language innovation and language variation in time and space. The research also helps the
public understand language diversity and offers a new perspective on national debates associated with
various dialects for example, should people be encouraged to eliminate nonstandard ways of
speaking?
Where do these terms come from?
According to Einar Haugen (1966), quoted in Hudson (1996) English made no distinction between
language and dialect until the Renaissance period when the term 'dialect' was borrowed from Greek.
Haugen suggests that the distinction was made in Greek as a result of a 'number of clearly distinct
written varieties in use in Clasical Greek, each associated with a different area and kind of literature'. It
would appear that the original Greek meaning of the term is quite different to what it means in English
today.
The distinctions made also differ between different cultures, making the question even more complex.
In France, for example, the French word 'dialecte' is used to refer to regional varieties which are written;
and the term 'patois' is used to refer to regional varieties which are not written.
How do we define a language?

Terralingua
Structural similarity or dissimilarity can only tell apart very dissimilar languages. It is easy to confirm
that, for instance, Chinese and English, or Kurdish and Turkish are clearly different languages because
their linguistic structures are so dissimilar. But despite being structurally very close to each other,
Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are called different languages. Serbian and Croatian may be even closer
to each other but they are now (again) called two different languages. Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi are both
structurally and lexically very similar, Kannada and Marathi are structurally almost the same but lexically
dissimilar -- all are called different languages. Structural similarity can thus mainly be used to
differentiate between two languages in cases which are so clear that no linguists would be needed
anyway to solve the problem. In other cases, linguistic criteria are not of much help.
What are the differences between a language and a dialect?
SIZE
A language is bigger (has more speakers)than a dialect, since a language is considered to be the sum of
its dialects. Dialects are therefore considered to be subcategories of a language. So, if we take English as
a language, we might consider varieties such as Cockney, Yorkshire English , Australian English, etc as
dialects of the language 'English'.
What are the differences between a language and a dialect?
PRESTIGE
A

language

is

more

prestigious

than

dialect.

A dialect is popularly considered to be "a substandard, low status, often rustic form of a language,
lacking in prestige. Dialects are often being thought of as being some kind of erroneous deviation from
the norm - an aberration of the 'proper' or standard form of language." (Chambers and Trudgill 1998).
For most people (at least in Britain), the level of prestige a variety has is dependent on whether it is used
in formal writing. Varieties which are unwritten are commonly referred to as dialects, whereas those
used in writing are considered to be the 'proper language'.
Standard English - language or dialect?
What is Standard English?
Hudson suggests that the variety of a language that we refer to as a 'proper language' rather than a
dialect is a Standard Language. Standard English, for example the kind of English used in textbooks,
official documents, etc, is simply another dialect of English among many (Yorkshire English, Indian
English, etc%u2026). It is the English that would be taught to foreign learners, or used in education

systems. It is important to note that this variety has no linguistic prestige over others - the selection of a
given variety depends on social, not linguistic factors (Milroy and Milroy, 1993).
There are four processes a variety goes through to become standardized (Haugen 1966)
1)Selection - The variety must be chosen out of a group of competing varieties as the one to be
developped into the standard form. The selected variety is not, as I said earlier, any more linguistically
'correct' than other varieties. The decision is one of great social importance, since those who speak this
variety of the language will automatically gain prestige as the variety does.Therefore, what is most
important is the varieties aceptability amoungst the most powerful sectors of society.
2) Codification - the standard variety is codified (written down) so that it is some way fixed as the
standard. Codification of modern Standard English took place in the 18th century, when Dr Samuel
Johnson's Dictionary along with many grammar books, first appeared. Once a variety had been codified,
it is possible for members of the community to learn and use the 'correct' forms that they believe will
give
them
social
advancement
(Milroy)
3) Elaboration of Function - As the standard language is diffused socially and geographically (often
through writing or education systems)it becomes necessary for it to be used in a wider variety of
functions, such as administrative functions associated with central government, in parliament, in
education and of course in literature. As a result, a wider vocabulary for this variety needs to be
developped and new linguistic items added so that the variety can be used in all these domains.
4) Acceptance - the variety must be accepted as the standard variety by an influential group of society. It
will then spread to other groups, and other forms will become non-standard. Hudson comments that a
standard language, once accepted, serves as a 'strong unifying force for the state'. It becomes a symbol
of independence.
Standard English - language or dialect?
SE as a dialect
Chambers and Trudgill argue that all speakers of English are speakers of a particular dialect of English,
dependent on their geographical and social backgrounds. No dialect of English is linguistically superior to
any other, but certain dialects have more prestige associated with them - for example, Standard English.
But do we want to consider Standard English as a language? Or is it just another dialect of the overall
concept - English? It certainly has more prestige than other dialects, yet it is spoken by a remarkably
small percentage of English speakers.
Mutual Intelligibility

Problems with this theory

Another criteria used for distinguishing language from dialect is mutual intelligibility. If two speakers are
able to understand one another, we can assume that they are speaking different varieties of the same
language.
Although this defintion seems clear-cut, there are many problems with it's application.
Firstly, let us consider the Scandanavian languages of Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, which are usually
considered to be three seperate languages (especially by their speakers). However, speakers of these
three languages can readily communicate and understand each other (C&T). Another example of this is
Serbian and Croation - speakers have no problem understanding one another, yet they are referred to as
different
languages.
Furthermore, whilst we would normally consider German to be one language, some varieties (such as
Swiss
German
and
Standard
German)
are
not
mutually
intelligible.
Another problem with this definition is that mutual intelligibility is a matter of degree, ranging from
totally intelligible to totally unintelligible (Hudson). How far down this scale must two varieties be in
order for us to class them as different languages? Where is the cut off point?
A third problem is that a person's ability to understand another person is dependant on various factors.
For example, the speakers past experience or exposure to the particular variety. For example, a speaker
of Cockney English may have difficulty understanding a speaker of Irish English - however, if the speaker
of Cockney English has, let's say, Irish parents - he or she might have no problems at all understanding.
We can also note that mutual intelligiblity is not always mutual. For example, Danes understand
Norwegians better than Norwegians understand Danes. This is probably due in part to the suggestion
that "Norwegian is pronounced like Danish is spelt."
Dialect Continuum
How do we draw boundaries between langs?
Another problem with using mutual intelligiblity as a criteria is that we can arange varieties in a chain,
known as a dialect continuum. In this chain, each pair of adjacent varieties are mutually intelligible,but
pairs
that
are
not
directly
adjacent
in
the
chain
are
not
(Hudson).
One such chain is said to stretch from Amsterdam through Germany to Vienna, and another from Calais
to
the
South
of
Italy.
This leaves us with a problem - how do we draw boundaries between languages? How do we decide
where one language ends and another begins?
Language as a Political and Social Factor
The answer appears to be due to social and political, rather than linguistic factors. Since a 'standard
language' can act as a symbol of independence, many groups are keen to keep their language seperate
from
others,
despite
being
practically
identical
(e.g.
Serbian
and
Croation).

A language is a political or socially created concept, not based on linguistic differences.

1.5 Dialects and languages

Idiolects and dialects
Two Americans are talking about a couple they have just met.

She sounded English to me, but he doesn't seem to have any accent at all.

Two English people are talking about the same couple.

He sounded American to me, but she doesn't seem to have any accent at all.

What's going on here? Who has the accent?

What I know about my language and how to use it is called my idiolect.
It almost certainly varies in
minor ways from the idiolects of all other speakers. But what is an idiolect? That is, what kinds of things
do I know? In one sense, this whole book is an answer to that question, but we need to have a first cut
at the answer here to help us get started.

I know words. I have a vocabulary, a set of words which I know how to pronounce and use
appropriately. For example, I know how to say the word apple, I know that it refers to a
particular type of fruit, I come up with this word when I want to refer to a particular apple, and I
understand it when I hear it.
I know how to pronounce words and combinations of words more generally. That is, there are
aspects of pronunciation that go beyond individual words. For example, I know to pronounce
the ending that we spell -ed like /t/ in words like picked and watched but to pronounce it like /d/
in words like signed and burned.
I know how to put words together into sentences in meaningful ways. For example, I know that
if I want to ask when a particular train leaves I can say when does the train leave?, but not when
leaves the train?.
I know how to use language appropriately to achieve my goals. I know that if I want a friend to
lend me $100, it is better to say I was wondering if you could lend me some money than to say
give me $100.

I'll be much more careful later on about how each of these types of knowledge is described, but for now
I'll say (informally) that my idiolect involves knowledge about vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and
usage.

Of course no one is really interested in describing idiolects. Linguists and other language scientists study
the speech of communities of people, not of individuals. More specifically, they study the knowledge of
vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and usage that is shared by the members of a speech community.
Because the members of the community agree on this knowledge, because it differs (at least in some
ways) from the knowledge shared by other communities, and because it is mostly arbitrary, I will refer
to the knowledge as linguistic conventions.
But what is a speech community? I will use this term to refer to any group of people that shares a set of
linguistic conventions differing in some noticeable way from the conventions found elsewhere. You may
know that in the United States people in some cities have some characteristic features in their
pronunciation, although they are easily understood by people elsewhere in the United States. For
example, people native to Pittsburgh are known for using you uns (or yinz) to mean 'you plural'. Here's
an example from the (partly tongue-in-cheek) "Pittsburghese" website: if yinz wants served, raise your
hands.. The number of conventions that distinguish Pittsburghers from other English speakers in the
northeastern United States is actually pretty small, but because there is such a set of conventions, we
can consider these people to be a speech community. The speech patterns, that is, conventions of
vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and usage, of a speech community are called a dialect,

so we

can speak of a "Pittsburgh dialect".

Note that a dialect may not be defined entirely on the basis of its physical location. Cities often contain a
variety of ethnic and social groups with different speech patterns. For example, the African-American
population of many US cities (for example, Pittsburgh) often has a quite different dialect from the EuroAmerican population of the same cities.
Which dialect do you speak? There may be a number of possible answers.
What about larger communities? Pittsburghers share some speech conventions with speakers in other
cities of the northeast and north midwest, for example, their pronunciation of the a in a word like
hands, as in the example above (more on this pronunciation later on). And people in that larger region
share some conventions with people in an even larger region encompassing speakers in most of the
northern and western United States, for example, their pronunciation of the long English vowels (bite,
beat, bait, boat, etc.). And people in that even larger region share many conventions with English
speakers all over North America, including most of their grammar and usage conventions, as well as a
number of pronunciation conventions, for example, the tendency to pronounce the words latter and
ladder in roughly the same way.
This idea of larger and larger communities, each sharing fewer and fewer conventions, is an oversimplification in one sense. The fact is that the boundaries of the communities overlap in many ways. If
we look at particular vocabulary, we may find a region with one boundary, whereas if we look at other
vocabulary or at some pronunciation convention, we may find another boundary. For example,
Pittsburghers tend to say pop (as opposed to soda or some other word) for carbonated drinks, and they
share this convention with many speakers in the northern midwestern cities who also share their

pronunciation of the vowel in hands, but not with speakers to the east of them, in New York City, for
example, who share the pronunciation but not the word. (New Yorkers tend to say soda rather than
pop.) Thus where we draw the boundaries around a dialect depends on which convention or set of
conventions we're looking at. For more about soda vs. pop, see this interesting website.
Another way what I've said so far is an over-simplification is that there is great variation within any of
these regions. Some of this variation has to do with the constant contact between dialects that is a fact
of life in most communities. Some of the variation also has to do with the fact that people often know a
range of ways to say things and they may sometimes avoid their local dialect in favor of a standard (see
below) in certain situations.
Each of these shared sets of conventions, whether at the level of a small village, a subculture within a
city, or a larger region, is a dialect. And a linguist can be interested in describing any level and any aspect
of the dialect at any level (pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, usage). The pronunciation associated
with a dialect is called an accent.
Languages
What is a language? How would you tell someone (say, an alien with no knowledge of human culture)
what English is, without using the word language?
We can of course extend the boundaries in our example even further, beyond North America to include
England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, a number of Caribbean countries, and
communities within many other countries. This large speech "community" is not really a community in
the usual sense of the word, but it does share many conventions. For example, in all of these places,
speakers make a question from a sentence like he ate potatoes by inserting the word did and changing
the form of the verb ate: did he eat potatoes?, and of course speakers in all of these places share the
word potato for referring a class of tuberous vegetables. The conventions of this large "community" are
of course what we refer to as "English", which we consider a language. Thus in one sense a language
is a set of dialects. In another sense it is (like a dialect) a set of conventions shared by a speech
community.
Two dialects of one language or two separate languages?
But how do we decide when a collection of dialects is a language and not just another, more general
dialect? As we've already seen, a dialect can also be a set of dialects (the North American English dialect
consists of Southern dialect, New England dialect, Canadian dialect, etc.). What makes English a
language and not just another very general dialect? What makes Canadian English a dialect of English
and not a language in its own right?
The answer to this question is complicated. In fact there is no clear answer because the words dialect
and language are used in different ways for different purposes. There are two completely different kinds

of criteria related to the distinction between dialect and language, linguistic criteria and social or
political criteria.
Linguistic criteria
Given two overlapping sets of linguistic conventions associated with two different speech communities,
for example, Mexican Spanish and Argentine Spanish, how do we decide whether they should count as
two dialects or two separate languages? One criterion is the degree of overlap: how similar are the
vocabulary, the pronunciation, the grammar, and the usage? Unfortunately there's no simple wat to
measure this overlap, at least no way that researchers would agree on. One way to have a sense of the
overlap, though, is mutual intelligibility, the extent to which speakers from the two or more speech
communities can understand each other. Mutual intelligibility is also not easy to measure, and it is often
based on the impressions of speakers and hearers, how much they understand when they encounter
members of the other group or how long it takes them to get accustomed to the speech of the other
group. We also need to establish some sort of intelligibility threshold; no two speakers can be expected
to understand each other all of the time. So none of this is precise at all. The idea is simply that if two
sets of linguistic conventions are similar enough so that their speakers can usually understand each
other, then the two sets of conventions should count as dialects of the same language rather than
separate languages. On these grounds, we call Mexican Spanish
same language (Spanish
understanding each other.

and Argentine Spanish dialects of the

) because speakers of these dialects normally have little trouble

To find out what should count as a separate language on grounds of mutual intelligibility, a good
resource is Ethnologue, an online database of all of the world's known languages, 6,912 according to
their current listing. The Ethnologue compilers attempt to use mutual intelligibility to decide what
should count as a language. While English is listed as a single language, both German and Italian are
listed as multiple languages. Each of these languages, for example, the variety of Italian called Sicilian, is
usually referred to as a "dialect", but, according to the Ethnologue compilers, these are distinct enough
to be considered separate languages. Again, the criterion of mutual intelligibility is a rough one, and
some of Ethnologue's claims are controversial.
Social and political criteria
Another sort of criterion for what counts as a dialect is the social or political unity of the group in
question. In Bavaria, a state in southern Germany, and in parts of Austria most people speak a dialect
called Bavarian or Austro-Bavarian,
which on grounds of mutual intelligibility could be considered a
language distinct from the speech of Germans and Austrians in other regions. Ethnologue calls Bavarian
a language. But Bavarian is clearly closely related to those other dialects and not more closely related to
dialects of some other language, and so for mainly political reasons, it is convenient to consider it a
dialect of the German "language", rather than a language in its own right. Something similar can be said
about the speaking conventions of the older generation in the Ryukyu Islands
in southern Japan
(because these dialects are dying out, most young people do not speak them). On the basis of mutual

intelligibility, we could divide the island dialects into several separate languages, each distinct from the
Japanese language (as is done in Ethnologue and in the Wikipedia article on these languages ). But the
Ryukyu Islands are politically part of Japan, and these dialects are clearly related to Japanese and not
related at all to any other known language (unless we consider each of them to be a language). So for
political reasons, it is convenient to consider them dialects of Japanese, just as the dialect of Osaka is
considered a dialect of Japanese.
Mutually intelligible "languages"
At the other extreme are examples like the languages spoken in the northern European countries
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland.
These "languages" are all related to one another, and
speakers from some pairs of countries within these have little difficulty understanding one another
when they are speaking the standard dialects of their languages, despite the obvious differences,
especially in pronunciation. Thus on grounds of mutual intelligibility, we might consider some of these
"languages" to be dialects of a single language. But Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are
official "languages" of separate countries, and there are separate spelling conventions for some of the
sounds in the languages.
Actually the situation is even more complex than this because Norway has two official dialects,
fifth related language, Faroese,
Denmark.

is spoken in the Faroe Islands,

and a

which are administered by

So for mainly political reasons, they are considered separate languages rather than dialects of a single
language.
To summarize, the line between dialects of one language and separate languages is somewhat arbitrary.
However, wherever we draw the line, three points should be clear.

Every language has multiple dialects.

Every speaker of every language is also a speaker of at least one dialect of that language.
Since the pronunciation conventions of a dialect constitute an accent, every speaker of every
language speaks with some accent. There is no such thing as "speaking without an accent".

Standard dialects
The following appears on the website of a person who spent some time in Pittsburgh: "probably relating
to the rest of Pittsburgh's terrible dialect, which I, fortunately, did not pick up". Why would some
dialects be thought of as "terrible"?
Some dialects within a language may be singled out for special status. When we're dealing with a
political unit, such as a nation, in which related dialects are spoken by most people, one dialect is often
treated as the standard dialect.

You know something about this already from the last section of the

book. The standard dialect is often the only dialect that is written, and it is the one that is taught in
schools and (with some exceptions) used in the media. Thus in Germany, Austria, and the Germanspeaking part of Switzerland, it is Standard German
that is taught in the schools and used in
broadcasting, even though most people in this region are not native speakers of the Standard German
dialect. This means that most people in the German-speaking countries end up bidialectal. The same
situation holds in Japan, where it is Standard Japanese, based on Tokyo dialect, that is taught in the
schools and used in the media. Note how this makes it possible to speak of a German or Japanese
speech community, even when the native dialects of people in these communities are very different
from one another, because all educated speakers in these communities share the standard dialect, often
as a second dialect.
So what do we mean when we say "German" or "Japanese"? There are two possibilities. "German" could
mean Standard German, that is, one of the set of dialects spoken in Germany and also the basis of
written German. Or it could mean the collection of related dialects, some mutually unintelligible, which
are spoken in Germany and other countries where Standard German is the official language (Austria) or
one of the official languages (Switzerland). When linguists refer to "German" or "Japanese", without
specifying the dialect, they normally mean the standard dialect.
Dialects of English in the US and England
In the United States, the situation is somewhat simpler than in Germany or Japan because the
differences among most of the dialects are not nearly as great; native speakers of English in the United
States have little trouble understanding each other. (An important exception is African-American
Vernacular English (AAVE), spoken mainly by many African-Americans.) As in Germany and Japan, we
have an (informal) standard dialect, for vocabulary, grammar, and usage, if not for pronunciation. Thus
children in Pittsburgh learn in school to write sentences like the school needs to be renovated rather
than the school needs renovated, which would be grammatical in their local dialect. Americans tend to
be relatively tolerant of differences in accent, however. Teachers in schools throughout the country
teach the standard grammar but use their own local pronunciation. If we have a standard accent, it is
the one people associate with television announcers, the accent characteristic of much of the Midwest
and the West. This accent is called General American;

I will have more to say about it later.

The situation in England is similar to that in the United States, and the standard vocabulary, grammar,
and usage that children learn to write in English schools are very similar to the American standard.
However, in England, there is a stronger idea of a standard accent than in the United States and more
pressure for children to learn this accent if it differs from their home accent. This accent is referred to as
Received Pronunciation (RP);
it is based on the speech of educated speakers in southern England.
(Note that RP is standard English English pronunciation, not British English; in Scotland, there is a quite
different standard accent. ) I'll have more to say about RP and how it differs from General American
and other English accents in this section.
"Just" a "dialect" or a full-blown "language"

The existence of a single standard dialect among a set of non-standard dialects has important social
implications. The non-standard dialects have less prestige, and their use may be discouraged in formal
situations, not just situations in which writing is called for. Sometimes, as in the Ryukyu Islands in Japan
or in some regions of France and Spain, this leads to the decline and possible death of the non-standard
"dialects" (which would be considered languages by the mutual intelligibility criterion). In other
situations, speakers of non-standard dialects retain pride in their local speech patterns, while
recognizing that they are not appropriate in certain situations. Finally, this pride, along with other
cultural differences separating the speakers of the non-standard dialect from the speakers of other
dialects (non-standard or standard), may lead to pressure to have non-standard dialects given official
status, especially if they differ significantly from the standard. At this point the words dialect and
language become politically charged terms because the supporters of official status for the nonstandard dialect may feel the need to argue that it is not "just" a dialect of the larger language but
rather a language in its own right. This has happened in the United States with AAVE (here is an essay on
this topic by the sociolinguist John Rickford) and in Europe with many languages that are normally
considered "dialects" of other languages (this website includes many of them as well as links to other
sites concerned with the "minority language" question in Europe and elsewhere).
Language families
Why some languages resemble each other
We've seen how as we extend the boundaries of speech communities, we get fewer and fewer shared
conventions. When we reach the level of a language such as English, Spanish, or Mandarin Chinese, we
have a speech community which shares a set of conventions (in some cases a standard dialect) which
allows people in the community to communicate with one another despite dialect differences. But we
can go beyond a language. So for English, we could extend the boundaries to include the Netherlands,
Germany, Scandinavia, and some other regions in western Europe. We'd now find a much smaller set of
shared conventions. All speakers in this large "community", for example, share a word meaning 'all'
which is similar in pronunciation to the English word all. But there would be no reason to call this set of
conventions a "language" since the speakers obviously do not understand each other and do not belong
to a single political unit with a single standard dialect. Instead we refer to this set of conventions, or set
of languages, as a language family,
in this case, the Germanic languages.
The members of a
language family resemble each other because they are genetically related; that is, historically they
derived from a common ancestor language. (Note that this use of the word genetic differs somewhat
from its use in biology; the speakers of Germanic languages are not necessarily genetically closer to one
another than they are to the speakers of other languages.) The ancestor of the modern Germanic
languages was not a written language, so we can only infer what it was like.
In most cases we can go even further back; the ancestor languages of two or more families themselves
may have had a common ancestor language. Thus the modern Romance languages,
including
Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, and Romanian; the modern Germanic languages; and
many other languages spoken today in Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia, apparently descended

from a much older (and also unwritten) language. This means we can group all of these languages into a
single family, in this case the one we call Indo-European.
Sometimes, to distinguish the lower from
the higher levels within a family tree of languages, we use "language family" only for the largest
grouping (for example, Indo-European) and "branch" to refer to groupings within this (for example,
Germanic and Romance). Note that there may be many intermediate levels in the family tree of
languages. Within Germanic, for example, there is North, including the Scandinavian languages, and
West, including English, Dutch, and German.
Note also that languages may resemble each other in one way or another for reasons other than a
genetic relationship. The main non-genetic source of similarity is language contact; when the speech
communities for two language are in close cultural contact, their languages often influence one another.
So modern Japanese vocabulary includes thousands of words borrowed from Chinese and uses the
Chinese writing system (as well as writing systems specific to Japanese). But, except in the sense that all
human languages may be ultimately related to one another, there is no evidence that Japanese is
genetically related to Chinese. A more complicated situation occurred in Western Asia with the
complicated cultural influences among people speaking Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. These three
languages belong to separate language families (Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, and Altaic, respectively),
which are either unrelated to one another or only very distantly related, but Turkish and Persian have
borrowed many words from Arabic, Turkish has also borrowed many words from Persian, and Persian
borrowed its writing system from Arabic.

Dialect
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
This article is about dialects of spoken and written languages. For dialects of programming languages,
see Dialect (computing). For the programming language named Dialect, see Dialect (programming
language). For the literary device, see Eye dialect.
The term dialect (from the Greek Language word dialektos, ) is used in two distinct ways, even
by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of the
language's speakers.[1] The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also
be defined by other factors, such as social class.[2] A dialect that is associated with a particular social
class can be termed a sociolect; a regional dialect may be termed a regiolect or topolect. The other
usage refers to a language socially subordinate to a regional or national standard language, often
historically cognate to the standard, but not a variety of it or in any other sense derived from it. This
more precise usage enables distinguishing between varieties of a language, such as the French spoken in
Nice, France, and local languages distinct from the superordinate language, e.g. Nissart, the traditional
native Romance language of Nice, known in French as Niard.

A dialect is distinguished by its vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation (phonology, including prosody).
Where a distinction can be made only in terms of pronunciation, the term accent is appropriate, not
dialect. Other speech varieties include: standard languages, which are standardized for public
performance (for example, a written standard); jargons, which are characterized by differences in
lexicon (vocabulary); slang; patois; pidgins or argots.
The particular speech patterns used by an individual are termed an idiolect.
Contents
[hide]

1 Standard and non-standard dialect

2 "Dialect" or "language"
o 2.1 "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"
o 2.2 Political factors
o 2.3 Historical linguistics
o 2.4 Interlinguistics
3 Selected list of articles on dialects
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Standard and non-standard dialect

A standard dialect (also known as a standardized dialect or "standard language") is a dialect that is
supported by institutions. Such institutional support may include government recognition or
designation; presentation as being the "correct" form of a language in schools; published grammars,
dictionaries, and textbooks that set forth a "correct" spoken and written form; and an extensive formal
literature that employs that dialect (prose, poetry, non-fiction, etc.). There may be multiple standard
dialects associated with a single language. For example, Standard American English, Standard Canadian
English, Standard Indian English, Standard Australian English, and Standard Philippine English may all be
said to be standard dialects of the English language.
A nonstandard dialect, like a standard dialect, has a complete vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, but is
not the beneficiary of institutional support. An example of a nonstandard English dialect is Southern
American English. The Dialect Test was designed by Joseph Wright to compare different English dialects
with each other.
Sometimes in stories authors distinguish characters through their dialect.

[edit] "Dialect" or "language"

There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing a language from a dialect. A number of
rough measures exist, sometimes leading to contradictory results. Some linguists[3] do not differentiate
between languages and dialects, i.e. languages are dialects and vice versa. The distinction is therefore
subjective and depends on the user's frame of reference.
Language varieties are often called dialects rather than languages:

because they have no standard or codified form,

because the speakers of the given language do not have a state of their own,
because they are rarely or never used in writing (outside reported speech)
or because they lack prestige with respect to some other, often standardised, variety.

The term idiom is used by some linguists instead of language or dialect when there is no need to commit
oneself to any decision on the status with respect to this distinction.[citation needed]
Anthropological linguists define dialect as the specific form of a language used by a speech community.
In other words, the difference between language and dialect is the difference between the abstract or
general and the concrete and particular. From this perspective, no one speaks a "language," everyone
speaks a dialect of a language. Those who identify a particular dialect as the "standard" or "proper"
version of a language are in fact using these terms to express a social distinction.
Often, the standard language is close to the sociolect of the elite class.
In groups where prestige standards play less important roles, "dialect" may simply be used to refer to
subtle regional variations in linguistic practices that are considered mutually intelligible, playing an
important role to place strangers, carrying the message of where a stranger originates (which quarter or
district in a town, which village in a rural setting, or which province of a country); thus there are many
apparent "dialects" of Slavey, for example, by which the linguist simply means that there are many
subtle variations among speakers who largely understand each other and recognize that they are each
speaking "the same way" in a general sense.
Modern-day linguists know that the status of language is not solely determined by linguistic criteria, but
it is also the result of a historical and political development. Romansh came to be a written language,
and therefore it is recognized as a language, even though it is very close to the Lombardic alpine
dialects. An opposite example is the case of Chinese, whose variations such as Mandarin and Cantonese
are often considered dialects and not languages, despite their mutual unintelligibility, because the word
for them in mandarin, "Fangyan", was mistranslated as dialect because it meant regional speech.
See also Mesoamerican languages#Language vs. Dialect
[edit] "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

Main article: A language is a dialect with an army and navy

The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich published the expression, "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un
flot" ("

", "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"; in

Yivo-bleter.
[edit] Political factors
Modern Nationalism, as developed especially since the French Revolution, has made the distinction
between "language" and "dialect" an issue of great political importance. A group speaking a separate
"language" is often seen as having a greater claim to being a separate "people", and thus to be more
deserving of its own independent state, while a group speaking a "dialect" tends to be seen not as "a
people" in its own right, but as a sub-group, part of a bigger people, which must content itself with
regional autonomy.[citation needed] The distinction between language and dialect is thus inevitably made at
least as much on a political basis as on a linguistic one, and can lead to great political controversy, or
even armed conflict.
The classification of speech varieties as dialects or languages and their relationship to other varieties of
speech can thus be controversial and the verdicts inconsistent. English and Serbo-Croatian illustrate the
point. English and Serbo-Croatian each have two major variants (British and American English, and
Serbian and Croatian, respectively), along with numerous lesser varieties. For political reasons, analyzing
these varieties as "languages" or "dialects" yields inconsistent results: British and American English,
spoken by close political and military allies, are almost universally regarded as dialects of a single
language, whereas the standard languages of Serbia and Croatia, which differ from each other to a
similar extent as the dialects of English, are being treated by many linguists from the region as distinct
languages, largely because the two countries oscillate from being brotherly to being bitter enemies. (The
Serbo-Croatian language article deals with this topic much more fully.)
Similar examples abound. Macedonian, although mutually intelligible with Bulgarian, certain dialects of
Serbian and to a lesser extent the rest of the South Slavic dialect continuum is considered by Bulgarian
linguists to be a Bulgarian dialect, in contrast with the contemporary international view, and the view in
the Republic of Macedonia which regards it as a language in its own right. Nevertheless, before the
establishment of a literary standard of Macedonian in 1944, in most sources in and out of Bulgaria
before the Second World War, the southern Slavonic dialect continuum covering the area of today's
Republic of Macedonia were referred to as Bulgarian dialects.
In the 19th Century, the Tsarist Government of Russia claimed that Ukrainian was merely a dialect of
Russian and not a language in its own right. Since Soviet times, when Ukrainians were recognised as a
separate nationality deserving of its own Soviet Republic, such linguistic-political claims had disappeared
from circulation.

In Lebanon, the right-wing Guardians of the Cedars, a fiercely nationalistic (mainly Christian) political
party which opposes the country's ties to the Arab world, is agitating for "Lebanese" to be recognized as
a distinct language from Arabic and not merely a dialect, and has even advocated replacing the Arabic
alphabet with a revival of the ancient Phoenician alphabet - which missed a number of characters to
write typical Arabic phonemes present in Lebanese, and lost by Phoenician (and Hebrew) in the second
millennium BC.
This is, however, very much a minority position - in Lebanon itself as in the Arab World as a whole. The
Varieties of Arabic are considerably different from each other - especially those spoken in North Africa
(Maghreb) from those of the Middle East (the Mashriq in the broad definition including Egypt and
Sudan) - and had there been the political will in the different Arab countries to cut themselves off from
each other, the case could have been made to declare these varieties as separate languages. However,
in adherence to the ideas of Arab Nationalism, the Arab countries prefer to give preference to the
Literary Arabic which is common to all of them, conduct much of their political, cultural and religious life
in it, and refrain from declaring each country's specific variety to be a separate language.
Interestingly, such moves may even appear at a local, rather than a federal level. The US state of Illinois
declared "American" to be the state's official language in 1923,[4] although linguists and politicians
throughout much of the rest of the country considered American simply to be a dialect.
There have been cases of a variety of speech being deliberately reclassified to serve political purposes.
One example is Moldovan. In 1996, the Moldovan parliament, citing fears of "Romanian expansionism,"
rejected a proposal from President Mircea Snegur to change the name of the language to Romanian,
and in 2003 a Moldovan-Romanian dictionary was published, purporting to show that the two countries
speak different languages. Linguists of the Romanian Academy reacted by declaring that all the
Moldovan words were also Romanian words; while in Moldova, the head of the Academy of Sciences of
Moldova, Ion Brbu, described the dictionary as a politically motivated "absurdity".
In contrast, spoken languages of Han Chinese are usually referred to as dialects of one Chinese language,
because the word "fangyan", which means regional speech, was mistranslated as dialect.. The article
"Identification of the varieties of Chinese" has more details.
In the Philippines, the Commission on the Filipino Language declared all the indigenous languages in the
Philippines as dialects[citation needed] despite the great differences between them, as well as the existence of
significant bodies of literature in each of the major "dialects" and daily newspapers in some.
The significance of the political factors in any attempt at answering the question "what is a language?" is
great enough to cast doubt on whether any strictly linguistic definition, without a socio-cultural
approach, is possible. This is illustrated by the frequency with which the army-navy aphorism discussed
in the preceding section is cited.
[edit] Historical linguistics

Many historical linguists view any speech form as a dialect of the older medium of communication from
which it developed.[citation needed] This point of view sees the modern Romance languages as dialects of
Latin, modern Greek as a dialect of Ancient Greek, Tok Pisin as a dialect of English, and Scandinavian
languages as dialects of Old Norse. This paradigm is not entirely problem-free. It sees genetic
relationships as paramount; the "dialects" of a "language" (which itself may be a "dialect" of a yet older
tongue) may or may not be mutually intelligible. Moreover, a parent language may spawn several
"dialects" which themselves subdivide any number of times, with some "branches" of the tree changing
more rapidly than others. This can give rise to the situation in which two dialects (defined according to
this paradigm) with a somewhat distant genetic relationship are mutually more readily comprehensible
than more closely related dialects. In one opinion this pattern is clearly present among the modern
Romance tongues, with Italian and Spanish having a high degree of mutual comprehensibility, which
neither language shares with French, despite some claiming that both languages are genetically closer to
French than to each other:[citation needed] In fact, French-Italian and French-Spanish relative mutual
incomprehensibility is due to French having undergone more rapid and more pervasive phonological
change than have Spanish and Italian, not to real or imagined distance in genetic relationship. In fact,
Italian and French share many more root words in common that do not even appear in Spanish. For
example, the Italian and French words for various foods, family members, and body parts are very
similar to each other, yet most of those words are completely different in Spanish. Italian "avere" and
"essere" as auxiliaries for forming compound tenses are used similarly to French "avoir" and "tre",
Spanish only retains "haber" and has done away with "ser" in forming compound tenses, which are no
longer used in either Spanish or Portuguese. However, when it comes to pronunciation, some Italian
sounds are familiar to Spanish speakers, and native speakers of Italian and Spanish may attain some
limited degree of mutual comprehension using single words or short phrases.
[edit] Interlinguistics
One language, Interlingua, was developed so that the languages of Western civilization would act as its
dialects.[5] Drawing from such concepts as the international scientific vocabulary and Standard Average
European, linguists developed a theory that the modern Western languages were actually dialects of a
hidden or latent language. Researchers at the International Auxiliary Language Association extracted
words and affixes that they considered to be part of Interlingua's vocabulary.[6] In theory, speakers of
the Western languages would understand written or spoken Interlingua immediately, without prior
study, since their own languages were its dialects.[5] This has often turned out to be true, especially, but
not solely, for speakers of the Romance languages and educated speakers of English. Interlingua has also
been found to assist in the learning of other languages. In one study, Swedish high school students
learning Interlingua were able to translate passages from Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian that students
of those languages found too difficult to understand.[7] It should be noted, however, that the vocabulary
of Interlingua extends beyond the Western language families.[6]