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I think the problem is the flimsy line between dialect and language. I remember getting into an argument years ago about this, that dialects can be so thick tha

I think the problem is the flimsy line between dialect and language. I remember getting into an argument years ago about this, that dialects can be so thick that you might as well as be listening to someone speaking another language. A friend argued that it's still the same language, so you can understand what others are saying even with a different dialect. Please. The average person can't understand all of Scouse, AAVE, Southern American, Geordie, cockney, Hiberno‐English, etc. I still find myself rewinding dialogue in shows like Peaky Blinders. The only reason people have a problem with AAVE is some sort of racial pretentiousness. Even the use of the phrase "Standard English" in this article is pretentious. Standard to whom? Brits certainly have a different perspective of what "Standard English" is from Americans.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
In practice, the language “standard” is simply whatever dialect is used by the elites.
- Arnt 10y ago
  One of my language books offers a serious-ish witticism as definition: A language is a dialect that has a capital.
  - mcguire 10y ago
    So,now,a language is a dialect with capital?
    - Arnt 10y ago
      Perhaps I should have said a capital city or a seat of government.
Broken_Hippo 10y ago
Dialects Can indeed do this. My aunt is british: Her mother's dialect was so thick I could hardly understand her as a child. Fast forward to adult life, and I moved to Norway. Spoken dialects here can have just a few hundred people, though writing is more standardized. To confound it all, there are two official forms of Norwegian. Norwegians are expected to understand not only both forms of the language, but most dialects... along with Swedish and Danish (Swedish sounds similar, danish is written similarly). Yet... There are instances where two Norwegians simply cannot understand each other. They are more likely to switch to english or try very very hard to stick to plain language. I have less luck with the dialects - I can understand some with a few alterations. On the other hand, I now understand different dialects of English much better.
- Arnt 10y ago
  The dialects are easy to understand, so to speak... not necessarily a matter five minutes, but orders of magnitude easier than learning, say, Dutch. A former co-worker told me about moving from one (dialect) end of the country to the other, and working as a teacher. For two days the children in her class basically didn't understand her, then they had learned to map her phonemes to theirs and it was okay.
- deviate_X 10y ago
  Indeed, Norweigen, Swedish and Danish are actually the same language, linguistically. In this situation, it is said: a language is a dialect with an army and navy http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3328218-the-story-of-human-language http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3328218-the-story-of-huma... - is a great and enlightening read
  - nradov 10y ago
    Or for another example, Serbo-Croatian used to be considered a language with Serbian and Croatian being just dialects. Then after Yugoslavia split apart into separate nation states, the Serbian and Croatian governments started insisting that they actually had separate languages. They even went to the extent of changing some words to increase the differences.
    - dragandj 10y ago
      And yet, not only all speakers of one can understand perfectly the other, everyone can speak it effortlessly, and even understand localized accents and subtleties.
- tptacek 10y ago
  The essay mentions the situation with Norwegian dialects, and notes that unlike the United States and AAVE, or the UK with Cockney, Norwegians respect and honor their rural dialects --- and apparently have superior educational outcomes as one result.
adrianN 10y ago
Standard English probably refers to what is taught in schools and written down in dictionaries. Germany has the Institut für Deutsche Sprache, France has Academie Francaise, but English seems to lack a formal governing body.
- spacecowboy_lon 10y ago
  Its the BBC :-)
  - JBReefer 10y ago
    Or the Economist
BjoernKW 10y ago
A language is a dialect with an army. The commonly accepted - but rather tenuous - criterion for distinguishing between language and dialect is speakers of different dialects being mutually intelligible to each other when making the effort. That can be said for Scouse, Southern American, Geordie, Cockney and Hiberno‐English, even though understanding speakers of those dialects talking among each other often is difficult for an outsider. Unlike these varieties, AAVE technically isn't a dialect but a an ethnolect and sociolect, so race definitely is a factor here. Maybe, AAVE can some day become a generally accepted dialect that's not dependent on speaker ethnicity. However, I think it's more likely that AAVE influences other - considered more standard - varieties of English. In fact that's likely already happening to some extent through culture, music in particular, and of course people just talking to each other and taking up linguistic quirks and habits from each other.
- Chathamization 10y ago
  > The commonly accepted - but rather tenuous - criterion for distinguishing distinction between language and dialect is speakers of different dialects being mutually intelligible to each other when making the effort. What's interesting is that I've seen Spanish and Portuguese speakers do this (enough to have a conversation, though I can't say how well that went). On the other hand, there are certain Chinese dialects (though maybe not considered dialect by linguistics) where the speaker of one finds it just about impossible to understand what the speaker of the other is saying.
  - BuckRogers 10y ago
    Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are mutually intelligible and the Roman empire's legacy lives on through them. My wife is a native Spanish speaker and she has no problem with all 3 in general. It's worth noting she wasn't impoverished, it requires a high level of education to achieve this. There are many Spanish speakers (because it's a massive part of the world) who don't truly know their own language and cannot do this.
    - devishard 10y ago
spacecowboy_lon 10y ago
And Peaky Blinders is just Brummy (birmigham) accent not full on yam yam - the Black country dialect Its funny but Peaky Blinders accents make me feel at home - ok I do have connections to pre legalization bookies :-)
pluma 10y ago
The definitions are ultimately arbitrary because they're just abstractions and the specifics are often more political than scientific. Most regional variation these days is what's colloquially called an accent: the exact same words, just with slightly different sounds (strictly speaking: the same phonemes produces slightly differently). Sometimes a few idiosyncratic words are mixed in for good measure. What seems most surprising to me as a German about English is actually that in the UK there seem to be vastly more dialects compared to Germany but each seems to share much more vocabulary and grammar. The differences often entirely consist of pronunciation. I guess this is because Germany is historically not one country but several: Bavaria really is something entirely different from Swabia, Saxony, Rhineland or Westphalia. It's just in modern times (literally only in the late 20th century) that most German speakers no longer speak their full regional dialects. That said, "standard" English is simply a matter of definition. In the UK "standard" means RP, in the US it means GA. There's nothing special about these "standard" versions, they're just a specific dialect that is defined as the standard to be used as the official language. They're still dialects, though. "Language" really just means "spectrum of mutually intelligible dialects". And that definition is already contradictory because not every pair of two languages within the spectrum is as mutually intelligible as any other. And sometimes different "languages" can be somewhat mutually intelligible (e.g. Afrikaans and Dutch) or even asymmetrical (e.g. Dutch speakers understand Afrikaans better than vice versa). Heck, in everyday conversation it's probably best to always read "language" to mean "dialect". It's just a useful abstraction that mostly leaks too much to be actually useful.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 10y ago
>A friend argued that it's still the same language, so you can understand what others are saying even with a different dialect. Please. Even if you cannot understand it, it remains the same language. Language is defined by the syntax rules and vocabulary, not the exact way those are pronounced (which can vary even between the same dialect). >The only reason people have a problem with AAVE is some sort of racial pretentiousness. Even the use of the phrase "Standard English" in this article is pretentious. Standard to whom? Brits certainly have a different perspective of what "Standard English" is from Americans. There are still majorities and minorities, and the first define what's "standard". Besides, even the Brits have their standard and their not so standard English.
- devishard 10y ago
  > Even if you cannot understand it, it remains the same language. Language is defined by the syntax rules and vocabulary, not the exact way those are pronounced (which can vary even between the same dialect). Syntax rules like "no double negatives" or vocabulary like "fleek" and "pneumococcal" and "dreich"? All of that is English, and I can point to dialects of English that have each and dialects of English that don't have each. > There are still majorities and minorities, and the first define what's "standard". Where? In the neighborhood I grew up in, the majority uses double negatives. In the UK "colour" is the majority way to spell "color". If you want to argue that the majority determines the standards, then the standards are contextual, because different segments of the population are the majority in different contexts.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    I agree with you, but I think the word "standard" gets deployed for lack of any better term. Maybe "Mainstream American English" would be more precise, but it's clunkier, too.
    - devishard 10y ago
      I think we use the term "Standard" because it accurately describes the fact that it is a standard enforced by a lot of institutions. Failure to comply with this standard is punished in a lot of ways. To be clear, I'm not saying that's how it should be, I'm merely describing what exists.
mikeash 10y ago
I'd say the problem is that people get so emotionally invested in the stuff. The flimsy line between dialect and language should just be an interesting example of the ambiguity of human life, but people get enormously upset about it. AAVE should just be an interesting example of a dialect and how dialects develop, but everyone has to rush to judge it, not just examine and understand it. The US has a long and proud history of rationalizing the perceived inferiority of black people using scientific-sounding arguments. Evolution, physiology, and psychology have all served this role, and linguistics is just another way to do it.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

In practice, the language “standard” is simply whatever dialect is used by the elites.

Arnt 10y ago
One of my language books offers a serious-ish witticism as definition: A language is a dialect that has a capital.
- mcguire 10y ago
  So,now,a language is a dialect with capital?
  - Arnt 10y ago
    Perhaps I should have said a capital city or a seat of government.

Broken_Hippo 10y ago

Dialects Can indeed do this. My aunt is british: Her mother's dialect was so thick I could hardly understand her as a child. Fast forward to adult life, and I moved to Norway. Spoken dialects here can have just a few hundred people, though writing is more standardized. To confound it all, there are two official forms of Norwegian. Norwegians are expected to understand not only both forms of the language, but most dialects... along with Swedish and Danish (Swedish sounds similar, danish is written similarly). Yet... There are instances where two Norwegians simply cannot understand each other. They are more likely to switch to english or try very very hard to stick to plain language. I have less luck with the dialects - I can understand some with a few alterations. On the other hand, I now understand different dialects of English much better.

Arnt 10y ago
The dialects are easy to understand, so to speak... not necessarily a matter five minutes, but orders of magnitude easier than learning, say, Dutch. A former co-worker told me about moving from one (dialect) end of the country to the other, and working as a teacher. For two days the children in her class basically didn't understand her, then they had learned to map her phonemes to theirs and it was okay.
deviate_X 10y ago
Indeed, Norweigen, Swedish and Danish are actually the same language, linguistically. In this situation, it is said: a language is a dialect with an army and navy http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3328218-the-story-of-human-language http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3328218-the-story-of-huma... - is a great and enlightening read
- nradov 10y ago
  Or for another example, Serbo-Croatian used to be considered a language with Serbian and Croatian being just dialects. Then after Yugoslavia split apart into separate nation states, the Serbian and Croatian governments started insisting that they actually had separate languages. They even went to the extent of changing some words to increase the differences.
  - dragandj 10y ago
    And yet, not only all speakers of one can understand perfectly the other, everyone can speak it effortlessly, and even understand localized accents and subtleties.
tptacek 10y ago
The essay mentions the situation with Norwegian dialects, and notes that unlike the United States and AAVE, or the UK with Cockney, Norwegians respect and honor their rural dialects --- and apparently have superior educational outcomes as one result.

adrianN 10y ago

Standard English probably refers to what is taught in schools and written down in dictionaries. Germany has the Institut für Deutsche Sprache, France has Academie Francaise, but English seems to lack a formal governing body.

spacecowboy_lon 10y ago
Its the BBC :-)
- JBReefer 10y ago
  Or the Economist

BjoernKW 10y ago

A language is a dialect with an army. The commonly accepted - but rather tenuous - criterion for distinguishing between language and dialect is speakers of different dialects being mutually intelligible to each other when making the effort. That can be said for Scouse, Southern American, Geordie, Cockney and Hiberno‐English, even though understanding speakers of those dialects talking among each other often is difficult for an outsider. Unlike these varieties, AAVE technically isn't a dialect but a an ethnolect and sociolect, so race definitely is a factor here. Maybe, AAVE can some day become a generally accepted dialect that's not dependent on speaker ethnicity. However, I think it's more likely that AAVE influences other - considered more standard - varieties of English. In fact that's likely already happening to some extent through culture, music in particular, and of course people just talking to each other and taking up linguistic quirks and habits from each other.

Chathamization 10y ago
> The commonly accepted - but rather tenuous - criterion for distinguishing distinction between language and dialect is speakers of different dialects being mutually intelligible to each other when making the effort. What's interesting is that I've seen Spanish and Portuguese speakers do this (enough to have a conversation, though I can't say how well that went). On the other hand, there are certain Chinese dialects (though maybe not considered dialect by linguistics) where the speaker of one finds it just about impossible to understand what the speaker of the other is saying.
- BuckRogers 10y ago
  Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are mutually intelligible and the Roman empire's legacy lives on through them. My wife is a native Spanish speaker and she has no problem with all 3 in general. It's worth noting she wasn't impoverished, it requires a high level of education to achieve this. There are many Spanish speakers (because it's a massive part of the world) who don't truly know their own language and cannot do this.
  - devishard 10y ago

spacecowboy_lon 10y ago

And Peaky Blinders is just Brummy (birmigham) accent not full on yam yam - the Black country dialect Its funny but Peaky Blinders accents make me feel at home - ok I do have connections to pre legalization bookies :-)

pluma 10y ago

The definitions are ultimately arbitrary because they're just abstractions and the specifics are often more political than scientific. Most regional variation these days is what's colloquially called an accent: the exact same words, just with slightly different sounds (strictly speaking: the same phonemes produces slightly differently). Sometimes a few idiosyncratic words are mixed in for good measure. What seems most surprising to me as a German about English is actually that in the UK there seem to be vastly more dialects compared to Germany but each seems to share much more vocabulary and grammar. The differences often entirely consist of pronunciation. I guess this is because Germany is historically not one country but several: Bavaria really is something entirely different from Swabia, Saxony, Rhineland or Westphalia. It's just in modern times (literally only in the late 20th century) that most German speakers no longer speak their full regional dialects. That said, "standard" English is simply a matter of definition. In the UK "standard" means RP, in the US it means GA. There's nothing special about these "standard" versions, they're just a specific dialect that is defined as the standard to be used as the official language. They're still dialects, though. "Language" really just means "spectrum of mutually intelligible dialects". And that definition is already contradictory because not every pair of two languages within the spectrum is as mutually intelligible as any other. And sometimes different "languages" can be somewhat mutually intelligible (e.g. Afrikaans and Dutch) or even asymmetrical (e.g. Dutch speakers understand Afrikaans better than vice versa). Heck, in everyday conversation it's probably best to always read "language" to mean "dialect". It's just a useful abstraction that mostly leaks too much to be actually useful.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

coldtea 10y ago

>A friend argued that it's still the same language, so you can understand what others are saying even with a different dialect. Please. Even if you cannot understand it, it remains the same language. Language is defined by the syntax rules and vocabulary, not the exact way those are pronounced (which can vary even between the same dialect). >The only reason people have a problem with AAVE is some sort of racial pretentiousness. Even the use of the phrase "Standard English" in this article is pretentious. Standard to whom? Brits certainly have a different perspective of what "Standard English" is from Americans. There are still majorities and minorities, and the first define what's "standard". Besides, even the Brits have their standard and their not so standard English.

devishard 10y ago
> Even if you cannot understand it, it remains the same language. Language is defined by the syntax rules and vocabulary, not the exact way those are pronounced (which can vary even between the same dialect). Syntax rules like "no double negatives" or vocabulary like "fleek" and "pneumococcal" and "dreich"? All of that is English, and I can point to dialects of English that have each and dialects of English that don't have each. > There are still majorities and minorities, and the first define what's "standard". Where? In the neighborhood I grew up in, the majority uses double negatives. In the UK "colour" is the majority way to spell "color". If you want to argue that the majority determines the standards, then the standards are contextual, because different segments of the population are the majority in different contexts.
- tptacek 10y ago
  I agree with you, but I think the word "standard" gets deployed for lack of any better term. Maybe "Mainstream American English" would be more precise, but it's clunkier, too.
  - devishard 10y ago
    I think we use the term "Standard" because it accurately describes the fact that it is a standard enforced by a lot of institutions. Failure to comply with this standard is punished in a lot of ways. To be clear, I'm not saying that's how it should be, I'm merely describing what exists.

mikeash 10y ago

I'd say the problem is that people get so emotionally invested in the stuff. The flimsy line between dialect and language should just be an interesting example of the ambiguity of human life, but people get enormously upset about it. AAVE should just be an interesting example of a dialect and how dialects develop, but everyone has to rush to judge it, not just examine and understand it. The US has a long and proud history of rationalizing the perceived inferiority of black people using scientific-sounding arguments. Evolution, physiology, and psychology have all served this role, and linguistics is just another way to do it.