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My understanding is that if you have a country, you get to have a language (such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourgish_language https://en.wikipedia.or

by omonra 10y ago

My understanding is that if you have a country, you get to have a language (such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourgish_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourgish_language) Therefore the argument 'How come X is a language while Y is not' doesn't make sense if X has their own country and Y does not.

Pinckney 10y ago
Look at Arabic; one "language" despite being barely mutually intelligible between, say, Iraq and Morocco.
- omonra 10y ago
  Good point - but people explain that it is due to political reasons [1]. Ie same way that people in Luxemburg want to point out that they have their own language different from German, rulers of Morocco (who are Arabs - majority of Morocco's population native language is Berber) want to stress that they share same language & culture with rest of the Arab world. In other words - if you are a country, you have the option to have your own language (even if it's mutually intelligible with a major other language). If you are just a part of a country, that option seems off the table (ie you need a non-mutually intelligible language to make that claim). [1] http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/why-hindi-urdu-is-one-language-and-arabic-is-several/ http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/why-hindi-urdu-is-one-langu...
rspeer 10y ago
The thing about a language being "a dialect with an army" is a bit tongue in cheek. Of course we'd like more consistent ways to distinguish languages that don't depend on politics. When there's a continuum (like the Scandinavian languages) and it's hard to decide where to draw the arbitrary line, national borders are a pretty convenient place to settle on. But that's not so fundamental that it "doesn't make sense" to ask why we distinguish languages. It's easy to imagine Norwegian and Swedish being considered the same language if they were the same country. It'd be a language with multiple written forms, but Norwegian already has two of those anyway. But you can only get so far by simplifying the issue to say that language borders are national borders. That erases a lot of the linguistic complexity of Europe, it defies reality in Africa and South Asia, and it just wouldn't make sense at all in North America. (What's the Canadian language, besides a joke on South Park?)

by omonra 10y ago

Pinckney 10y ago

Look at Arabic; one "language" despite being barely mutually intelligible between, say, Iraq and Morocco.

omonra 10y ago
Good point - but people explain that it is due to political reasons [1]. Ie same way that people in Luxemburg want to point out that they have their own language different from German, rulers of Morocco (who are Arabs - majority of Morocco's population native language is Berber) want to stress that they share same language & culture with rest of the Arab world. In other words - if you are a country, you have the option to have your own language (even if it's mutually intelligible with a major other language). If you are just a part of a country, that option seems off the table (ie you need a non-mutually intelligible language to make that claim). [1] http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/why-hindi-urdu-is-one-language-and-arabic-is-several/ http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/why-hindi-urdu-is-one-langu...

rspeer 10y ago

The thing about a language being "a dialect with an army" is a bit tongue in cheek. Of course we'd like more consistent ways to distinguish languages that don't depend on politics. When there's a continuum (like the Scandinavian languages) and it's hard to decide where to draw the arbitrary line, national borders are a pretty convenient place to settle on. But that's not so fundamental that it "doesn't make sense" to ask why we distinguish languages. It's easy to imagine Norwegian and Swedish being considered the same language if they were the same country. It'd be a language with multiple written forms, but Norwegian already has two of those anyway. But you can only get so far by simplifying the issue to say that language borders are national borders. That erases a lot of the linguistic complexity of Europe, it defies reality in Africa and South Asia, and it just wouldn't make sense at all in North America. (What's the Canadian language, besides a joke on South Park?)