8 ms·

In general, there are 2 ways to classify something as a language instead of a dialect: 1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy [0] 2. Easier test i

In general, there are 2 ways to classify something as a language instead of a dialect: 1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy [0] 2. Easier test is mutual intelligibility – dialects of one language are mutually intelligible – US English speakers chat and understand with the Brits (even when they can hear the extra ‘u’s in colour). Neither US English nor UK English speakers understand or can produce intelligible German. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

bhaak 10y ago
Mutual intelligibility is problematic for languages with a dialect continuum. Native speakers that live next to each other can understand each other without a problem but the farther apart the regions are the more likely it is that they can't anymore. For example German. The Swiss Germans and the South Germans can understand each other but if you let somebody from the north of Germany speak with them in the local dialect, they won't. Linguists usually don't even classify languages as dialects anymore. It's almost always a political minefield.
- frandroid 10y ago
  There's a very wide continuum in arabic as well.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  In biology they would call that a "ring species". Sometimes two nearby populations can interbreed, which means they are the same species. But distant populations are so different they can't interbreed, and so must be different species. But figuring out exactly where to draw the line is problematic.
lordnacho 10y ago
Mutually intelligible is not an exact thing. From my own experience: A native speaker of Danish, I was able to speak with my Norwegian housemate. It worked OK, but not great, and not for anything technical (like science and finance, where the Germanic words are very different to the English). With my Swedish friends however, it was harder. Not sure why, since Sweden is visible from Denmark but Norway is a bit further away. Also, I found the TV Series "The Bridge / Broen" quite unlikely. Swedes and Danes don't talk that easily together, and certainly not with slang. The scenario of the cops from opposite sides of the bridge working together could still work, but mostly in writing. Also, the cadence is very different. Swedish is melodic. Danish is grunty. Of course I have had no instruction in Swedish or Norwegian, but it wouldn't be hard, based on friends who have moved. German is not mutually intelligible with Danish. But it is. I went to a handful of German classes, and it dawned on me that changing a few things around makes High German pretty much like old Danish, like what you'd hear in old black-and-white movies from around the war. These days Danish has a lot of English in it, and something about the way sentences are put together makes old movies seem very... old. But once you have a simple map in your mind, Danish appears to be German with some substitutions and simplified grammar. I can read the paper in German now, despite having had just those few lessons. Swiss German, now there's a weird one. The sounds are different. I suppose I'm twice removed from it, but even native Germans I know will produce the WTF face when they hear a Swiss German. Words and grammar are similar, but different enough to be recognisably so by a foreigner like myself. But I suppose it's like Swedish and Danish. Apropos the article, Singlish I found quite interesting. To me it's just English with sprinkled Chinese, and I think most English speaking people will not have a problem understanding it without instruction. One useful addition: English doesn't make much use of the modal particle, so it makes sense that Cantonese "la" is heard all over the place.
- bhaak 10y ago
  Regarding the understanding of dialects, I wouldn't give much on the first impression of a German who only speak standard German. They usually don't have to understand dialects unless it's within the family context. So they have almost no practice in understanding German that is different from the standard and even slight accents can already throw them off. Compare that to Swiss or Austrian German where the dialects are used on every level of society and usually don't have a mark of being used by lower class citizens. It's not remotely strange to discuss quantum physics in Swiss German where Germans would most likely switch to standard German. In such a case, you can also look on how long it takes a native to understand the language without any formal education. In the case of Swiss German, I'd say it takes at most 6 months to understand everything (as usual YMMV as there are some peculiar dialects out there). But as you noticed with Danish<->German, even though there are some sight difference in grammar, there are some obvious transformations like "Haus" becomes "Huus" or "Zeit" becomes "Ziit" that can be generalized.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    To add to this, dialect uses outside family context seem to be focused on adverting or special occasions like Carnival, radio competitions (describe your day in dialect), cabaret shows and similar.
- kqr 10y ago
  > A native speaker of Danish, I was able to speak with my Norwegian housemate. With my Swedish friends however, it was harder. Not sure why, since Sweden is visible from Denmark but Norway is a bit further away. Between 1500ish and 1800ish Danish was extremely influential on Norwegian, by virtue of being... well... the formal language of the country.
  - lordnacho 10y ago
    Yeah but Denmark was also in possession of the southern bit of Sweden for a good long while. Meanwhile you can read Holberg without too much trouble, even though he was born in Norway. It's possible politics is the explanation. The newly independent/recovered lands need to be integrated, and one way to do that is language. So the Swedes made sure people spoke like them. Nynorsk I can't get my head around, either.
oblio 10y ago
> 1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy [0] Heh, sometimes a language is a dialect with someone else's army and navy. All modern imperial powers have taken "divide et impera" to heart.
pingec 10y ago
The first point reminds me of Croatian and Serbian. In Yugoslavia they were one language: Serbo-Croatian. Then after the war Croatia declared their language as Croatian and artificially made some changes to it to make it slightly different.
emodendroket 10y ago
Those are reasonable starting points, but in truth the classification is far more complex than that among linguists.
- charlesism 10y ago
  Classification of the natural world into separate bins is almost invariably a "leaky abstraction" anyways. A lot of problems just solve themselves once you remember that. That's why I don't find questions like "Is Pluto a planet?" or "When does a fetus become a person?" interesting.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    But, like those questions, this one also has important implications in practice.
    - charlesism 10y ago
      It's generally valid to say Thing 1 is more A-like than Thing 2. The problem is believing that everything is either A, or not A.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      Can you list some important implications of "is Pluto a planet or not?" and of "is Basque a language or a dialect?"?
      - ghaff 10y ago
        Is Pluto a planet? No. Although various people have strong feelings about implications in education and elsewhere--in both directions. Languages and dialects can with respect to policies like bilingual education. If it's just a dialect, then you may argue there's no need to treat native-speakers differently. If there's a genuinely different language then you may or may not decide that bilingual education is necessary but it tends to be a different discussion than in the first case.
SeanLuke 10y ago
The various Chinese tongues have long been called dialects, yet many are mutually unintelligible. However, they have one critical feature: until about 150 years ago (when modern Chinese was adjusted to have a 1-to-1 correspondence with Mandarin) none of the dialects had a written form. Everyone spoke in their own tongue, but wrote in Chinese. How about Italian? There are dozens of Italian dialects, many further from one another than, say, Italian is from Spanish. It was only during unification (in the 1800s) that Italians settled on the Florence dialect as their national language. But the regions all still proudly speak their own dialects. I'm particularly familiar with Romagnolo, spoken (and written) in the region of Ravenna, Rimini, and San Marino,and which has its own classic literature dating from as far back as the 16th century.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  > The various Chinese tongues have long been called dialects, yet many are mutually unintelligible. China, India, and Europe are on a continuum of separateness / unification, just fixated at different points in it. Europe is the most disunited, China the most unified. But basically the stories are the same. Areas of intense trade and cultural interchange, achieving different levels of political unity.
NetStrikeForce 10y ago
I was under the impression that a dialect becomes a language when it has its own set of "official" rules and not those of the "parent" language.
- halfdan 10y ago
  There's no good definition of what makes a dialect a separate language. At least not one that is universally accepted. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#Dialect_or_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#Dialect_or_language
- patcallier 10y ago
  Standardization is generally distinct from whether something counts as a language or not. English lacked standardization for centuries (almost a millennium if you count it right) after it became a distinct language.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
shas3 10y ago
"1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" Tell that to the speakers of 10s of languages of India, most of which are so different from one another that no definition would classify them as dialects. I wonder if that quip, even as a humorous one, makes sense when it fails for about 20% of all humans.
- cema 10y ago
  Well it was said (attributed, anyway) to Max Weinreich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...) who was a professional linguist. Notice that it was said in Yiddish which, of course, did not have its own navy or army. So it may have been said with a tongue in cheek, especially if the story relayed by Weinreich at the link is correct.
  - jhbadger 10y ago
    I always interpreted it as meaning that there is no objective distinction between dialects and languages but that nations (which have armies and navies) declare their prestige dialect to be a "language" and claim related dialects to be subservient to it.
    - cema 10y ago
      Yes, normative dialects are selected to be the language. Often based on the dialect of the capital city.
- labster 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure that at some point in the not too distant past, these Indian languages had armies.
  - shas3 10y ago
    Well, yes and no. Kingdoms and provinces weren't ever linguistically organized till 1957, 7 years after India was unified as a Republic (1950). Most kingdoms and provinces were multilingual, though they all had one or more court languages for which the respective governing elites patronized scholarship. An example is the Vijayanagara empire in southern India (1330s to 1565) which was ruled by different multilingual elites who patronized Kannada, Telugu, Sanskrit, and to a lesser extent, Tamil and Persian. There are also other types of counter-examples- dialects that were patronized by kings or leal chiefs with their own armies (e.g. Dakhani Persian/Urdu of the various Sultans and Nizams (1300s - 1900s) of the Deccan region of South/South-Central India)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
WalterBright 10y ago
> Neither US English nor UK English speakers understand or can produce intelligible German. I beg to differ: "Das machine is nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und corkenpoppen mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fur gewerken by das dummkopfen. Das rubbernecken sightseeren keepen hands in das pockets. Relaxen und vatch das blinkenlights!!!"
ralfd 10y ago
> 1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy [0] ... which is quoted in the article.

bhaak 10y ago

Mutual intelligibility is problematic for languages with a dialect continuum. Native speakers that live next to each other can understand each other without a problem but the farther apart the regions are the more likely it is that they can't anymore. For example German. The Swiss Germans and the South Germans can understand each other but if you let somebody from the north of Germany speak with them in the local dialect, they won't. Linguists usually don't even classify languages as dialects anymore. It's almost always a political minefield.

frandroid 10y ago
There's a very wide continuum in arabic as well.
Houshalter 10y ago
In biology they would call that a "ring species". Sometimes two nearby populations can interbreed, which means they are the same species. But distant populations are so different they can't interbreed, and so must be different species. But figuring out exactly where to draw the line is problematic.

lordnacho 10y ago

Mutually intelligible is not an exact thing. From my own experience: A native speaker of Danish, I was able to speak with my Norwegian housemate. It worked OK, but not great, and not for anything technical (like science and finance, where the Germanic words are very different to the English). With my Swedish friends however, it was harder. Not sure why, since Sweden is visible from Denmark but Norway is a bit further away. Also, I found the TV Series "The Bridge / Broen" quite unlikely. Swedes and Danes don't talk that easily together, and certainly not with slang. The scenario of the cops from opposite sides of the bridge working together could still work, but mostly in writing. Also, the cadence is very different. Swedish is melodic. Danish is grunty. Of course I have had no instruction in Swedish or Norwegian, but it wouldn't be hard, based on friends who have moved. German is not mutually intelligible with Danish. But it is. I went to a handful of German classes, and it dawned on me that changing a few things around makes High German pretty much like old Danish, like what you'd hear in old black-and-white movies from around the war. These days Danish has a lot of English in it, and something about the way sentences are put together makes old movies seem very... old. But once you have a simple map in your mind, Danish appears to be German with some substitutions and simplified grammar. I can read the paper in German now, despite having had just those few lessons. Swiss German, now there's a weird one. The sounds are different. I suppose I'm twice removed from it, but even native Germans I know will produce the WTF face when they hear a Swiss German. Words and grammar are similar, but different enough to be recognisably so by a foreigner like myself. But I suppose it's like Swedish and Danish. Apropos the article, Singlish I found quite interesting. To me it's just English with sprinkled Chinese, and I think most English speaking people will not have a problem understanding it without instruction. One useful addition: English doesn't make much use of the modal particle, so it makes sense that Cantonese "la" is heard all over the place.

bhaak 10y ago
Regarding the understanding of dialects, I wouldn't give much on the first impression of a German who only speak standard German. They usually don't have to understand dialects unless it's within the family context. So they have almost no practice in understanding German that is different from the standard and even slight accents can already throw them off. Compare that to Swiss or Austrian German where the dialects are used on every level of society and usually don't have a mark of being used by lower class citizens. It's not remotely strange to discuss quantum physics in Swiss German where Germans would most likely switch to standard German. In such a case, you can also look on how long it takes a native to understand the language without any formal education. In the case of Swiss German, I'd say it takes at most 6 months to understand everything (as usual YMMV as there are some peculiar dialects out there). But as you noticed with Danish<->German, even though there are some sight difference in grammar, there are some obvious transformations like "Haus" becomes "Huus" or "Zeit" becomes "Ziit" that can be generalized.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  To add to this, dialect uses outside family context seem to be focused on adverting or special occasions like Carnival, radio competitions (describe your day in dialect), cabaret shows and similar.
kqr 10y ago
> A native speaker of Danish, I was able to speak with my Norwegian housemate. With my Swedish friends however, it was harder. Not sure why, since Sweden is visible from Denmark but Norway is a bit further away. Between 1500ish and 1800ish Danish was extremely influential on Norwegian, by virtue of being... well... the formal language of the country.
- lordnacho 10y ago
  Yeah but Denmark was also in possession of the southern bit of Sweden for a good long while. Meanwhile you can read Holberg without too much trouble, even though he was born in Norway. It's possible politics is the explanation. The newly independent/recovered lands need to be integrated, and one way to do that is language. So the Swedes made sure people spoke like them. Nynorsk I can't get my head around, either.

oblio 10y ago

> 1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy [0] Heh, sometimes a language is a dialect with someone else's army and navy. All modern imperial powers have taken "divide et impera" to heart.

pingec 10y ago

The first point reminds me of Croatian and Serbian. In Yugoslavia they were one language: Serbo-Croatian. Then after the war Croatia declared their language as Croatian and artificially made some changes to it to make it slightly different.

emodendroket 10y ago

Those are reasonable starting points, but in truth the classification is far more complex than that among linguists.

charlesism 10y ago
Classification of the natural world into separate bins is almost invariably a "leaky abstraction" anyways. A lot of problems just solve themselves once you remember that. That's why I don't find questions like "Is Pluto a planet?" or "When does a fetus become a person?" interesting.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  But, like those questions, this one also has important implications in practice.
  - charlesism 10y ago
    It's generally valid to say Thing 1 is more A-like than Thing 2. The problem is believing that everything is either A, or not A.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    Can you list some important implications of "is Pluto a planet or not?" and of "is Basque a language or a dialect?"?
    - ghaff 10y ago
      Is Pluto a planet? No. Although various people have strong feelings about implications in education and elsewhere--in both directions. Languages and dialects can with respect to policies like bilingual education. If it's just a dialect, then you may argue there's no need to treat native-speakers differently. If there's a genuinely different language then you may or may not decide that bilingual education is necessary but it tends to be a different discussion than in the first case.

SeanLuke 10y ago

The various Chinese tongues have long been called dialects, yet many are mutually unintelligible. However, they have one critical feature: until about 150 years ago (when modern Chinese was adjusted to have a 1-to-1 correspondence with Mandarin) none of the dialects had a written form. Everyone spoke in their own tongue, but wrote in Chinese. How about Italian? There are dozens of Italian dialects, many further from one another than, say, Italian is from Spanish. It was only during unification (in the 1800s) that Italians settled on the Florence dialect as their national language. But the regions all still proudly speak their own dialects. I'm particularly familiar with Romagnolo, spoken (and written) in the region of Ravenna, Rimini, and San Marino,and which has its own classic literature dating from as far back as the 16th century.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> The various Chinese tongues have long been called dialects, yet many are mutually unintelligible. China, India, and Europe are on a continuum of separateness / unification, just fixated at different points in it. Europe is the most disunited, China the most unified. But basically the stories are the same. Areas of intense trade and cultural interchange, achieving different levels of political unity.

NetStrikeForce 10y ago

I was under the impression that a dialect becomes a language when it has its own set of "official" rules and not those of the "parent" language.

halfdan 10y ago
There's no good definition of what makes a dialect a separate language. At least not one that is universally accepted. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#Dialect_or_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#Dialect_or_language
patcallier 10y ago
Standardization is generally distinct from whether something counts as a language or not. English lacked standardization for centuries (almost a millennium if you count it right) after it became a distinct language.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

shas3 10y ago

"1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" Tell that to the speakers of 10s of languages of India, most of which are so different from one another that no definition would classify them as dialects. I wonder if that quip, even as a humorous one, makes sense when it fails for about 20% of all humans.

cema 10y ago
Well it was said (attributed, anyway) to Max Weinreich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...) who was a professional linguist. Notice that it was said in Yiddish which, of course, did not have its own navy or army. So it may have been said with a tongue in cheek, especially if the story relayed by Weinreich at the link is correct.
- jhbadger 10y ago
  I always interpreted it as meaning that there is no objective distinction between dialects and languages but that nations (which have armies and navies) declare their prestige dialect to be a "language" and claim related dialects to be subservient to it.
  - cema 10y ago
    Yes, normative dialects are selected to be the language. Often based on the dialect of the capital city.
labster 10y ago
I'm pretty sure that at some point in the not too distant past, these Indian languages had armies.
- shas3 10y ago
  Well, yes and no. Kingdoms and provinces weren't ever linguistically organized till 1957, 7 years after India was unified as a Republic (1950). Most kingdoms and provinces were multilingual, though they all had one or more court languages for which the respective governing elites patronized scholarship. An example is the Vijayanagara empire in southern India (1330s to 1565) which was ruled by different multilingual elites who patronized Kannada, Telugu, Sanskrit, and to a lesser extent, Tamil and Persian. There are also other types of counter-examples- dialects that were patronized by kings or leal chiefs with their own armies (e.g. Dakhani Persian/Urdu of the various Sultans and Nizams (1300s - 1900s) of the Deccan region of South/South-Central India)

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

WalterBright 10y ago

> Neither US English nor UK English speakers understand or can produce intelligible German. I beg to differ: "Das machine is nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und corkenpoppen mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fur gewerken by das dummkopfen. Das rubbernecken sightseeren keepen hands in das pockets. Relaxen und vatch das blinkenlights!!!"

ralfd 10y ago

> 1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy [0] ... which is quoted in the article.