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> The usual criterion for distinguishing language from dialect is mutual intelligibility. The problem with this criterion is that mutual intelligibility is not

> The usual criterion for distinguishing language from dialect is mutual intelligibility. The problem with this criterion is that mutual intelligibility is not transitive, so it doesn't support an intuitive notion of sameness that one might expect. Consider some language with distinct dialects A, B, and C lying at different points on the dialect continuum. If A and B are mutually intelligible, and B and C are mutually intelligible, it is still possible that A and C are not mutually intelligible. However, this is a property we'd expect if this criterion were enough to say that A, B, and C were all dialects of the same language. In addition to being unintuitive, it also raises some tough questions, like: if they're all the same language today and the last speaker of B dies tomorrow, are A and C still dialects of the same language? From a linguist's point of view, there's no useful distinction between a dialect and a language. It's more common to talk about "varieties", which is a more general term that includes dialects, regiolects, sociolects, idiolects, &c. Grouping of varieties is done contextually and for utility, often for the sake of convenience, and often according to some guiding principles (phylogeny in diachronic linguistics, for example, helps us to understand the historical relationships among groups). There's some truth to the quip that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, though: in practice, the distinction between the two is a sociopolitical one. Some people will be very upset if some outside group starts insisting that, in fact, no, you do not speak Arabic anymore, or, no, you do not speak Chinese anymore, or, no, Moldovan was never really a language. For many people, their native language is an integral part of their national identity, and it's not for outsiders to decide. It won't matter how precise and logical a definition someone comes up with, because it was never a scientific or philosophical issue to begin with. We allow social groups to self-actualize their own identities, or everyone is gonna have a bad time.

SilasX 8y ago
>From a linguist's point of view, there's no useful distinction between a dialect and a language. I think you mean, for edge cases, there’s no useful distinction. Mutual comprehensibility is a pretty useful concept, and no one makes “Arabic is a the same language as English” their Hill-to-die-on.
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  When the edges are numerous and blurry, you have to question the utility of trying to formalize a definition. Obviously, the idea of discrete languages is socially useful in many situations, but there's no point in trying to invent a hard rule to distinguish a dialect from a language. That's why it's better thought of as a continuum, with English vs Arabic being obviously distinct but recently divergent and convergent varieties left forever moot.
  - SilasX 8y ago
    The fact that you can recognize Arabic and English as being different languages, with practical implications, means that a substantive distinction exists.
    - acjohnson55 8y ago
      That's a really simplistic way of looking at it. To most people, red and blue are very distinct colors. No one would argue that they're the same. But are crimson and pink different colors, or different shades of the same color? What about #f00 and #f11? It's both arbitrary and contextual. Categorization is easy when a difference is so large as to be irrefutable. But thinking in terms of continuum is much more useful when looking at small differences.
      - SilasX 8y ago
        The fact that the boundary is blurry does not mean it doesn’t exist or that it doesn’t make useful distinctions.
        acjohnson55 8y ago
        I feel like you didn't bother to read my last comment.
      - posterboy 8y ago
        Language is simply uncountable. House and haus are pretty much the same word to me, so English and German overlap. If they are not disjunct, it doesn't make sense to count them one by one. That would be like counting sand by the corns, and by extension, coast lines by the sand. Language is recursive (a rose is a rose is a ...), what is its Housedorff dimension!? If you take a point in a topological space and give it a closed cover, you can calculate the area of the disc, but ... ok, I have close to no idea of complex analysis (didn't expect it would come in helpful for linguistics). The point is, if two arbitrarily large set's of Language are easier to compare by what they have in common, than where they are mutually exclusive, than you could colloquially call those different sets of language. If you can't even parse the speech, you won't be able to do that, so a natural speaker will perceive it as different. Book keeping Linguists are more interested in, or even bound to writing, as is clear from them calling spoken syntax "grammar" (which is from gramm~graph~scrapho writing, drawing, unless I'm missing something).
posterboy 8y ago
It's a matter of ongoing language exchange. So English is still a common language, but Afrikans and Dutch are different, if South African speakers are not exposed to dutch a lot. I'm not sure how it is for Portuguese at home and in Brazil. The Brazilians have little exposure to Portuguese media content, I guess, so I'd expect it would diverge, if it develops quickly, if language change didn't get slower for various reasons, which I suppose it did though due to social and technical developments.

SilasX 8y ago

>From a linguist's point of view, there's no useful distinction between a dialect and a language. I think you mean, for edge cases, there’s no useful distinction. Mutual comprehensibility is a pretty useful concept, and no one makes “Arabic is a the same language as English” their Hill-to-die-on.

acjohnson55 8y ago
When the edges are numerous and blurry, you have to question the utility of trying to formalize a definition. Obviously, the idea of discrete languages is socially useful in many situations, but there's no point in trying to invent a hard rule to distinguish a dialect from a language. That's why it's better thought of as a continuum, with English vs Arabic being obviously distinct but recently divergent and convergent varieties left forever moot.
- SilasX 8y ago
  The fact that you can recognize Arabic and English as being different languages, with practical implications, means that a substantive distinction exists.
  - acjohnson55 8y ago
    That's a really simplistic way of looking at it. To most people, red and blue are very distinct colors. No one would argue that they're the same. But are crimson and pink different colors, or different shades of the same color? What about #f00 and #f11? It's both arbitrary and contextual. Categorization is easy when a difference is so large as to be irrefutable. But thinking in terms of continuum is much more useful when looking at small differences.
    - SilasX 8y ago
      The fact that the boundary is blurry does not mean it doesn’t exist or that it doesn’t make useful distinctions.
      - acjohnson55 8y ago
        I feel like you didn't bother to read my last comment.
    - posterboy 8y ago
      Language is simply uncountable. House and haus are pretty much the same word to me, so English and German overlap. If they are not disjunct, it doesn't make sense to count them one by one. That would be like counting sand by the corns, and by extension, coast lines by the sand. Language is recursive (a rose is a rose is a ...), what is its Housedorff dimension!? If you take a point in a topological space and give it a closed cover, you can calculate the area of the disc, but ... ok, I have close to no idea of complex analysis (didn't expect it would come in helpful for linguistics). The point is, if two arbitrarily large set's of Language are easier to compare by what they have in common, than where they are mutually exclusive, than you could colloquially call those different sets of language. If you can't even parse the speech, you won't be able to do that, so a natural speaker will perceive it as different. Book keeping Linguists are more interested in, or even bound to writing, as is clear from them calling spoken syntax "grammar" (which is from gramm~graph~scrapho writing, drawing, unless I'm missing something).

posterboy 8y ago

It's a matter of ongoing language exchange. So English is still a common language, but Afrikans and Dutch are different, if South African speakers are not exposed to dutch a lot. I'm not sure how it is for Portuguese at home and in Brazil. The Brazilians have little exposure to Portuguese media content, I guess, so I'd expect it would diverge, if it develops quickly, if language change didn't get slower for various reasons, which I suppose it did though due to social and technical developments.