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I don't think this constitutes a dialect. It's not distinct enough from Standard English. Believe me, I've been to Miami plenty of times, and I've heard the typ

I don't think this constitutes a dialect. It's not distinct enough from Standard English. Believe me, I've been to Miami plenty of times, and I've heard the typical "spanglish," it was fascinating to hear a group of friends rapidly and fluently switching between English and Spanish. But the English and Spanish were distinct. And the two languages are similar enough in their structure that when things get calqued there is often little to no loss of meaning. Hinglish, which is a language I've learned (well, I learned Hindi and I grew up speaking English) is a radically different dialect of English. Hindi, like Spanish, is also in a lot of ways very similar to English. But there are enough differences where the logic of the language, when used by Hindi speakers, changes enough that in order to understand the meaning of any given phrase one often needs to know both Hindi and English, even if all the words used are English. What one must understand is, all English words are part of the lexicon of Hindi (as are all Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic words--in fact, alongside the major South Asian literary languages, any language spoken in the region where one is speaking Hindi is a language that loan-words are pulled from. Hindi is more a framework than anything else), such that you can speak Hindi only using English words, and its still basically Hindi. If you don't know Hindi, even if you know every word, you might not understand the meaning of the sentence. I understand the impetus but linguists for whatever reason are oftentimes politically motivated in this sort of social-justic-y, milquetoast liberal progressive way that stretches the limits of what can and should be rigorously defined as a dialect. AAVE is a real dialect, and there are many different registers of English in the world. I really don't think this rises to that level.

comfypotato 3y ago
You differentiate between Spanglish and Hinglish because a native English speaker wouldn't understand the English parts of Hinglish (but they would understand the English parts of Hinglish)?
- DiscourseFan 3y ago
  Spanish is so far close to English in so many aspects, because English grammar is so heavily influenced by French (which is why French and Spanish are easier for English speakers to learn than German, even though German and English are technically both members of the same language family). If someone took a Spanish sentence and overlaid every single word with its English equivalent, 95% of the time it would be intelligible to a native English speaker. On the other hand, if one did the same thing for Hindi, it would almost certainly be unintelligible unless someone already knew the "framework" of the grammar of Hindi, in which case they'd interpret it properly. I never once been unable to communicate in Hindi, since I already know all the vocabulary I need.
norgie 3y ago
This is an impressively long comment that adds no value. It has some long tangent about Hindi that not relevant to the point (is there a point here?), and then engages in some politically motivated whining about linguists. I don't know, maybe you just got dumped by a linguist?
egeozcan 3y ago
> But there are enough differences where the logic of the language, when used by Hindi speakers, changes enough that in order to understand the meaning of any given phrase one often needs to know both Hindi and English, even if all the words used are English I speak both German and Turkish fluently and for the most cases, I "understand only the train station" ("nur Bahnhof verstehen" means that you understand nothing) when Germans of Turkish origin communicate with each other in German-Turkish, and it's been 14 years since I came here, so I have no hope of ever understanding it. Those languages tend to evolve apart from both of the origins towards asymmetric intelligibility. > I understand the impetus but linguists for whatever reason are oftentimes politically motivated in this sort of social-justic-y, milquetoast liberal progressive way that stretches the limits of what can and should be rigorously defined as a dialect. Well that escalated quickly. People defining dialects because of their political agenda? Anything touches, regardless of positivity, to minorities and people shout SJW!
- Ensorceled 3y ago
  > Well that escalated quickly. People defining dialects because of their political agenda? Anything touches, regardless of positivity, to minorities and people shout SJW! This has been going on for a while: "I disagree with an recognized expert (linguists) on a fundamental concept (definition of dialect) based on my rather singular experience (or youtube research) so those experts must be 'woke' and I will now become enraged!" It must be exhausting.
  - DiscourseFan 3y ago
    >This has been going on for a while: "I disagree with an recognized expert (linguists) on a fundamental concept (definition of dialect) based on my rather singular experience (or youtube research) so those experts must be 'woke' and I will now become enraged!" This is worse than Scientism. I'm not going to lay out my credentials for you, I'll just say that most "woke" shit dovetails heavily with far-right ethnonationalism, which I elucidated elsewhere (since you might not know that most cuban-americans are politically aligned with the far-right), and I have no patience for white-liberals, or liberals in general, who go around whining about identity politics without any real social critique.
unhammer 3y ago
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... but it seems that in the US, even dialects need to be armed to stand their ground. Here in Norway, we just call any regional language difference dialectal (unless of course you get to call it a different language, cf. above link). That takes away the need to argue about how much linguistic difference is needed for two dialects to be considered separate or why the difference occurred or whether it's "correct grammar" – if people speak their language differently because they're from different places, that's a dialectal difference. (Anyone who speaks a language thus speaks a dialect of that language.) Simple, but rigorous. There's no value judgement, it's just a factual description.
- gylterud 3y ago
  We (in Norway) also recognise that it is not really discrete. In school we learned about the different dialectical traits (like palatalisation, different versions of “r” as well as morphological and lexical differences) and the different areas have which trait. We would listen to speech samples and identify where they are from by recognising traits and computing intersections. We would also learn about how language and dialects evolve over time and compare how old people in our local area talk with how young people talk.

comfypotato 3y ago

You differentiate between Spanglish and Hinglish because a native English speaker wouldn't understand the English parts of Hinglish (but they would understand the English parts of Hinglish)?

DiscourseFan 3y ago
Spanish is so far close to English in so many aspects, because English grammar is so heavily influenced by French (which is why French and Spanish are easier for English speakers to learn than German, even though German and English are technically both members of the same language family). If someone took a Spanish sentence and overlaid every single word with its English equivalent, 95% of the time it would be intelligible to a native English speaker. On the other hand, if one did the same thing for Hindi, it would almost certainly be unintelligible unless someone already knew the "framework" of the grammar of Hindi, in which case they'd interpret it properly. I never once been unable to communicate in Hindi, since I already know all the vocabulary I need.

norgie 3y ago

This is an impressively long comment that adds no value. It has some long tangent about Hindi that not relevant to the point (is there a point here?), and then engages in some politically motivated whining about linguists. I don't know, maybe you just got dumped by a linguist?

egeozcan 3y ago

> But there are enough differences where the logic of the language, when used by Hindi speakers, changes enough that in order to understand the meaning of any given phrase one often needs to know both Hindi and English, even if all the words used are English I speak both German and Turkish fluently and for the most cases, I "understand only the train station" ("nur Bahnhof verstehen" means that you understand nothing) when Germans of Turkish origin communicate with each other in German-Turkish, and it's been 14 years since I came here, so I have no hope of ever understanding it. Those languages tend to evolve apart from both of the origins towards asymmetric intelligibility. > I understand the impetus but linguists for whatever reason are oftentimes politically motivated in this sort of social-justic-y, milquetoast liberal progressive way that stretches the limits of what can and should be rigorously defined as a dialect. Well that escalated quickly. People defining dialects because of their political agenda? Anything touches, regardless of positivity, to minorities and people shout SJW!

Ensorceled 3y ago
> Well that escalated quickly. People defining dialects because of their political agenda? Anything touches, regardless of positivity, to minorities and people shout SJW! This has been going on for a while: "I disagree with an recognized expert (linguists) on a fundamental concept (definition of dialect) based on my rather singular experience (or youtube research) so those experts must be 'woke' and I will now become enraged!" It must be exhausting.
- DiscourseFan 3y ago
  >This has been going on for a while: "I disagree with an recognized expert (linguists) on a fundamental concept (definition of dialect) based on my rather singular experience (or youtube research) so those experts must be 'woke' and I will now become enraged!" This is worse than Scientism. I'm not going to lay out my credentials for you, I'll just say that most "woke" shit dovetails heavily with far-right ethnonationalism, which I elucidated elsewhere (since you might not know that most cuban-americans are politically aligned with the far-right), and I have no patience for white-liberals, or liberals in general, who go around whining about identity politics without any real social critique.

unhammer 3y ago

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... but it seems that in the US, even dialects need to be armed to stand their ground. Here in Norway, we just call any regional language difference dialectal (unless of course you get to call it a different language, cf. above link). That takes away the need to argue about how much linguistic difference is needed for two dialects to be considered separate or why the difference occurred or whether it's "correct grammar" – if people speak their language differently because they're from different places, that's a dialectal difference. (Anyone who speaks a language thus speaks a dialect of that language.) Simple, but rigorous. There's no value judgement, it's just a factual description.

gylterud 3y ago
We (in Norway) also recognise that it is not really discrete. In school we learned about the different dialectical traits (like palatalisation, different versions of “r” as well as morphological and lexical differences) and the different areas have which trait. We would listen to speech samples and identify where they are from by recognising traits and computing intersections. We would also learn about how language and dialects evolve over time and compare how old people in our local area talk with how young people talk.