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When my Historical Linguistics professor mentioned that determination of dialect/language difference is mostly political I was amazed and argued with him for ha
by Jun8 14y ago
When my Historical Linguistics professor mentioned that determination of dialect/language difference is mostly political I was amazed and argued with him for half an hour and still wasn't convinced after that. I thought there should be a way wherein a linguist can collect and then analyze corpora, then scientifically discover and label dialects, isoglosses, languages, etc. Later, I learned that although there are tools for doing this analysis, the resulting labeling is mostly based on political/ideological distinctions.
The common examples of the difficulties in determining language vs a dialect are: the "dialects" of Chinese; Macedonian vs Bulgarian; Swedish vs Norwegian vs Danish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect.
I think most linguists would consider AAEV to be a dialect of English.
- twelvechairs 14y agoAs the famous saying goes "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy".
- akavi 14y agoWhich was said first, ironically, in Yiddish (a language that gains its status as such through its connection with an ethnic group, not military presence).
- joshrotenberg 14y agoLink with more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an... a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot Yiddish is fascinating. (And entertaining when spoken by Mel Brooks as an Ind ... er, Native American).
- jdmichal 14y agoI could pretty readily read (Latin-transliterated) Yiddish with just a couple years of German language classes. > "Eine Sprache ist ein Dialekt mit einer Armee und einer Flotte"
- joshrotenberg 14y agoYou might enjoy this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qQSAEMq5ko http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qQSAEMq5ko
- jdmichal 14y agoI did! Thank you very much for linking me to it.
- SilasX 14y agoI read an intro to Yiddish when I was in the same position as you, and my immediate reaction was, "Wait, this is just German with some rough edges!"
- SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago> determination of dialect/language difference is mostly political I heard that expressed as "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an... I found it quite true when you look at cases like Dutch vs. Afrikaans or Swedish vs Norwegian vs Danish. Declaring your dialect a "language" can be a tool of nationalism.
- dyno12345 14y agoAs counterexample I would still call American English and Brazilian Portuguese dialects, even though they have armies and navies. I'm not sure if I would call Afrikaans a dialect.
- Daishiman 14y agoAmericans self-identify with English just as much as Brazilians identify themselves with Portuguese. This issue arises when this is not the case.
- dyno12345 14y agoI can think examples of any combination of "has army/not", "is language/dialect". Mutual intelligibility doesn't even matter either way. has army, is dialect: Schweizerdeutch, American English, Brazilian Portuguese has army, is language: Norwegian (v. Danish) no army, is language: Yiddish, Afrikaans no army, is dialect: Frisian
- SideburnsOfDoom 14y agoGood examples, but "Afrikaans has no army" is debatable and IMHO misleading. It doesn't share an army with Dutch. And in the formative period from the Boer wars (1880, 1899) to 1994 I would say that it did have an army in absolute terms.
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- hkarthik 14y agoThis is pretty true in India, which is divided into states mostly by linguistic lines. I've heard "dialects" which sound distinct enough to be separate languages (Marwari versus Hindi) and "languages" that sound similar enough to be dialects (Urdu and Hindi).
- nsns 14y ago"Hindi" is made up of Marwari, Mewati, Bhojpuri, Magahi, Maithili, Bundeli, awadhi, chhattisgarhi... all of them different language with their own history and literature. This was done in '47 mostly for political reasons, to stop Bangla from becoming the Indian national language. In a way the Italian situation is similar [0]. [0] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Italian_languages.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Italian_l...
- sdqali 14y agoI would like to point out that linguistically there is no language called Hindi. The modern Hindi is a Sankritized, modernized register of the Hindustani language - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_language I am not sure if somebody amalgamated all those languages to form Hindi in 1947. The original article 343 of the Indian constitution specified Hindi in Devnagri as the national language, mostly out of the insistence of people like Gopal Krishna Goghale who while agreeing that English is a better language for law-making (http://www.constitution.org/cons/india/p17348.html http://www.constitution.org/cons/india/p17348.html) argued that we should not declare it the national language because of the colonial past. The Official Languages Act of 1963 and subsequent amendments to article 343 cleaned up this mess. Edit: Clarified the correct article of the constitution. I originally said Article XVII, but it should have been Part XVII.
- harichinnan 14y agoHindi is written in Sanskrit letters and Urudu is written in Arabic script. The languages use same words. Hindi is the primary official language for India and Urudu is the primary national language for Pakistan. Two dialects protected by armies navies and nuclear bombs.