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A Yiddish scholar once said that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." It's really true. One might think that mutual intelligibility (ability for

by dsrguru 13y ago

A Yiddish scholar once said that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." It's really true. One might think that mutual intelligibility (ability for speakers of one to make themselves fully understood by speakers of the other) would be the standard for differentiating languages from dialects, but the distinction really ends up just being political. The spoken forms of Hindi and Urdu are entirely mutually intelligible but have two separate names. Many varieties of Arabic and Chinese are mutually unintelligible but are called "dialects" of one Arabic or Chinese language, presumably to promote a unified Arab or Chinese identity. Speakers of Moroccan Arabic and Levantine Arabic or of Mandarin and Cantonese can't understand each other any better than speakers of Spanish and Italian can, but we don't call Spanish and Italian dialects of Modern Latin! It gets even weirder when you have a dialect continuum, like with Polish-Russian-Ukrainian. Russian is somewhat mutually intelligible with both Polish and Ukrainian, but Polish and Ukrainian are not themselves mutually intelligible! So even if politics didn't play a role in the distinction between language and dialect, it would be hard if not impossible to come up with a universal distinction.

hrkristian 13y ago
The same applies to the Scandinavian languages, to an extent. A Norwegian will generally have little issue understanding both Danish and Swedish, while Swedes and Danes have a much harder time understanding each other. However, us Norwegians receive a lot of influence from our neighbors and so understanding of their slight differences in language comes as a side-effect of that. A kind of younger sibling complex. May the same apply to Poland and the Ukraine?
- dsrguru 13y ago
  I don't know if that's the case with Polish and Ukrainian. That certainly is the case with Arabic where many speakers of Levantine or Gulf Arabic will probably understand Egyptian Arabic since they grow up watching Cairo-based media. Likewise, most Indians who don't speak Hindi will probably understand it perfectly since they grow up with Bollywood. I assume that's especially true for northern Indians whose languages are related to Hindi.
- techtivist 13y ago
  Nordic languages and Hindu-Urdu are great examples of how political language is. The reason Urdu was made a separate language was because of political reasons of the Mughals. Similarly, I believe Norwegians gave a separate legal status to Norwegian to make it distinct from Danish, as a mark of defiance to Danish colonial rule of the past. TO be fair Hindi, even though it grew more organically was given a formal status of national language by the predominantly Northern Indian Congress government post-independence to use it as an instrument to exert central political influence on the rest of the country, rather unfairly. At the time of India's independence, there were far more Tamil and Bengali speakers (not just native) than Hindi, but the central government forced Hindi to the rest of the country which did lead to a lot of understandable backlash, primarily in the South, which is why they dare not make it the official language of the country.
  - saumil07 13y ago
    For what it's worth - the backlash is still kind of the case in the South (not speaking statistically, just from personal experience). I grew up around Mumbai and traveled to the southern part of the country 5 years ago where Hindi is not the native tongue. Hindi was not particularly well-spoken nor was it always well-received by the other person. We wound up talking in English most of the time.
    - dsw2 13y ago
      In South Africa, many Tamil Hindus, when asked what their religion is, say "Tamil", not "Hindu". "Hindu" to them, refers to Hindus of North Indian descent (of Gujarati and Hindi origin). Since their ancestors came to South Africa more than 150 years ago, this sort of separatist instinct seems to long predate modern India. http://www.quora.com/Hinduism/In-South-Africa-many-people-of-Tamil-descent-say-they-are-Tamils-when-asked-what-their-religion-is-Does-this-happen-in-India-as-well http://www.quora.com/Hinduism/In-South-Africa-many-people-of...
  - cubancigar11 13y ago
    'there were far more Tamil' That is false. Citations please? 'and Bengali speakers' This ignores the fact that Bengali attained its status because of British who ruled India from Calcutta and enabled Bengali hegemony. No native speakers learned Bengali as second language in rest of the undivided India. Only Bengali diaspora moved to different parts of country as part of British civil services. 'Hindi... was given a formal status of national language by the predominantly Northern Indian Congress government post-independence to use it as an instrument to exert central political influence on the rest of the country' Another propaganda. Hindi-Urdu (or Hindustani) was the most spoken and widely understood language in undivided India. Hindustani was official language of British. It might lose to Bengali IFF one divides it into Hindi and Urdu. But that division happened AFTER independence, when the spoken Hindi was standardized to a Sanskrit base, and Arabic-Persian words were mercilessly pruned-off to enable non-Hindustani speaking people to grasp it easily. The only people who got the short end of the deal were Tamil, because Tamil language has got almost (almost) nothing to do with Sanskrit. To blame a newly formed government of an enslaved country, of 'exerting political influence' is the racist tirade Tamils latched on to, after there beloved masters left the country and didn't leave them in charge.
nekopa 13y ago
A side note: as a teenager I spent one summer working in a clothing store in London, with a bunch of Spaniards and Italians. They spoke to each other using their respective tongue, and said they could understand each other. Just basics of course. Maybe someone from Spain or Italy could chime in here?
- pdpi 13y ago
  As a portuguese who learnt some french in school, portuguese, spanish and italian are all similar enough that you can communicate or at least kind of understand what's being talked about. Spanish is the closest to portuguese though (how entirely unsurprising), and the degree to which I understand italian is quite influenced by knowing some french.
- truhd 13y ago
  As a person currently studying Spanish, I can understand basic Portuguese, Italian, French. As all these languages are from the same origin (Latin). Similarly, although Hindi is derived from Sanskrit, over the years, due to lots of Mughal invasions, and Urdu arts, poets, a lot of Urdu words are a part of Hindi. Hence they are easily understood in either part of the border.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  As a French I can tell you we can understand most of casual Italian / Spanish conversation just fine (and I believe Spaniards and Italians can understand a good portion of French too). The roots are very similar for most words that you catch it up very quickly.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - liviu 13y ago
    You are right. Related romance language (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian) speakers can understand most of the words. As a Romanian I understand best Italian, then Spanish, then French and lastly Portuguese which is little odd for me.
phillc73 13y ago
I'm not convinced your Polish-Russian-Ukrainian example is correct. My wife is from the west of Ukraine, and her home language is Ukrainian. However, she is totally fluent in Russian, as to be expected from someone growing up during the Soviet era. Both Ukrainian and Russian are written using the Cyrillic alphabet, whereas Polish uses Roman letters. She finds Polish fairly easy to understand, from an aural point of view, but does have difficulty reading it unless she mentally sounds out words phonetically. My understanding is that Polish and Ukrainian languages are closer to each other, than Polish and Russian, or Ukrainian and Russian. It just so happens that almost all Ukrainians can easily slip between Ukrainian and Russian, with many Russian words now found in every day Ukrainian speech, due to political events of the last one hundred years. Today, Ukraine is almost evenly split between ethnic Ukrainians in the west and ethnic Russians in the east. Kiev is the standout melting pot. This ethnic split is one reason why Ukrainian politics find themselves so often in a mess.
- anatoly 13y ago
  I would disagree with both you and your parent comment. Russian and Ukrainian are East Slavic languages; Polish is a West Slavic language. None of these three languages is mutually intelligible with any other, but Russian and Ukrainian are much closer to each other than other pairings. For example, Polish words generally have a fixed stress position, which makes Polish speech sound foreign and bizarre to unaccustomed Russian/Ukrainian ears. Many features of grammar and syntax are also much more similar between Russian and Ukrainian compared to Polish. This basic picture is clouded a little by the split between east Ukrainian, which is lexically much closer to Russian, and west Ukrainian, which is farther from Russian and has very many lexical borrowings from Polish, because west Ukraine had been a part of Poland for a long time. So someone from the west of Ukraine will hear many familiar words in Polish speech, and will find it easier to understand Polish than someone from the east of Ukraine. That's sort of an icing on a cake, however; it doesn't change the basic fact that Russian is still much closer to their native language. If you could find someone from the west of Ukraine who had never been exposed to anything but their native language (and it's rare, as you mention, because almost everybody knows Russian at least to some extent), they would almost certainly find it much easier to learn Russian than Polish. (my native language is Russian and I grew up in east Ukraine) (and don't get me started on Belorussian)
jedrek 13y ago
You sure it's not Polish-Ukrainian-Russian? My mom can sit down and yak the night away with her Ukrainian friend, but when I spent a few days in Russia, "ne gaviria po rusku" because I couldn't understand a damn thing.

by dsrguru 13y ago

hrkristian 13y ago

The same applies to the Scandinavian languages, to an extent. A Norwegian will generally have little issue understanding both Danish and Swedish, while Swedes and Danes have a much harder time understanding each other. However, us Norwegians receive a lot of influence from our neighbors and so understanding of their slight differences in language comes as a side-effect of that. A kind of younger sibling complex. May the same apply to Poland and the Ukraine?

dsrguru 13y ago
I don't know if that's the case with Polish and Ukrainian. That certainly is the case with Arabic where many speakers of Levantine or Gulf Arabic will probably understand Egyptian Arabic since they grow up watching Cairo-based media. Likewise, most Indians who don't speak Hindi will probably understand it perfectly since they grow up with Bollywood. I assume that's especially true for northern Indians whose languages are related to Hindi.
techtivist 13y ago
Nordic languages and Hindu-Urdu are great examples of how political language is. The reason Urdu was made a separate language was because of political reasons of the Mughals. Similarly, I believe Norwegians gave a separate legal status to Norwegian to make it distinct from Danish, as a mark of defiance to Danish colonial rule of the past. TO be fair Hindi, even though it grew more organically was given a formal status of national language by the predominantly Northern Indian Congress government post-independence to use it as an instrument to exert central political influence on the rest of the country, rather unfairly. At the time of India's independence, there were far more Tamil and Bengali speakers (not just native) than Hindi, but the central government forced Hindi to the rest of the country which did lead to a lot of understandable backlash, primarily in the South, which is why they dare not make it the official language of the country.
- saumil07 13y ago
  For what it's worth - the backlash is still kind of the case in the South (not speaking statistically, just from personal experience). I grew up around Mumbai and traveled to the southern part of the country 5 years ago where Hindi is not the native tongue. Hindi was not particularly well-spoken nor was it always well-received by the other person. We wound up talking in English most of the time.
  - dsw2 13y ago
    In South Africa, many Tamil Hindus, when asked what their religion is, say "Tamil", not "Hindu". "Hindu" to them, refers to Hindus of North Indian descent (of Gujarati and Hindi origin). Since their ancestors came to South Africa more than 150 years ago, this sort of separatist instinct seems to long predate modern India. http://www.quora.com/Hinduism/In-South-Africa-many-people-of-Tamil-descent-say-they-are-Tamils-when-asked-what-their-religion-is-Does-this-happen-in-India-as-well http://www.quora.com/Hinduism/In-South-Africa-many-people-of...
- cubancigar11 13y ago
  'there were far more Tamil' That is false. Citations please? 'and Bengali speakers' This ignores the fact that Bengali attained its status because of British who ruled India from Calcutta and enabled Bengali hegemony. No native speakers learned Bengali as second language in rest of the undivided India. Only Bengali diaspora moved to different parts of country as part of British civil services. 'Hindi... was given a formal status of national language by the predominantly Northern Indian Congress government post-independence to use it as an instrument to exert central political influence on the rest of the country' Another propaganda. Hindi-Urdu (or Hindustani) was the most spoken and widely understood language in undivided India. Hindustani was official language of British. It might lose to Bengali IFF one divides it into Hindi and Urdu. But that division happened AFTER independence, when the spoken Hindi was standardized to a Sanskrit base, and Arabic-Persian words were mercilessly pruned-off to enable non-Hindustani speaking people to grasp it easily. The only people who got the short end of the deal were Tamil, because Tamil language has got almost (almost) nothing to do with Sanskrit. To blame a newly formed government of an enslaved country, of 'exerting political influence' is the racist tirade Tamils latched on to, after there beloved masters left the country and didn't leave them in charge.

nekopa 13y ago

A side note: as a teenager I spent one summer working in a clothing store in London, with a bunch of Spaniards and Italians. They spoke to each other using their respective tongue, and said they could understand each other. Just basics of course. Maybe someone from Spain or Italy could chime in here?

pdpi 13y ago
As a portuguese who learnt some french in school, portuguese, spanish and italian are all similar enough that you can communicate or at least kind of understand what's being talked about. Spanish is the closest to portuguese though (how entirely unsurprising), and the degree to which I understand italian is quite influenced by knowing some french.
truhd 13y ago
As a person currently studying Spanish, I can understand basic Portuguese, Italian, French. As all these languages are from the same origin (Latin). Similarly, although Hindi is derived from Sanskrit, over the years, due to lots of Mughal invasions, and Urdu arts, poets, a lot of Urdu words are a part of Hindi. Hence they are easily understood in either part of the border.
ekianjo 13y ago
As a French I can tell you we can understand most of casual Italian / Spanish conversation just fine (and I believe Spaniards and Italians can understand a good portion of French too). The roots are very similar for most words that you catch it up very quickly.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- liviu 13y ago
  You are right. Related romance language (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian) speakers can understand most of the words. As a Romanian I understand best Italian, then Spanish, then French and lastly Portuguese which is little odd for me.

phillc73 13y ago

I'm not convinced your Polish-Russian-Ukrainian example is correct. My wife is from the west of Ukraine, and her home language is Ukrainian. However, she is totally fluent in Russian, as to be expected from someone growing up during the Soviet era. Both Ukrainian and Russian are written using the Cyrillic alphabet, whereas Polish uses Roman letters. She finds Polish fairly easy to understand, from an aural point of view, but does have difficulty reading it unless she mentally sounds out words phonetically. My understanding is that Polish and Ukrainian languages are closer to each other, than Polish and Russian, or Ukrainian and Russian. It just so happens that almost all Ukrainians can easily slip between Ukrainian and Russian, with many Russian words now found in every day Ukrainian speech, due to political events of the last one hundred years. Today, Ukraine is almost evenly split between ethnic Ukrainians in the west and ethnic Russians in the east. Kiev is the standout melting pot. This ethnic split is one reason why Ukrainian politics find themselves so often in a mess.

anatoly 13y ago
I would disagree with both you and your parent comment. Russian and Ukrainian are East Slavic languages; Polish is a West Slavic language. None of these three languages is mutually intelligible with any other, but Russian and Ukrainian are much closer to each other than other pairings. For example, Polish words generally have a fixed stress position, which makes Polish speech sound foreign and bizarre to unaccustomed Russian/Ukrainian ears. Many features of grammar and syntax are also much more similar between Russian and Ukrainian compared to Polish. This basic picture is clouded a little by the split between east Ukrainian, which is lexically much closer to Russian, and west Ukrainian, which is farther from Russian and has very many lexical borrowings from Polish, because west Ukraine had been a part of Poland for a long time. So someone from the west of Ukraine will hear many familiar words in Polish speech, and will find it easier to understand Polish than someone from the east of Ukraine. That's sort of an icing on a cake, however; it doesn't change the basic fact that Russian is still much closer to their native language. If you could find someone from the west of Ukraine who had never been exposed to anything but their native language (and it's rare, as you mention, because almost everybody knows Russian at least to some extent), they would almost certainly find it much easier to learn Russian than Polish. (my native language is Russian and I grew up in east Ukraine) (and don't get me started on Belorussian)

jedrek 13y ago

You sure it's not Polish-Ukrainian-Russian? My mom can sit down and yak the night away with her Ukrainian friend, but when I spent a few days in Russia, "ne gaviria po rusku" because I couldn't understand a damn thing.