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Why isn't 'American' a Language?
- hellofunk 11y agoFrench is also spoken very very differently in various regions of the world... Haiti, France, Quebec, Africa. German too has significant variations. Does that mean each dialect should be considered a unique language? My take is that if two people can communicate with each other in the same "language," regardless of where they are from, then it really is the "same language."
- cosarara97 11y agoA better title would be: Why didn't 'American' become a language?
- WalterBright 11y agothe printing press
- Alphasite_ 11y agoIt's not that simple, as far as I know Hindi and Urdu are effectively the same language when spoken, with some small divergences but use a different character set. How would regard that?
- maaku 11y agoAs the same language. I believe it is uncontroversial among linguists to regard spoken Hindi and Urdu as regional dialects of the same language. Their writing systems are radically different, of course.
- mkaziz 11y agoDepends on how colloquial you get. For fornal/poetic use, they are vastly different.
- olavk 11y agoI don't believe linguists consider the writing system as part of the language as such. Multiple languages have shifted writing systems for convenience or political reasons without the language itself changing.
- zogwarg 11y agoAlso not that simple because of dialect continuums, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum In the case of french, say: - Metropolitan and Canadian might understand each other - Metropolitan and Sub-Saharan too - but Canadian and Sub-Saharan not so much
- allendoerfer 11y agoSwiss understand High German, because it is basically the language they write, but somebody from Hannover will have a hard time trying to understand somebody from Bern. You get used to it after a while and Swiss people will try to meet you halfway and speak a bit less dialect (which then sounds strange to other Swiss people). They have some words that are different but Germans normally get. As with AE and BE, it gets funny when the same words have totally different meanings. On that note: Swiss-German is one form of Alemannic, a dialect also spoken in South-Western Germany, varying from region to region as it does in Switzerland, but do not call it a dialect, they see it as a separate language.
- barry-cotter 11y agoMaybe 10% of the Haitian population speak French. Everybody else speaks Kreyol. There may be some Haitians who can't speak Kreyol at all but very few. African French is very close to metropolitan French because the language is less than 200 years old in Africa. You see the same effect anywhere a language has spread recently, there's much less divergence and variation. Most Germans are bilingual in Hochdeutsch (Standard German) and a local "dialect". The question of whether a given speech is a dialect or a language is a political one, not a linguistic one.
- iso8859-1 11y agoIf that constitutes bilingual to you, surely speakers of African American Vernacular English are bilingual too?
- anon4 11y agoThe ones who also speak High English (British English? Newscaster English? Academic English? Something along these lines...) are, yes. From what I understand, most^ just use AAVE all the time and don't learn to speak High English. ^Disclaimer: I live in Eastern Europe, I've never met a Black person (I know many dark-skinned people, but they aren't negroes, ergo not Black), I've never even met an American, I may be wrong about the "most"
- allendoerfer 11y agoAs someone from central Germany, who moved around in Southern Germany quite a bit I have to correct you: When you ignore English, French etc., most Germans are not bilingual, they are hardly monolingual. Most people who do speak somewhat High German are unable to understand a heavy dialect. Somebody who speaks dialect is almost never able to speak acceptable let alone perfect High German. Even people who manage to suppress the accent are easily recognized, because they often build incorrect grammatical constructs (use of different pronouns, use of dative instead of genitive and so on).
- richmarr 11y agoThere are degrees of communication though, and degrees of distance between languages. For example, Scandinavians can typically make themselves understood with speakers of other Scandinavian languages, but they're not the same language. Same with Spanish and Italian. I'd have have to expend similar effort with someone speaking Jamaican Patois or thick Glaswegian English. I guess my point is that it's a simple task to label languages if you apply prior knowledge of their historical context, but it might not be the most useful categorisation, either in terms of linguistic similarity or in terms of regional identity of the speaker
- CmonDev 11y agoWell, if every colony will have it's own language - how many will you have for no good reason?
- iso8859-1 11y ago"Good reason"? It is a question of definition. If your reasoning makes you define it as a dialect and not a language, what have you gained? It doesn't matter.
- wieckse 11y agoAmerican English and Brittish are not different languages, 99% of the words are the same or similar.
- zamalek 11y agoExactly, it's a dialect. How is this news? I thought everyone realized this.
- olavk 11y agoI don't know what you think someone thinks is news, but the discussion about why American is considered a dialect (and not a separate language) is interesting. As a comparison, Danish and Norwegian was also considered (more or less) the same language at the time of the american revolution, but is today considered separate languages.
- zamalek 11y ago> I don't know what you think someone thinks is news, Because it's on a news website: BBC.
- odiroot 11y agoA source for that? I would be surprised it was actually 99%.
- yoz-y 11y agoIt is probably even more.
- iopq 11y agoDepends on how you count, if you count all words, then it would be much much more than that, like 99.99% because of very specialized words like "mononitrate" and the like. But in common use I wouldn't be surprised if it was 98% or less consider words like "pissed", "pants", "suspenders", "fag", "chips", "bisquit", "jelly", "pavement", etc. they mean different things in British and American English, even though etymologically they come from the same source
- dimitar 11y agoThe point of the article is not that there is an American language, but that there could have been one if Americans (and the British) chose to and allowed AE to diverge significantly more from BE. People often consciously choose what words to use. In the end practical reasons - trade, business and mutual cultural influence kept the language from splitting up.
- jcrei 11y agoConsidering the differences between Brazilian Portuguese and "European" Portuguese, it makes more sense to ask "Why isn't Brazilian a language". Then again, there are recent efforts to make all Portuguese languages around the globe more similar
- gambiting 11y agoWhen Czechoslovakia split into Slovakia and the Czech Republic, they also split the languages into two, even though they are virtually identical.
- iopq 11y agoThat's not true, otherwise it wouldn't be called "Czechoslovakia" - the name itself implies there's a Czechia and a Slovakia
- gambiting 11y agoWhat isn't true? That the two languages are incredibly similar? There's less difference between them than between American and British English. Some words are pronounced differently, and they have different words for certain things, but it's no different than Americans saying elevators and British people saying lifts. Same thing.
- acqq 11y agoI tried to find how different they are, is this "virtually identical"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Slovak_and_Czech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Slovak_and_Czech Apparently "present-day standard Slovak wasn't codified until the 19th century." Then it's not something invented after the breakup.
- iopq 11y agoThey have different letters. It's the equivalent of British English lacking the letter "h" and American English not having "ng" as a digraph.
- yoz-y 11y agoThis is actually not true. The two languages are incredibly similar but nevertheless quite different. Quite more so than American and British English. They are different to the point where many young Czechs do not actually understand Slovak very well (well, this is a bit exaggerated, however I was surprised by kids that were just staring at me until I started speaking in Czech when asking for directions). Slovak people tend to speak Czech somewhat better because they are (or at least were) exposed to the language more. At least in my time no movies, books etc. were translated to Slovak. Czech and Slovak have also quite a lot of differences in grammar (for example Czech have one more case in their declination system).
- elnygren 11y agoWell, "Asian" or "European" or "African" are not languages either. Why would "American" be? ;)
- CHAT_SKYWALKER 11y agoHahah!
- learc83 11y agoThe accepted English demonym for inhabitants of the United States of America is American. It has been this way for 200 years. We call ourselves American, and every English speaking country calls us American. The only measure of correctness for language is use, and when speaking in English, American is only commonly used in one way--in English, American is almost universally unambiguous. No other country name contains the word America, and no one else commonly refers to themselves as American in English. I don't go around telling Colombians they can't call themselves Colombians because Columbia is another name for the Americas. It's also not a problem here because we don't recognize one American continent. Who refers to themselves by continent anyway? In what sense is it useful to identify to yourself as someone who lives somewhere in the entire western hemisphere? There is also no common language, race, ethnicity, or culture that unifies North and South America.
- satori99 11y ago>Who refers to themselves by continent anyway? satori99 Waves hello from Australia :)
- spleen 11y agoVocabulary constitutes a language "façade" and it is often interpreted as the key differentiating factor between languages. Most linguists agree that the language is based in grammar and rules for creating sentences. That being said, official AE and BE are pretty much identical and the same rules apply on both sides of the Atlantic. It is only logical that different words are used, because of the different contexts that people live in, but that doesn't mean that AE and BE are distinct languages.
- rikkus 11y agoThere are minor differences in spelling and vocabulary between British and US English, but there are also differences in grammar, so I consider en_US and en_GB to be quite different - enough that I always push for translations for applications, where the differences in grammar are as important as those in spelling and vocabulary. Here are some excellent examples: http://www.onestopenglish.com/grammar/grammar-reference/american-english-vs-british-english/differences-in-american-and-british-english-grammar-article/152820.article http://www.onestopenglish.com/grammar/grammar-reference/amer...
- wink 11y agoSlightly related: Is the Oxford comma mostly a BE thing or just a style thing that's used by x% of the English speakers everywhere?
- dragonwriter 11y agoIt's mostly a thing used by people who don't like ambiguity.
- redblacktree 11y agoThe oxford comma does not guarantee a list to be unambiguous. [0] > But the serial comma can also create ambiguity. Consider the following adjusted version of the dedication [discussed in the preceding paragraph]: To my mother, Ayn Rand [,] and God. With the serial comma, the reader could understand the dedication as meaning either that the book is dedicated three ways or that the book is dedicated to the writer’s mother, who happens to be Ayn Rand, and to God. Omitting the serial comma makes the latter meaning less likely. [0]: http://www.adamsdrafting.com/the-serial-comma-can-cause-ambiguity/ http://www.adamsdrafting.com/the-serial-comma-can-cause-ambi...
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoThis seems the counter-example to the old "What's the difference between a language and a dialect? A language has a navy" observation.
- nkoren 11y agoThere is no precise and official way to identify something as a "language" rather than a "dialect". For example: there are five major dialects of Hindi, some of which are mutually unintelligible -- yet few people call them separate languages. On the other hand, standard Hindi is mutually intelligible with Urdu -- they use different writing systems, but as spoken languages are roughly as close as American and British English -- yet they are considered different languages. Similarly, China has a vast diversity of mutually unintelligible languages -- or, rather, what outsiders call "languages", and what the Chinese government insists are merely dialects of a single language: "Chinese". What's going on here? Max Weinreich's quip that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" seems to hit the mark. If Britain and America had not become allies in the late 19th century, then the ongoing antipathy between them would have required their speaking systems to be classified as "languages". But that would have been a political necessity, not a linguistic one. As an aside -- as somebody who grew up in America and emigrated at age 31 to Britain -- I must say that the oft-cited differences in spelling and pronunciation are the least important areas of divergence. Much more significant (and confusing) are the idiomatic divergences. For example: in the UK, people commonly say "are you alright?" as a greeting, equivalent to the American "how do you do?" or "what's up?". But in American, "are you alright?" is an expression of serious concern -- something you might say to somebody walking around in a state of confusion with an apparent head injury. It was extremely disconcerting when people kept asking me this -- I thought I must be acting/looking really strange to provoke such continual concern!
- slapshot 11y agoTo your "dialect with an army and a navy" point, don't forget that in the US a language is taught called "Serbo-Croatian." In Serbia, it's "Serbian" and is its own language. In Croatia, it's "Croatian" and it is also a separate language locally despite being almost entirely mutually intelligible with speakers of the Serbian form. (To add to the fun, in the UN it's called "Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian", but who's counting?) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_language#Sociopolitical_standpoints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_language#Sociopolitic... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_standard_Bosnian,_Croatian_and_Serbian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_standard_Bosnian...
- digital-rubber 11y agoDepends if you ask Americans, i think a large percentage will answer it _is_ a language. Also they tend to forgot their heritage there. 'We americans' == 'We previously european and other geolocations originating'
- eyko 11y agoFor the same reason that Argentinian, Mexican, Colombian, Canadian, Ghanaian, Singaporean, Australian, Ivorycoastian, Nigerian, Brazilian, etc are not languages, but dialects. Regardless of what Max Weinreich may have said (which was more of a political/philosophical statement than an academic one, and he didn't even coin the phrase), the variation between english dialects is not enough to call it a language. Some pidgins are considered languages: they're spoken as lingua franca by large populations and is quite different from English.
- wink 11y agoFrom my limited knowledge Brazilian Portuguese seems to be a lot more different from European Portuguese than AE differs from BE.
- jkot 11y agoI dont know about English, but there was not common French language until 20th century. Several dialects were united during WW I and latter with radio and television.
- tokenadult 11y agoThanks for submitting the interesting popular article on a perennial topic of discussion. The subheading of the article begins with "Britain and the US share a common language – but English is spoken and spelled very differently on each side of the Atlantic." Spelling, first of all, is largely irrelevant, because native speakers of English all over the world often coped without standardized spellings and sometimes still do, and anyway can usually read one another's spellings with understanding. How "very different" the speech of the United States is from the speech of Britain is a matter of distinguishing how different is different enough to be a problem. I read the other comments here before typing out this comment. As several of the comments say, distinguishing different varieties of speech as "dialects" rather than "languages" is often a matter of politics rather than a matter of linguistics. It happens that I was one of the Wikipedians who was active in updating the Wikipedia article "English language"[1] earlier this year so that it is now a "good article" by Wikipedia's article rating criteria. For years, there were all kinds of stupid edit wars on that article by editors who didn't bother to look up or read any sources, but when several Wikipedians agreed to look up sources together and check what the sources actually say, we reached consensus about how to improve the article. The main point about the English language is that it has a very large speech community with high mutual comprehensibility spread all over the globe. The spread around the globe came first from trade, migration, and colonization, but even after the British Empire dissolved, the spread of English has been maintained by telecommunications, travel, broadcasting, film, book publishing, study abroad, and the efforts of many national governments of non-English-speaking countries to promote knowledge of English through formal schooling and government administration. The majority of people who use English day-by-day now are not descendants of English settlers who live in the "inner circle" of English-speaking countries. When we consider that railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, voice radio broadcasting, passenger airplanes, and talking motion pictures were all invented in English-speaking countries, and were used in international communication as early for United States-to-Britain communication as for international communication between any other country pairs, it is not surprising that English has stayed remarkably homogeneous across the vast territory of the United States and has even stayed mutually comprehensible despite the political separation of the United States and Britain. Like the majority of my ancestors (I have only a little English ancestry, from which I gain my family name), most Americans are descended mostly from people who did NOT speak English when they arrived in North America, but who learned English to communicate with one another as residents of the United States. My two maternal grandparents were both born in Great Plains states of the United States, but their schooling (only primary schooling) was conducted entirely in the German language, and they learned English as a second language as native-born United States citizens to interact with neighbors. There were earlier comments in this thread about Chinese. Absolutely, positively the different Sinitic languages are distinct languages, not mutually comprehensible, and it does violence to the English usage of the term "dialect" to refer to Mandarin and to Cantonese as "dialects" of Chinese. I speak Modern Standard Chinese fluently and have worked for many years as a Chinese-English interpreter. I have also studied Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Hakka (listed in decreasing order of proficiency). Mandarin and Cantonese are more distinct, in several respects, than English is from German or than French is from Spanish. Calling both Mandarin and Cantonese "dialects of Chinese" is simply a matter of the politics of China denying linguistic reality. The distinctions among Sinitic languages as distinct languages apply even if you write them down in Chinese characters. Chinese characters still represent speech (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[2] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[3] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[4] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[5] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective. I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation "Does he know how to speak Mandarin? "No, he doesn't." 他會說普通話嗎？ 他不會。 in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write "Does he know how to speak Cantonese? "No, he doesn't." 佢識唔識講廣東話？ 佢唔識。 in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters. Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language [2] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFrancis/dp/0824810686/ http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci... [3] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comparisons/dp/0824812077/ http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp... [4] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodied-Meaning/dp/0824827600/ http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie... [5] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm