Eli5: the difference between a language and dialect?
In: 12
Political power/presence/posturing. Sometimes used as a sublanguage, but that gets misused.
For example, French/Spanish and Dutch/German are more mutually intelligible than Mandarin/Cantonese or Tagalog/Ilocano. Yet, the French/Spanish/Dutch/German are all the main languages in their respective countries, but Cantonese and Ilocano are sometimes referenced as dialects.
Mandarin is the government’s deigned language for the nation, while Filipino (essentially Tagalog) is also the deigned language of the nation. But Cantonese did not derive from Mandarin and Ilocano did not derive from Tagalog.
Though you have situations like Castilian (Spanish), Catalan, and Basque in Spain where they are identified as languages and not dialects.
Also a case of Swedish/Danish/Norwegian being separate languages, despite being mutually intelligible between speakers. You could argue they are “dialects” of a proto-language, but if no one speaks that proto-language, then what does it matter?
In short, dialect was a term to describe something in one place and completely fell apart outside. I argue that dialect is a defunct term that’s not useful. (Though if someone can provide a helpful example.)
Edit: Ok, I guess the modern example now of dialect is just regional variations of the language, but the case I found is that of American/British/Australian English as being English dialects. This means that Latin American Spanish and Iberian Spanish would also be Spanish dialects.
At its simplest:
Language: English
Dialect: Mancunian, Cockney, American Southern, Brooklyn, Australian
Languages are parent word sets, dialects are variations on those word sets that develop regionally.
“A language is a dialect with an army and navy.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy
A little flippant but not really wrong either. The distinction is sometimes made for political rather than linguistic reasons.
The transition between language and dialect is fluid. Often there are also political reasons for how something is classified. Luxembourgish, for example, is often referred to as a language of its own, although in reality it is no different from a German dialect. Serbian and Croatian are also actually the same languages, but after the Yugoslav war they wanted to distance themselves from each other.
In the German-speaking world, for example, there are very strong dialects. For someone from northern Germany, a speaker from Switzerland is almost impossible to understand. (People can still talk to each other through standard German). There are also strong dialects in the Italian language.
In China, on the other hand, the diversity of languages is denied and dismissed as dialects.
A language is words and rules on how to pronounce them and string them together to communicate. A dialect is a variation of a language where people make changes to the words, rules and pronunciation.
We don’t really have good rules for when to call a dialect a new language; it’s pretty clear it’s a dialect when things are VERY similar and people of different dialects can understand each other, but it becomes difficult when they get farther apart and people stop being able to understand each other.
Language is pizza
Dialect is a pepperoni pizza, Brooklyn style pizza, Chicago deep dish.
Does that help clear it up?
Linguistically there is no universal definition.
A language is usually some standarized form of talking and writing sanctioned by some goverment while a dialect is a primarily spoken form of communication that is closely related to and to a great degree comprehensive to the standard language, usually due to historical coevolution and a common ancestor language. Notice that a dialect is generally not derived from the standard language, it just coevolved. The standard language may also be a somehow artificial mixture of dialectic features.
The definition is hence mostly political:
Serbian and Croatian are often designated as different languages, despite being more or less fully comprehensible and only showing very minor distinctions. Luxembourgish is defined as its own language despite being virtually identical to neighboring Mosel-Frankish ideoms that are universally considered dialects of German.
In contrast, the Chinese goverment considers its spoken Sintic ideoms (like Cantonese, Wu, etc.) to be dialects of the Standard language despite them being similarly incomprehensible to each other and to Standard Chinese like French, Spanish and Italian to each other.
From a more linguistic point of view two languages often form segregated areas in which they are spoken, with a clear language border between them. In contrast dialects generally form a continuum where the manner of speach gradually changes from one specific phenotype into another when moving through the area in which they are spoken.
dialects are like different versions of the same language. like the way americans say chips and brits say crisps. or the way people in spain use vosotros while people in mexico use ustedes.
It’s actually quite simple. A language is. . . uh, a language is a bunch of words that mean something, that a lot of people are. . . wait, so.
A language is a group of words used to communicate ideas. A different language will use different words; for example, in English we say “Hello” to greet someone. In Japanese, the word would be “Kon’nichiwa.”
An _accent_ is when a person who speaks Japanese as his main language begins to speak English, but he still uses the same pronunciations as when he speaks Japanese.
A _dialect_ is similar to an accent, but instead of it being a person whose second language is, for example, English, speaking it the same way he speaks Japanese, it would be someone whose _first_ language is English speaking it the way people in his particular area speak it.
So for instance, a person from the north might pronounce the word “happening” as “hap-en-ing,” whereas someone in the south might pronounce it “hap-in-in’.”
Moreover, one might also use different words. A person in the north might say “Hello,” while in the south he might say “Howdy” or “What’s happenin’, cuz?” or, “Hoo-whee! Tha’ some good eatin’, I tell you h’what.”
These differences are dialectical.
Most countries have 1 official main language (yes some countries have few like Canada, Switzerland etc)
But then 1 country can have dialects and these are usually regionally spoken. Example 1 town in Italy may speak a different dialect (different words/accent/words) than a town near by.
A language is the official way of communication between the cities in that country while dialects are just naturally spoken by a certain level region in that 1 country.
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