Sometimes dialect sounds so different that it sounds like a language on its own? How do linguists classify a dialect as dialect?
In: Other
Politics mostly.
Basically don’t look for any kind of hard, logical rule as to when something is a dialect and when it is a language. Because you won’t find any hard rules without a ton of exceptions.
Languages aren’t neat and discrete and human attempts to categorise them are messy and flawed.
That’s how you get Serbian, Croatian and Montenegrin being considered “languages” while being essentially identical while Arabic is considered a “language” despite its many “dialects” being unintelligible to each other.
“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” is a well-known quote.
It depends on who you ask. Generally to be considered a dialect, it has to be mutually intelligible with the parent language. If it’s not then it’s a language of its own.
If you’re deferring to another language to answer grammatical or syntactic questions about it, then it’s a dialect of that language.
But there is no universally accepted definition or set of criteria for determining a dialect vs language, just what’s most commonly agreed upon.
An extreme generalization I learned was that basically if two people can generally hold an understandable conversation with each other even using different words/rules, that’s a dialect. If they can’t, it’s a different language.
It’s mostly linguistic politics. Speaking the same language is very important to cultural identity: that’s why when the modern nations first formed they started mapping the languages spoken in the torritory, creating the first modern grammars to unify them. The line between what is still the same language and what’s not it’s rather about people being considered a part of the same community/ nation/ empire than any formal aspect of the languages themselves – including intelligibility.
So basically, a variation between two linguistic forms becomes a different dialect or language when people say and accept it is: it becomes a dialectic when they want it to be consider it part of the same “whole”, and a different language when they want it to be separated.
British people can talk to american people but American English =/= British English. Therefore, they’re both dialects of English (same with Australia, Canada, and whatnot).
Latest Answers