I intuitively know this, kind of like I intuitively know what a species is. I also accept that language is imperfect and there’s gonna be messy bits where things don’t fit right (again, like a definition of a biological species).
But if linguists and other languagey folks were to put a group of English speakers on another planet and let them live there for x amount of time, going back to study their language from time to time, what markers would they look for to say “this is now not a group with new slang, this is a group with a new dialect”? And “this is not the same language as the English spoken on Earth”?
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> what markers would they look for to say “this is now not a group with new slang, this is a group with a new dialect”? And “this is not the same language as the English spoken on Earth”?
I think your thought experiment is flawed because the distinction between language and dialect is not a matter of linguists looking at the language, it is a matter of how the speakers of those languages interact (which is of course influenced by things like “mutual intelligibility”)
So I’d rather look for things like
– If an Earther (who speaks English) travels to Mars, does he have to take language classes in order to communicate with the Martians? Or is he just told “this is a list of 20 important words that have a different meaning in Martian English, oh, and be prepared to be mocked for your Earther accent”?
– Do the Martians have specialized vocabulary for every area of life? Or is the vocabulary only markedly different for everyday topics, while for scientific or philosophical topics it’s nearly identical to English?
Of course, the whole thing is still fuzzy, and in the end there’s still a lot of leeway for the Martians for either proclaiming “Martian” as its own language even though it’s virtually identical to English (see: Serbian and Croatian), or conversely for insisting it’s just a dialect of English even though the two are vastly different (see: Mandarin and Cantonese).
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