Dialect

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A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος, dialektos) is a variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic area.

The preceding is a definition used by trained linguists and in academia. In popular usage, the word dialect is often used to refer to a lesser-known language, especially one that is unwritten or not standardized, or for which one does not know the name or linguistic relationship. This usage is illustrated by the phrase "in the local Indian dialect". This usage of the word dialect is often taken as pejorative by the speakers of the languages referred to in that way.

The number of speakers, and the area itself, can be of arbitrary size. A dialect in a larger area can contain several sub-dialects. A dialect is a complete system of verbal communication (oral or signed, but not necessarily written) with its own vocabulary and grammar.

Dialects can be distinguished from: sociolects, which are varieties of a language spoken by a certain social class; standard languages, which are standardized for public performance (e.g. written standard); jargons, which are characterized by differences in vocabulary (or lexicon in linguistics); slang; patois; creoles; pidgins or argots.

Varieties of language such as dialects, idiolects and sociolects can be distinguished not only by their vocabulary and grammar, but also by differences in phonology (including prosody). If the distinctions are limited to phonology, one often uses the term accent of a variety instead of variety or dialect.

Standard and non-standard dialects

A standard dialect (also known as a standardized dialect or "standard language") is a dialect that is supported by institutions. Such institutional support may include government recognition or designation; presentation as being the "correct" form of a language in schools; published grammars, dictionaries, and textbooks that set forth a 'correct' spoken and written form; and an extensive formal literature that employs that dialect (prose, poetry, nonfiction, etc.). There may be multiple standard dialects associated with a language. For example, Standard American English, Southern English, Standard British English, and Standard Indian English may all be said to be standard dialects of the English language.

A nonstandard dialect, like a standard dialect, has a complete vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, but is not the beneficiary of institutional support. For example, African-American Vernacular English may be said to be a nonstandard dialect of the English language.

'Dialect' or 'language'

There are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects, although a number of paradigms exist, which render sometimes contradictory results. The exact distinction is therefore a subjective one, dependent on the user's frame of reference.

Language varieties are often called dialects rather than languages

  • solely because they are not (or not recognized as) literary languages,
  • because the speakers of the given language do not have a state of their own,
  • or because their language lacks prestige.

The term idiom is used by some linguists instead of language or dialect when there is no need to commit oneself to any decision on the status with respect to this distinction.

Anthropological linguists define 'dialect' as the specific form of a language used by a speech community. From this perspective, no one speaks a "language," everyone speaks a dialect of a language. Those who identify a particular dialect as the "standard" or "proper" version of a language are in fact using these terms to express a social distinction.

Often, the standard language is close to the sociolect of the elite class.

In groups where prestige standards play less important roles, "dialect" may simply be used to refer to subtle regional variations in linguistic practices that are considered mutually intelligible, playing an important role to place strangers, carrying the message of wherefrom a stranger originates (which quarter or district in a town, which village in a rural setting, or which province of a country); thus there are many apparent "dialects" of Slavey, for example, geographically widespread North American indigenous languages, by which the linguist simply means that there are many subtle variations among speakers who largely understand each other and recognize that they are each speaking "the same way" in a general sense.

Modern day linguistics assumes that the status of language is not solely determined by linguistic criteria, but it is also the result of a historical and political development. Romansh came to be a written language, and therefore it is recognized as a language, even though it is very close to the Lombardic alpine dialects. An opposite example is the case of the Chinese language, whose variations are often considered dialects and not languages despite their mutual unintelligibility, because they share a common literary standard and common body of literature.

"A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich published the expression, "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot" ("אַ שפראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמײ און פֿלאָט", "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"; in Yivo-bleter 25.1, 1945, p.13), illustrating that languages are created by assimilation. This is perhaps the most widely cited statement of an analogy that has been attributed to other authors. (Weinreich explicitly states that he did not coin it.) It has been suggested that the initial wording was provided by Hubert Lyautey as, "Une langue, c'est un dialecte qui possède une armée, une marine et une aviation." ("A language is a dialect with an army, a navy and an air force." ).

Political factors

Depending on political realities and ideologies, the classification of speech varieties as dialects or languages and their relationship to other varieties of speech can be controversial and the verdicts inconsistent. English and Serbo-Croatian illustrate the point. English and Serbo-Croatian each have two major variants (British and American English, and Serbian and Croatian, respectively), along with numerous lesser varieties. For political reasons, analyzing these varieties as "languages" or "dialects" yields inconsistent results: British and American English, spoken by close political and military allies, are almost universally regarded as dialects of a single language, whereas the standard languages of Serbia and Croatia, which differ from each other to a similar extent as the dialects of English, are being treated by many linguists from the region as distinct languages, largely because the two countries oscillate from being brotherly to being bitter enemies.

Parallel examples abound. Macedonian, although mutually intelligible with Bulgarian, certain dialects of Serbian and to a lesser extent the rest of the South Slavic dialect continuum is considered by Bulgarian linguists to be a Bulgarian dialect, in contrast with the international view, and the view in the Republic of Macedonia which sees it as a language in its own right. In Lebanon, the right-wing Guardians of the Cedars, a fiercely nationalistic (mainly Christian) political party which opposes the country's ties to the Arab world, is agitating for "Lebanese" to be recognized as a distinct language from Arabic and not merely a dialect, and has even advocated replacing the Arabic alphabet with a revival of the ancient Phoenician alphabet.

There have been cases of a variety of speech being deliberately altered to serve political purposes. One example is Moldovan. No such language existed before 1945, and most non-Moldovan linguists remain sceptical about its classification. After the Soviet Union annexed the Romanian province of Bessarabia and renamed it Moldavia, Romanian, a Romance language, became known as Moldovan, the Cyrillic alphabet was restored and numerous Slavic words were imported into the language, in an attempt to weaken any sense of shared national identity with Romania. After Moldavia won its independence in 1991 (and changed its name to Moldova), it reverted to a modified Latin alphabet as a rejection of the perceived political connotations of the Cyrillic alphabet. In 1996, however, the Moldovan parliament, citing fears of "Romanian expansionism," rejected a proposal from President Mircea Snegur to change the name of the language back to Romanian, and in 2003 a Romanian-Moldovan dictionary was published, purporting to show that the two countries speak different languages. Linguists of the Romanian Academy reacted by declaring that all the Moldovan words were also Romanian words; while in Moldova, the head of the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Linguistics, Ion Bărbuţă, described the dictionary as a politically motivated "absurdity".

In contrast, spoken languages of Han Chinese are usually referred to as dialects of one Chinese language, to promote national unity. The article "Identification of the varieties of Chinese" has more details.

The significance of the political factors in any attempt at answering the question "what is a language?" is great enough to cast doubt on whether any strictly linguistic definition, without a socio-cultural approach, is possible. This is illustrated by the frequency with which the army-navy aphorism discussed at the end of the preceding section is cited.

The historical linguistics point of view

Many historical linguists view every speech form as a dialect of the older medium of communication from which it developed. This point of view sees the modern Romance languages as dialects of Latin, modern Greek as a dialect of ancient Greek, Tok Pisin as a dialect of English, and Scandinavian languages as dialects of Old Norse. This paradigm is not entirely problem-free. It sees genetic relationships as paramount; the "dialects" of a "language" (which itself may be a "dialect" of a yet older tongue) may or may not be mutually intelligible. Moreover, a parent language may spawn several "dialects" which themselves subdivide any number of times, with some "branches" of the tree changing more rapidly than others. This can give rise to the situation where two dialects (defined according to this paradigm) with a somewhat distant genetic relationship are mutually more readily comprehensible than more closely related dialects. This pattern is clearly present among the modern Romance tongues, with Italian and Spanish having a high degree of mutual comprehensibility, which neither language shares with French, despite both languages being genetically closer to French than to each other: French has undergone more rapid change than have Spanish and Italian.

Concepts in dialectology

Concepts in dialectology include:

Mutual intelligibility

Some have attempted to distinguish dialects from languages by saying that dialects are mutually comprehensible while languages are not. But this concept may not be as clear-cut as it may at first seem. Italian speakers and Spanish speakers, for example, may be able to understand a considerable proportion of each other's closely-related Romance languages, whereas Lombards and Sicilians, speaking what are described as dialects of the same language, may encounter considerable barriers to mutual comprehension.

Diglossia

Another problem occurs in the case of diglossia, used to describe a situation where, in a given society, there are two closely-related languages, one of high-prestige, which is generally used by the government and in formal texts, and one of low-prestige, which is usually the spoken vernacular tongue. An example of this is Sanskrit, which was considered the proper way to speak in northern India, but only accessible by the upper class, and prakrit which was the common (and informal or vernacular) speech at the time.

Dialect continuum

Main article: Dialect continuum

A dialect continuum is a network of dialects in which geographically adjacent dialects are mutually comprehensible, but with comprehensibility steadily decreasing as distance between the dialects increases. A well-known example is the Dutch-German dialect continuum, a vast network of dialects with two recognized literary standards. Another such network of dialects is the one that exists among the Eastern Slavic languages, among which Russian, Belarussian, and Ukrainian are recognized as three literary standards.

Diasystem

A diasystem refers to a single genetic language which has two or more standard forms. An example is Hindi-Urdu or Hindustani, which encompasses two main standard varieties, Urdu and Hindi. Another example is Norwegian, with Bokmål having developed closely with Danish and Swedish, and Nynorsk as a partly reconstructed language based on old dialects. Both are recognized as official languages in Norway.

Pluricentrism

A pluricentric language is a language with several standard versions.

The Ausbausprache - Abstandsprache - Dachsprache framework

One analytical paradigm developed by professional linguists is known as the Ausbausprache - Abstandsprache - Dachsprache framework. It has proved popular among linguists in Continental Europe, but is not so well known in English-speaking countries, especially among people who are not trained linguists. Although only one of many possible paradigms, it has the advantage of being constructed by trained linguists for the particular purpose of analyzing and categorizing varieties of speech, and has the additional merit of replacing such loaded words as "language" and "dialect" with the German terms of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache, and Dachsprache, words that are not (yet) loaded with political, cultural, or emotional connotations.

Dialects of English

  • Northern:

- [u] butler, cut, some - /æ/ dance, grass, path - /u:/ cow, down

  • Southwestern:

- s-> z (six)

  • Welsh:

- /a/ tap, bath

  • Irish:

- rhotic 'r' - monophtongal articulation [e:, o:] take, home

  • Scottish:

- rhotic 'r' articulated in all positions - nondistinctive length lad/lard, fud/ food, cot/caught

Selected list of articles on dialects

See also

External links

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