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SereneDreams03 t1_j20bhv9 wrote

In terms of linguistic classification, when do two different dialects of the same language diverge into two entirely different languages?

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atomfullerene t1_j20xh7p wrote

The old saw is that a language is a dialect with an army. Basically, there's a lot of overlap between the two, and the difference isn't so much technical as it is political/social.

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gdcunt t1_j21krt9 wrote

Seconding this!

difference is political/social/cultural rather than linguistic....

(you try tell Serbian ppl they're speaking a dialect of Croatian, or a Hindi person theyre speaking a dialect of Urdu... stabbed ... ask them if they understand the other, tho, they'll say of course, it's the same language you moron... stabbed)

(linguists have never agreed on any linguistic criteria that would define the difference)

TL;DR you're getting stabbed

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MrMobster t1_j21dvb7 wrote

Neither “dialect” nor “language” are strictly defined concepts in linguistics. The classical criterion of recognizing dialects is mutual intelligibility (the varieties are clearly different but people can understand each other), but it’s not entirely unproblematic. “Language” is usually recognized on the basis of some political, cultural or historical significance.

The current approach in linguistics is to leave these things somewhat ambiguous and just note different varieties and their relationship between each other (approach that glottolog takes). Some have been advocating for “doculects” - identifying a variety on the basis of the publication or data that describes it. In the end, one can come up with multiple different measures for what’s a dialect and what’s a language, many of them useful in own way. ,

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hairyforehead t1_j223r18 wrote

I heard it's similar in biology with race, population, species etc. and medicine with diseases and syndromes...

Science is just labeling Rorschach blots.

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MrMobster t1_j23hc08 wrote

It’s interesting, isn’t it? We humans like to classify things and give them clean, well defined labels. And we often have a good reason to, since there is obviously something going on. It’s not like these labels are entirely arbitrary. But pinning down the nature of the label is often exceedingly difficult. I suppose that’s the difference between ideals and reality. I mean, we all know the difference between a bowl and a vase, but where does one start and where does one end?

This is a common theme in any discipline that studies complex systems. Especially linguistics. It’s a bit of a tragedy of language science as many linguists confidently operate in notions that have very weak theoretical foundation. There is a lot of unspoken assumption, driven by tradition, in the linguistic theory, and not enough people question the tradition IMO. I mean, starting with such basic things like “meaning” or “word”.

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Lele926 t1_j20nwdo wrote

I think, usually the criterion is mutual understandability, but there are exceptions like chinese, where some linguists argue, the dialects should be considered different languages, because people from different provinces can't understand each other, but they are still considered dialects because of the political implications.

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GusPlus t1_j213h31 wrote

There are “dialects” in mainland China that aren’t just different languages, they belong to completely different language families.

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