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VintageJane t1_j8mwqjp wrote

Reply to comment by Runaround46 in India, soon world's most populous nation, doesn't know how many people it has by Icewear_Daddy

From my understanding it’s less that and more that when does a dialect become so distinct that it’s it’s own language? In English we have some dialects that are so distinct that if you don’t speak English, you would never be able to tell the root language. Think that really deep English/French/Southern Louisiana creole accent. Now imagine you are a government official who speaks Arabic and a little bit of English and goes to a village with that dialect. Can you communicate?

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therealdannyking t1_j8n4xeh wrote

I remember my linguistics professor telling us that a language is just a dialect with a military.

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JohnGillnitz t1_j8o8tgv wrote

That's why we have the KISS Army to protect the language of Rock 'n Roll.

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jaxinpdx t1_j8n5tf6 wrote

Kind of like Rio de Plata Spanish in Uruguay. Totally different than other Spanish. A tricky hybrid of Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and French. It really should be considered a stand alone language.

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Runaround46 t1_j8myft3 wrote

Oh wow so they can't read and any official coming to record on their behalf can't communicate. Wow just wow, that is a mess.

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Cormetz t1_j8n4vtk wrote

One Problem with your example is Arabic not spoken as a primary language in India at all. The Muslim population speaks the local languages of their area but might speak Arabic for religious reasons at times.

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VintageJane t1_j8oxrxv wrote

My example wasn’t for India. I went for Arabic as a language in my example that has nothing more than some words in common with English (the “technical” language being spoken in Louisiana Creole) as opposed to being a root language (German or Latin) or language with shared root (French or Italian).

The point being that in India, the government official may speak two of the common languages of the country (one natively and the other regional language functionally) and if the person they are attempting to communicate with is speaking a weird bastardized version of the latter language (sorry Louisianans) which has very little in common with the language you speak fluently then it can be very difficult to decipher.

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