Dialect, langauge and nation (original) (raw)
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LANGUAGE AND DIALECT: CRITERIA AND HISTORICAL EVIDENCE
History is replete with events, change, cause and effect on the basis of language. Political movements and geographical changes occurred in different corners of the world and eras have slightly and massively been linked with language. Many regions are currently facing separatist movements mainly rooted in languages or dialects. A few authors have written about the criteria to define a particular linguistic system as a language in terms of the number of speakers, its prestige, whether they have been accepted as national languages, whether they present written forms and literary traditions, whether similar linguistic systems exist in the same country or area which present an elevated level of lexical similarity, whether they have less number of speakers, etc. It seems simple to differentiate between a language and a dialect. However, although the definition of language seems to be clear and every dictionary of the world contains it, in practical terms when facing the dilemma of whether a particular linguistic system is a language or a dialect, these definitions are blurry from a scientific point of view and sociolinguistic and political pressures may play a role in many cases. This paper will propose better criteria towards differentiation of language and dialect basing the argument on the empirical evidence of the history of linguistcs.
Dialectology, Philology, and Historical Linguistics
The Handbook of Dialectology, 2018
The term "dialect" is understood today to refer to a geographically delimited form of language. The purpose of the present chapter is to trace the history of this meaning of the word and to outline the rise of dialectology, which is the historical study of dialects in this sense (Fisiak ed. 1988). Furthermore, this study seeks to set dialectology in relation to the disciplines of philology (Turner 2014; Momma 2015: 1-27) and historical linguistics. These latter two are closely related in that the former fed into the latter. Indeed, the modern discipline of linguistics arose at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries out of earlier concerns of philology, which is the study of the textual records of languages. The etymology of "dialect" can be traced back to Classical Greek, in which the word διαλεκτος originally referred to discourse, conversation, or way of speaking, and later came to mean a regional variety of a language. It is this last meaning that initiated the modern understanding of the word (the older meaning of "investigative discussion" can still be recognized in the term "dialectic"). However, one cannot say that once the meaning of "regional variety" was established one had a usage similar to that today. The essential difference is that nowadays "dialect" stands in a contrastive relationship to "standard," a form of language favored in the public domain and employed in compiling official documents in a country. The reference to "country" is important here: the modern sense of "standard," with all its prescriptive connotations, is essentially an artifact of modern nation states. Thus, the often negative connotations of dialect did not hold until the notion of a preferred form of language arose, a form that enjoyed preference in writing, education, and public speaking. How early this preference occurred historically is difficult to say with certainty. True, there were historical constellations of language varieties in which one was used more than others. This applied in the Hellenistic period of Greek (roughly three centuries before the beginning of the common era), when the dialect of Attica (including the city of Athens) was used widely as a koiné or common form of language in the eastern Mediterranean (Woodard 2008). In England, during the later Old English period, the language of the West Saxon region was employed in written documents (Gneuss 1972), such as religious or legal texts, and thus enjoyed a similar status to Attic Greek in ancient Greece. But in neither case did later attributes of standard forms of language apply, above all codification and prescriptivism, which involved the censure of dialect forms of the same language.
This paper explores the linguistic as well as sociolinguistic factors or criteria used by linguists and sociolinguists to help define both terms with examples of relevant language varieties and dialects in addition to the sociopolitical factors determining the difference between the standard variety, which is considered a language per se, and the related varieties, whether they are distinctive in their phonetic or syntactic form or similar.
‘Differing only in dialect’, or How collocations can co-shape concepts
Language & Communication, 2017
This article seeks to show that a specific phrase, ‘to differ only in dialect’, was coined before the middle of the sixteenth century in the Zurich region as an effective way to describe the superficial nature of the differences between two speech varieties. Originating in commentaries on the historiographic works of the classical Latin authors Caesar and Tacitus, this originally Neo-Latin phrase became widely used in other types of text from the 1560s onwards (mainly in works devoted to ethnic history, language, and theology), where it served a wide range of divergent purposes and discursive strategies. From the seventeenth century onwards, the collocation ‘to differ only in dialect’ impacted on theoretical reflections on the conceptual pair ‘language’ and ‘dialect’. This case study thus shows that scholars interested in the emergence and development of a concept could benefit greatly from closely examining collocations and their history.
Dialects and the Standard Varieties
Before I begin defining what dialect or Standard language is, let's take a step back and look into the real meaning of the term 'language' and what it relates to. Jeffries (2006) distinguishes between language as a system and language use. A language system is an idealised form of the language in question, which differs from the way in which it is actually used. Chapman looks at language through three different theories: 1) as a type of behaviour, 2) as a state of mind and 3) as a form of communication. Sociolinguists consider it as a type of behaviour in their study of language. Through behaviour it takes into account specifically the regional and social
A dialect is a distinct manner of speech that differs in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar from other regional dialects nearby (Wolfram, Adger, & Christian, 1999). For instance, a person from eastern Massachusetts may add the [r] sound to the word “idea” and pronounce it as “idear.” The same person may go to a store to purchase a sandwich that she calls a “grinder” and others call a “sub” or “hoagie.”Or, as we see in this sample of quoted speech coming from the character Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s famous novel The Grapes of Wrath, there is a distinct grammar displayed in the “Oklahoma dialect”: “‘They was too old,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t of saw nothin’ that’s here.’” Finally, a feature of most dialects that are considered members of a given language (e.g., dialects of German, or dialects of English) is that they are mutually intelligible, meaning that native speakers of different dialects of X language can understand each other for the most part. Yet, as will be explained later, some dialects, such as Chinese, are not mutually intelligible.
The concept of " a language " (Einzelsprache, that is, one of many extant languages) and its opposition to " dialect " (considered as a " non-language, " and thus subjugable to an already recognized language merely as " its " dialect) is the way people tend to think about languages in the West today. It appears to be a value-free, self-evident conception of the linguistic position. So much so that the concept of " language " was included neither in Immanuel Kant's system of categories, nor in the authoritative Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. This paper sketches the rise of the " dialect vs language " opposition in classical Greek, its transposition onto classical Latin, and its transfer, through medieval and renaissance Latin, to the early modern period. On the way, the Greek and Latin terms for " language " (and also for " dialect ") sometimes functioned as synonyms for peoples (that is, ethnic groups), which – importantly – contributed to the rise of the normative equation of language with 1 I thank Michael O Gorman for his wise advice, ideas, useful references, and for help with polishing the prose of this article.