Appendices
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1.5 Dialects and languagesIdiolects and dialectsTwo Americans are talking about a couple they have just met.
Two English people are talking about the same couple.
What's going on here? Who has the accent?
What I know about my language and how to use it is called
my idiolect.
I'll be much more careful later on about how each of these types of knowledge is described, but for now I'll say (informally) that my idiolect involves knowledge about vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and usage.
Of course no one is really interested in describing idiolects.
Linguists and other language scientists
study the speech of communities of people, not of individuals.
More specifically, they study the knowledge of vocabulary,
pronunciation, grammar, and usage that is shared by the
members of a speech community.
Because the members of the community agree on this knowledge,
because it differs (at least
in some ways) from the knowledge shared by other communities,
and because it is mostly arbitrary,
I will refer to the knowledge as linguistic
conventions.
But what is a speech community?
I will use this term to refer to any group of people that shares
a set of linguistic conventions differing in some noticeable
way from the conventions found elsewhere.
You may know that in the United States people in some cities
have some characteristic features in their
pronunciation, although they are easily understood by people elsewhere
in the United States.
For example, people native to Pittsburgh are known for using
you uns (or yinz) to mean 'you plural'.
Here's an example from the (partly tongue-in-cheek)
"Pittsburghese" website:
if yinz wants served,
raise your hands.
The number of conventions that distinguish Pittsburghers from other English
speakers in the northeastern United States is actually pretty small, but
because there is such a set of conventions, we can consider these people to
be a speech community.
The speech patterns, that is, conventions of vocabulary, pronunciation,
grammar, and usage, of a speech community are called a
dialect, Note that a dialect may not be defined entirely on the basis of its physical location. Cities often contain a variety of ethnic and social groups with different speech patterns. For example, the African-American population of many US cities (for example, Pittsburgh) often has a quite different dialect from the Euro-American population of the same cities. | |||
Which dialect do you speak?
There may be a number of possible answers.
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What about larger communities? Pittsburghers share some speech conventions with speakers in other cities of the northeast and north midwest, for example, their pronunciation of the a in a word like hands, as in the example above (more on this pronunciation later on). And people in that larger region share some conventions with people in an even larger region encompassing speakers in most of the northern and western United States, for example, their pronunciation of the long English vowels (bite, beat, bait, boat, etc.). And people in that even larger region share many conventions with English speakers all over North America, including most of their grammar and usage conventions, as well as a number of pronunciation conventions, for example, the tendency to pronounce the words latter and ladder in roughly the same way. This idea of larger and larger communities, each sharing fewer and fewer conventions, is an over-simplification in one sense. The fact is that the boundaries of the communities overlap in many ways. If we look at particular vocabulary, we may find a region with one boundary, whereas if we look at other vocabulary or at some pronunciation convention, we may find another boundary. For example, Pittsburghers tend to say pop (as opposed to soda or some other word) for carbonated drinks, and they share this convention with many speakers in the northern midwestern cities who also share their pronunciation of the vowel in hands, but not with speakers to the east of them, in New York City, for example, who share the pronunciation but not the word. (New Yorkers tend to say soda rather than pop.) Thus where we draw the boundaries around a dialect depends on which convention or set of conventions we're looking at. For more about soda vs. pop, see this interesting website. Another way what I've said so far is an over-simplification is that there is great variation within any of these regions. Some of this variation has to do with the constant contact between dialects that is a fact of life in most communities. Some of the variation also has to do with the fact that people often know a range of ways to say things and they may sometimes avoid their local dialect in favor of a standard (see below) in certain situations.
Each of these shared sets of conventions, whether at the level
of a small village, a subculture within a city, or a larger
region, is a dialect.
And a linguist can be interested in describing any level and
any aspect of the dialect at any level (pronunciation, vocabulary,
grammar, usage).
The pronunciation associated with a dialect is called an
accent. LanguagesWhat is a language? How would you tell someone (say, an alien with no knowledge of human culture) what English is, without using the word language?
We can of course extend the boundaries in our example
even further, beyond North America
to include England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand,
a number of Caribbean countries, and communities within many other
countries.
This large speech "community" is not really a community in the usual
sense of the word, but it does share many conventions.
For example, in all of these places, speakers
make a question from a sentence like he ate potatoes
by inserting the word did and changing the form of
the verb ate: did he eat potatoes?, and of course
speakers in all of these places share the word potato for referring
a class of tuberous vegetables.
The conventions of this large "community" are of course what we
refer to as "English", which we consider a
language. | |||
Two dialects of one language or
two separate languages?
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But how do we decide when a collection of dialects is a language and not just another, more general dialect? As we've already seen, a dialect can also be a set of dialects (the North American English dialect consists of Southern dialect, New England dialect, Canadian dialect, etc.). What makes English a language and not just another very general dialect? What makes Canadian English a dialect of English and not a language in its own right? The answer to this question is complicated. In fact there is no clear answer because the words dialect and language are used in different ways for different purposes. There are two completely different kinds of criteria related to the distinction between dialect and language, linguistic criteria and social or political criteria. Linguistic criteria
Given two overlapping sets of linguistic conventions associated
with two different speech communities, for example, Mexican Spanish
and Argentine Spanish, how do we
decide whether they should count as two dialects or two separate
languages?
One criterion is the degree of overlap: how similar are the vocabulary,
the pronunciation, the grammar, and the usage?
Unfortunately there's no simple wat to measure this overlap, at least no
way that researchers would agree on.
One way to have a sense of the overlap, though, is
mutual intelligibility,
the extent to which speakers from the two or more speech communities can
understand each other.
Mutual intelligibility is also not easy to measure, and it is often
based on the impressions of speakers and hearers, how much they understand
when they encounter members of the other group or how long it takes
them to get accustomed to the speech of the other group.
We also need to establish some sort of intelligibility threshold; no
two speakers can be expected to understand each other all of the time.
So none of this is precise at all.
The idea is simply that if two sets of linguistic conventions are similar
enough so that their speakers can usually understand each other,
then the two sets of conventions should count as dialects of the same
language rather than separate languages.
On these grounds, we call Mexican Spanish
To find out what should count as a separate language on grounds
of mutual intelligibility,
a good resource is
Ethnologue,
an online database of all of the world's known languages, 6,912 according to
their current listing.
The Ethnologue compilers attempt to use mutual intelligibility to decide
what should count as a language.
While English is listed as a single language,
both German and Italian are listed as multiple languages.
Each of these languages, for example, the variety of Italian called Sicilian,
is usually referred to as a "dialect", but, according to the
Ethnologue compilers, these are distinct enough to be considered
separate languages.
Again, the criterion of mutual intelligibility is a rough one, and some of
Ethnologue's claims are controversial. Social and political criteria
Another sort of criterion for what counts as a dialect is the
social or political unity of the group in question.
In Bavaria, a state in southern Germany, and in parts of Austria most people speak
a dialect called Bavarian or Austro-Bavarian, | |||
Mutually intelligible "languages"
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At the other extreme are examples like the languages spoken in
the northern European countries Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
Actually the situation is even more complex than this because Norway has two official dialects, So for mainly political reasons, they are considered separate languages rather than dialects of a single language. To summarize, the line between dialects of one language and separate languages is somewhat arbitrary. However, wherever we draw the line, three points should be clear.
Standard dialectsThe following appears on the website of a person who spent some time in Pittsburgh: "probably relating to the rest of Pittsburgh's terrible dialect, which I, fortunately, did not pick up". Why would some dialects be thought of as "terrible"?
Some dialects within a language may be singled out for special
status.
When we're dealing with a political unit, such as a nation, in which related
dialects are spoken by most people, one dialect
is often treated as the
standard dialect. So what do we mean when we say "German" or "Japanese"? There are two possibilities. "German" could mean Standard German, that is, one of the set of dialects spoken in Germany and also the basis of written German. Or it could mean the collection of related dialects, some mutually unintelligible, which are spoken in Germany and other countries where Standard German is the official language (Austria) or one of the official languages (Switzerland). When linguists refer to "German" or "Japanese", without specifying the dialect, they normally mean the standard dialect. | |||
Dialects of English in the US
and England
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In the United States, the situation is somewhat simpler than in Germany
or Japan because the differences among most of the dialects are not
nearly as great; native speakers of English in the United States
have little trouble understanding each other.
(An important exception is African-American Vernacular English (AAVE),
The situation in England is similar to that in the United States, and
the standard vocabulary, grammar, and usage that
children learn to write in English schools are very similar to the
American standard.
However, in England, there is a stronger idea of a standard accent than in the
United States and more pressure for children to learn this accent
if it differs from their home accent.
This accent is referred to as
Received Pronunciation (RP); | |||
"Just" a "dialect" or a full-blown
"language"
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The existence of a single standard dialect among a set of non-standard dialects has important social implications. The non-standard dialects have less prestige, and their use may be discouraged in formal situations, not just situations in which writing is called for. Sometimes, as in the Ryukyu Islands in Japan or in some regions of France and Spain, this leads to the decline and possible death of the non-standard "dialects" (which would be considered languages by the mutual intelligibility criterion). In other situations, speakers of non-standard dialects retain pride in their local speech patterns, while recognizing that they are not appropriate in certain situations. Finally, this pride, along with other cultural differences separating the speakers of the non-standard dialect from the speakers of other dialects (non-standard or standard), may lead to pressure to have non-standard dialects given official status, especially if they differ significantly from the standard. At this point the words dialect and language become politically charged terms because the supporters of official status for the non-standard dialect may feel the need to argue that it is not "just" a dialect of the larger language but rather a language in its own right. This has happened in the United States with AAVE (here is an essay on this topic by the sociolinguist John Rickford) and in Europe with many languages that are normally considered "dialects" of other languages (this website includes many of them as well as links to other sites concerned with the "minority language" question in Europe and elsewhere). Language families | |||
Why some languages resemble each other
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We've seen how as we extend the boundaries of speech communities,
we get fewer and fewer shared conventions.
When we reach the level of a language such as English, Spanish,
or Mandarin Chinese, we have a speech community
which shares a set of conventions (in some cases a standard dialect)
which allows people in the community to communicate with one another despite dialect
differences.
But we can go beyond a language.
So for English, we could extend the boundaries to include
the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia, and some other regions in
western Europe.
We'd now find a much smaller set of shared conventions.
All speakers in this large "community", for example, share
a word meaning 'all' which is similar in pronunciation to the
English word all.
But there would be no reason to call this set of conventions
a "language" since the speakers obviously do not understand each
other and do not belong to a single political unit with a single
standard dialect.
Instead we refer to this set of conventions, or set of
languages, as a language family,
In most cases we can go even further back;
the ancestor languages of two or more families themselves may have had
a common ancestor language.
Thus the modern Romance languages,
Note also that languages may resemble each other in one way or another
for reasons other than a genetic relationship.
The main non-genetic source of similarity is language contact; |