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Dialect
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A '''dialect''' (from the
Greek language Greek word διάλεκτος, ''dialektos'') is a
variety (linguistics) variety of a
language used by people from a particular geographic area. The number of speakers, and the area itself, can be of
wiktionary:arbitrary arbitrary size. It follows that a dialect for a larger area can contain plenty of (sub-) dialects, which in turn can contain dialects of yet smaller areas, etc.
A dialect is a complete system of verbal communication (oral or
sign language signed but not necessarily written) with its own
vocabulary and/or
grammar.
The concept of dialects can be distinguished from:—
*
sociolects, which are a variety 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 according to linguist jargon), and
*
slang.
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 (linguistics) prosody). If the distinctions are limited to phonology, one often uses the term ''
accent (linguistics) 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, 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.
"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.
Variety (linguistics) 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 (sociology) prestige.
The term ''
idiom (subsystem of language) 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.
Anthropology Anthropological linguists define dialect as the specific form of a language used by a
speech community. In other words, the difference between language and dialect is the difference between the abstract or general and the concrete and particular. From this perspective, no one speaks a "language," everyone speaks a dialect of a language. Those who identify a particular dialect as the "
standard language 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 language 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 knows that the
Social status 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.
The
Yiddish language Yiddish linguist
Max Weinreich published the expression, "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot" ("×?Ö· שפר×?ַך ×?×™×– ×?Ö· די×?ַלעקט מיט ×?ַן ×?ַרמײ ×?ון פֿל×?ָט", "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"; in ''Yivo-bleter'' 25.1, 1945, p. 13), illustrating the fact that languages are created by
cultural assimilation 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." ). A separate article discusses the origin of the
Language-dialect aphorism language-dialect aphorism in greater detail.
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 language English and
Serbo-Croatian language Serbo-Croatian illustrate the point. English and Serbo-Croatian each have two major variants (
British English British and
American English American English, and
Serbian language Serbian and
Croatian language 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. ''The
Serbo-Croatian language article deals with this topic much more fully.''
Parallel examples abound.
Macedonian language Macedonian, although mutually intelligible with
Bulgarian language Bulgarian and often considered to be a Bulgarian dialect, is touted in
Republic of Macedonia 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 language "Lebanese" to be recognized as a distinct language from
Arabic language 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 language Moldovan. No such language existed before
1945, and most non-Moldovan linguists remain sceptical about its classification. After the
Soviet Union annexed the
Romania Romanian province of
Bessarabia and renamed it
Moldavia,
Romanian language Romanian, a
Romance language, the
Cyrillic alphabet was restored and numerous
Slavic languages 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 of Moldova 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 (Moldova) Academy of Sciences' Institute of Linguistics,
Ion Bărbuţă, described the dictionary as a politically motivated "absurdity".
In contrast,
spoken languages of China spoken languages of
Han Chinese are usually referred as dialects of one Chinese language, to promote national unity. ''The article "
Chinese_language#Language_or_language_family.3F Is Chinese a language or a family of languages?" 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
Language-dialect aphorism army-navy aphorism discussed at the end of the preceding section is cited.
The historical linguistics point of view
Many
historical linguistics 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 language Greek as a dialect of ancient Greek, and
Tok Pisin as a dialect of English. 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 language Italian and
Spanish language Spanish having a high degree of mutual comprehensibility, which neither language shares with
French language 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 intelligible languages mutually comprehensible while languages are not. But this concept may not be as clear-cut as it may at first seem.
Italian language Italian speakers and
Spanish language Spanish speakers, for example, may be able to understand a considerable proportion of each other's closely-related Romance languages, whereas
Lombards and
Sicily 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
slang) speech at the time.
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
Afrikaans-
Dutch language Dutch-
Frisian language Frisian-
German language German dialect continuum, a vast network of dialects with four recognized literary standards. Although standard Dutch and German are not mutually intelligible, a chain of dialects connects them, with no break in intelligibility between any geographically adjacent dialects along the continuum. A network of dialects similarly exists among the
Eastern Slavic languages, among which
Russian language Russian,
Belarusian language Belarusian, and
Ukrainian language Ukrainian are recognized as three literary standards. The
Serbo-Croatian language can also be viewed as a network of four major dialects and three literary standards. The Romance languages --
Portuguese language Portuguese, Castilian
Spanish language Spanish,
Catalan language Catalan,
Galician language Galician,
Provençal,
French language French,
Occitan,
Corsican,
Sardinian,
Sicilian,
Romansh,
Friulian, other
Italian_Language Italian dialects,
Romanian language Romanian, and others -- form another well-known continuum.
Diasystem
A
diasystem refers to a single genetic language which has two or more standard forms. An example is
Hindi-Urdu or
Hindustani language Hindustani, which encompasses two main standard varieties,
Urdu and
Hindi.
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 language German terms of
Ausbausprache,
Abstandsprache, and
Dachsprache, words that are not (yet) loaded with political, cultural, or emotional connotations. It may prove to be a tool helpful for enabling people to see some ancient and poisoned linguistic controversies through a different lens of perception.
Dialects in English
*Northern:
- [u] butler, cut, some, pound
- /ae/ dance, grass, path
- /u:/ cow, down
*Southwestern:
- s-> z (six)
*Welsh:
- /a/ tap,bath
*Irish:
- rhotic 'r'
- monophtongal articulation [e:, o:] take, home
*Scotish:
- rhotic 'r' articulated in all position
- nondistinctive length lad/lard, full/ fod, cot/cought
Selected list of articles on dialects
*
Varieties of Arabic
*
Catalan dialect examples
*
List of Chinese dialects
*
List of dialects of the English language
*
Flemish dialects
*
Dialects of the French language
*
Cypriot dialect
*
Connacht Irish,
Munster Irish,
Ulster Irish
*
Italian dialects
*
Sicilian language Sicilian language
*
Japanese dialects
*
Korean dialects
*
Norwegian dialects
*
Gilaki and Mazandarani (Persian dialects)
*
Warsaw dialect
*
Portuguese dialects
*
Dialects in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia
*
Slovenian dialects
*
Spanish dialects and varieties
*
Swedish dialects in Ostrobothnia
See also
*
Accent (linguistics) Accent
*
Ethnolect
*
Isogloss
*
Prestige dialect
*
Diglossia
*
Programming language dialect
*
Dialect continuum
*
Sprachbund
External links
-
Language or dialect? (Terralingua)
-
Incorporating Dialect Study into the Language Arts Class
-
Vernacular Dialects in U.S. Schools
-
Fishermen's Dialect on the South-East Coast of Scotland.
Category:Language varieties and styles
Category:Dialects *
als:Dialekt
br:Rannyezh
bg:Диалект
ca:Dialecte
cv:Диалект
da:Dialekt
de:Dialekt
et:Murre
es:Dialecto
eo:Dialekto
fr:Dialecte
fy:Dialekt
gl:Dialecto
ko:ë°©ì–¸
hr:Dijalekt
io:Dialekto
id:Dialek
is:Mállýska
it:Dialetto
he:× ×™×‘
li:Dialek
hu:Nyelvjárás
nl:Dialect
ja:方言
no:Dialekt
nn:Målføre
pl:Dialekt
pt:Dialeto
ro:Dialect
ru:Диалект
sq:Dialekti
simple:Dialect
sk:Dialekt
sr:Дијалект
sh:Dijalekt
fi:Murre
sv:Dialekt
tt:Söyläm
tr:Lehçe (dil bilimi)
uk:Діалект
zh:方言
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