In general, there are 2 ways to classify something as a language instead of a dialect:
1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy [0]
2. Easier test is mutual intelligibility – dialects of one language are mutually intelligible – US English speakers chat and understand with the Brits (even when they can hear the extra ‘u’s in colour). Neither US English nor UK English speakers understand or can produce intelligible German.
Mutual intelligibility is problematic for languages with a dialect continuum.
Native speakers that live next to each other can understand each other without a problem but the farther apart the regions are the more likely it is that they can't anymore.
For example German. The Swiss Germans and the South Germans can understand each other but if you let somebody from the north of Germany speak with them in the local dialect, they won't.
Linguists usually don't even classify languages as dialects anymore. It's almost always a political minefield.
In biology they would call that a "ring species". Sometimes two nearby populations can interbreed, which means they are the same species. But distant populations are so different they can't interbreed, and so must be different species. But figuring out exactly where to draw the line is problematic.
Mutually intelligible is not an exact thing. From my own experience:
A native speaker of Danish, I was able to speak with my Norwegian housemate. It worked OK, but not great, and not for anything technical (like science and finance, where the Germanic words are very different to the English).
With my Swedish friends however, it was harder. Not sure why, since Sweden is visible from Denmark but Norway is a bit further away. Also, I found the TV Series "The Bridge / Broen" quite unlikely. Swedes and Danes don't talk that easily together, and certainly not with slang. The scenario of the cops from opposite sides of the bridge working together could still work, but mostly in writing. Also, the cadence is very different. Swedish is melodic. Danish is grunty.
Of course I have had no instruction in Swedish or Norwegian, but it wouldn't be hard, based on friends who have moved.
German is not mutually intelligible with Danish. But it is. I went to a handful of German classes, and it dawned on me that changing a few things around makes High German pretty much like old Danish, like what you'd hear in old black-and-white movies from around the war. These days Danish has a lot of English in it, and something about the way sentences are put together makes old movies seem very... old. But once you have a simple map in your mind, Danish appears to be German with some substitutions and simplified grammar. I can read the paper in German now, despite having had just those few lessons.
Swiss German, now there's a weird one. The sounds are different. I suppose I'm twice removed from it, but even native Germans I know will produce the WTF face when they hear a Swiss German. Words and grammar are similar, but different enough to be recognisably so by a foreigner like myself. But I suppose it's like Swedish and Danish.
Apropos the article, Singlish I found quite interesting. To me it's just English with sprinkled Chinese, and I think most English speaking people will not have a problem understanding it without instruction. One useful addition: English doesn't make much use of the modal particle, so it makes sense that Cantonese "la" is heard all over the place.
When I learned Norwegian, my teacher used to joke that all of Scandinavia spoke Norwegian. It's just that the Swedes were pronouncing things wrong and the Danish couldn't spell it correctly.
The novel Trainspotting is written like this if you're interested in more:
"Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ah sound mind, ectetera, ectetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whut they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life. Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it's thair fuckin problem. As Harry Launder sais, ah jist intend tae keep right on to the end of the road..."
Eyeballing Google Image Search? What an absolutely absurd way of figuring out what Scandinavia is. First of all, "every image" isn't even close to true, as many of them clearly highlight Finland (and Iceland) in different colors and many of them include non-Scandinavian countries for context (like Poland and the Baltics). If you actually click on any of those links, they don't "say he's wrong". From one of the first result's webpage (Wikipedia):
> The term Scandinavia always includes the mainlands of the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Norwegian dependencies, including Svalbard and Jan Mayen, are usually not seen as a part of Scandinavia, nor is Danish Greenland. However, the Danish Faroe Islands are sometimes included, as sometimes are Iceland and Finland
Finnish isn't even remotely related to the Scandinavian languages. If you're going to be needlessly pedantic and contrarian, at least put a little more effort in it than glancing at Google Images.
blah blah blah.
Finnish is related to Scandinavian languages because it is a Scandinavian language. There are even similar words like appelsiini vs apelsin for Orange, in Finnish/Swedish respectively.
That's... not how languages are grouped together. Russian has the word "apelsin", meaning the same thing - is it a Scandinavian language also?
Finland is associated with Scandinavia by virtue of being dominated by actual Scandinavian countries (notably, Sweden) for so long, which influenced the culture. But it's not Scandinavian per se, any more so than, say, Georgia is Eastern Slavic. Ditto the language - influenced, yes; belonging to the same group, not at all.
> A native speaker of Danish, I was able to speak with my Norwegian housemate. With my Swedish friends however, it was harder. Not sure why, since Sweden is visible from Denmark but Norway is a bit further away.
Between 1500ish and 1800ish Danish was extremely influential on Norwegian, by virtue of being... well... the formal language of the country.
Yeah but Denmark was also in possession of the southern bit of Sweden for a good long while.
Meanwhile you can read Holberg without too much trouble, even though he was born in Norway.
It's possible politics is the explanation. The newly independent/recovered lands need to be integrated, and one way to do that is language. So the Swedes made sure people spoke like them.
Regarding the understanding of dialects, I wouldn't give much on the first impression of a German who only speak standard German.
They usually don't have to understand dialects unless it's within the family context. So they have almost no practice in understanding German that is different from the standard and even slight accents can already throw them off.
Compare that to Swiss or Austrian German where the dialects are used on every level of society and usually don't have a mark of being used by lower class citizens. It's not remotely strange to discuss quantum physics in Swiss German where Germans would most likely switch to standard German.
In such a case, you can also look on how long it takes a native to understand the language without any formal education. In the case of Swiss German, I'd say it takes at most 6 months to understand everything (as usual YMMV as there are some peculiar dialects out there).
But as you noticed with Danish<->German, even though there are some sight difference in grammar, there are some obvious transformations like "Haus" becomes "Huus" or "Zeit" becomes "Ziit" that can be generalized.
To add to this, dialect uses outside family context seem to be focused on adverting or special occasions like Carnival, radio competitions (describe your day in dialect), cabaret shows and similar.
There's also different grammatical rules with Singlish. In particular, they tend to omit the verb to be and tend to use the present instead of the past tense.
The various Chinese tongues have long been called dialects, yet many are mutually unintelligible. However, they have one critical feature: until about 150 years ago (when modern Chinese was adjusted to have a 1-to-1 correspondence with Mandarin) none of the dialects had a written form. Everyone spoke in their own tongue, but wrote in Chinese.
How about Italian? There are dozens of Italian dialects, many further from one another than, say, Italian is from Spanish. It was only during unification (in the 1800s) that Italians settled on the Florence dialect as their national language. But the regions all still proudly speak their own dialects. I'm particularly familiar with Romagnolo, spoken (and written) in the region of Ravenna, Rimini, and San Marino,and which has its own classic literature dating from as far back as the 16th century.
> The various Chinese tongues have long been called dialects, yet many are mutually unintelligible.
China, India, and Europe are on a continuum of separateness / unification, just fixated at different points in it. Europe is the most disunited, China the most unified. But basically the stories are the same. Areas of intense trade and cultural interchange, achieving different levels of political unity.
The first point reminds me of Croatian and Serbian. In Yugoslavia they were one language: Serbo-Croatian. Then after the war Croatia declared their language as Croatian and artificially made some changes to it to make it slightly different.
> Neither US English nor UK English speakers understand or can produce intelligible German.
I beg to differ:
"Das machine is nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und corkenpoppen mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fur gewerken by das dummkopfen. Das rubbernecken sightseeren keepen hands in das pockets. Relaxen und
vatch das blinkenlights!!!"
"1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy"
Tell that to the speakers of 10s of languages of India, most of which are so different from one another that no definition would classify them as dialects. I wonder if that quip, even as a humorous one, makes sense when it fails for about 20% of all humans.
Notice that it was said in Yiddish which, of course, did not have its own navy or army. So it may have been said with a tongue in cheek, especially if the story relayed by Weinreich at the link is correct.
I always interpreted it as meaning that there is no objective distinction between dialects and languages but that nations (which have armies and navies) declare their prestige dialect to be a "language" and claim related dialects to be subservient to it.
Well, yes and no. Kingdoms and provinces weren't ever linguistically organized till 1957, 7 years after India was unified as a Republic (1950). Most kingdoms and provinces were multilingual, though they all had one or more court languages for which the respective governing elites patronized scholarship. An example is the Vijayanagara empire in southern India (1330s to 1565) which was ruled by different multilingual elites who patronized Kannada, Telugu, Sanskrit, and to a lesser extent, Tamil and Persian. There are also other types of counter-examples- dialects that were patronized by kings or leal chiefs with their own armies (e.g. Dakhani Persian/Urdu of the various Sultans and Nizams (1300s - 1900s) of the Deccan region of South/South-Central India)
Standardization is generally distinct from whether something counts as a language or not. English lacked standardization for centuries (almost a millennium if you count it right) after it became a distinct language.
Classification of the natural world into separate bins is almost invariably a "leaky abstraction" anyways. A lot of problems just solve themselves once you remember that. That's why I don't find questions like "Is Pluto a planet?" or "When does a fetus become a person?" interesting.
> Can you list some important implications of "is Pluto a planet or not?"
I remember reading in 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' that Pluto was the first and only planet discovered in the USA, all the rest having been discovered in Europe.
I don't know if that had any implications for the reactions to IAU decision to demote Pluto to a dwarf planet, but it's easy to imagine how it would have been an even bigger deal if the other planets had been discovered by, for eg., Russia back in the day.
Is Pluto a planet? No. Although various people have strong feelings about implications in education and elsewhere--in both directions.
Languages and dialects can with respect to policies like bilingual education. If it's just a dialect, then you may argue there's no need to treat native-speakers differently. If there's a genuinely different language then you may or may not decide that bilingual education is necessary but it tends to be a different discussion than in the first case.
Also language preservation - and there's a direct analogy to preservation of species. When we consider something a separate species, there's that much more impetus to preserve it from extinction, for the sake of maintaining diversity. Similarly, when we consider something a distinct language, there's similar impetus to preserve it. Dialects (usually) aren't extended the same deference, and are left to live and die on their own.
I'll leave Pluto to others but whether something is a language or not has tremendous political significance, which is obvious to anyone who's spent any time reading about China.
It doesn't, really. Chinese policy is to make sure everyone speaks Mandarin, to promote in-country unity. The rhetoric they employ to push that goal is independent of the goal; there is no question anywhere that English is not a dialect of any Sinitic language, but English was required in Chinese schools for policy reasons and they are now beginning to phase it out for (different) policy reasons.
There are no policy implications to using a different term for Cantonese (though the relevant Mandarin terms are 方言 "the speech (语言) of a place (地方)", which makes no distinction between "dialect" and "language" (though "linguistics" is 语言学, the study of 语言), and 粤语 "Cantonese", which is a term fully parallel to 英语 "English", 法语 "French", 日语 "Japanese", etc.). Regardless of term, the policy will be that schooling takes place in Mandarin.
No, that's not really true; the PRC's position is predicated on the claim that Mandarin is a degenerate dialect of Cantonese, and not a language in its own right. They also believe, rightly or wrongly, that acknowledging the multiple Sinitic languages would threaten their status as one cohesive nation. It's also rather disingenuous to take the two component characters of 方言 apart to argue it means something different than it does; telling me it means "direction-speak" is no more illuminating than telling me "telephone" means "distant voice."
1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy [0]
2. Easier test is mutual intelligibility – dialects of one language are mutually intelligible – US English speakers chat and understand with the Brits (even when they can hear the extra ‘u’s in colour). Neither US English nor UK English speakers understand or can produce intelligible German.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...