Dialect and Language

The difference between a dialect and a language is not clearly defined. It is

largely a result of perception and often influenced by political factors. Different
countries are more likely to be seen to have different languages than different
areas of the same country. If a nation has a formal ‘standard’ version of a
language, this is likely to be acknowledged, whereas less formal regional
variations are far less likely to be considered languages in their own right.
However, there are exceptions to this rule as always.

In 1925, South Africa passed a law declaring Afrikaans, the form of

speech widely used by the descendants of Dutch settlers in the country, was not a
dialect of Dutch, but instead was its own, separate language. In this case
though, there are enough grammatical differences between it and standard Dutch,
indeed, a different language. However, this was not universally accepted in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, when many still considered it to be a dialect of
Dutch (referred to as “Cape Dutch”). A large part of why has to do with the fact
that Dutch and Afrikaans are so similar that speakers of the two languages can
often understand each other when talking in their native languages.

Furthermore, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are universally considered

different languages, yet they have a very complicated relationship with each other.
These three languages form what is known as a “dialect continuum”, where the
local dialects change very gradually as you move from town to town. Neighboring
villages will have very similar dialects, while villages father away from each other
will have very different dialects. This creates the unusual situation where people
in a Swedish town right on the border with Norway will have an easier time
understanding their Norwegian neighbors than they would Swedes living on the
opposite side of Sweden. Moreover, most people in the United States probably
consider “Chinese” a single language, but linguists now tend to consider it to be
many different languages that just happen to share the same writing system.
You’ll notice more and more lists of the most widely spoken languages specify
“Mandarin Chinese”, instead of simply “Chinese”, holding the first slot.

Arabic is even stranger than that. Throughout the Middle East and North
Africa, “Arabic” is a catch-all term for many, many different forms of speech that
are functionally different languages for all practical intents and purposes and are
not intelligible at all. However, they all share a Standard Arabic dialect (based on
the Arabic of the Koran) that is taught in schools and used for such formal things
as news broadcasts and official documents. When Arabic speakers from different
countries meet and can’t understand each other, they use Standard Arabic to
communicate. Since Standard Arabic acts as a linguistic bridge spanning from
Morocco to Iraq, most people, including most Arabic speakers, consider Arabic to
be a single language. On the other hand, someone travelling through India and
Pakistan would see the exact opposite effect when it came to the Hindi and Urdu
languages spoken there. Language, as pretty much all linguists agree that Hindi
and Urdu are simply dialects of one language – Hindustani. Yet most Hindi and
Urdu speakers will emphatically insist that this is not the case, that Hindi and
Urdu are separate and distinct. The reason is both religious and political. Hindi is
India’s national language, and emphasizes the country’s Hindu roots by
incorporating many Sanskrit words and using an alphabet based on Sanskrit. Urdu
is the official language of Pakistan, and emphasizes the dialect’s ties to Islam by
incorporating many Persian and Arabic words and using an Arabic-based script.

When Yugoslavia broke up in the 1990s, a similar phenomenon occurred

with the Serbo-Croatian language. The warring Serb, Croat, and Bosnian ethnic
groups refused to accept that they were all speaking the same language, and
declared that their dialects were not dialects at all, but different languages:
Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. Similarly, there is no reason Moldovan should be
considered a separate language from Romanian, other than that Moldova was
ruled by the Soviet Union for decades and Moscow demanded that Moldovans
think of themselves as Soviet citizens and not as Romanians. Since independence,
the country has started to change its laws, now recognizing that Moldovan is
really just a dialect of Romanian.

All in all, we can see that when speakers are able to understand each other
without either of them having to change the language or dialect they are speaking
or get a translator is known as “Intelligibility”. However, intelligibility is not the
determining factor in whether something is a separate language or a dialect of the
same language. If that were the case, there are plenty of English dialects that
would have to be classified as languages.
 References

When does a dialect become a language in its own right. Retrieved October 4,
2019 from https://www.thetranslationpeople.com/2009/07/when-does-a-dialect-
become-a-language-in-its-own-right/

When does a dialect become a language?. Retrieved October 4, 2019 from

https://catflag.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/when-does-a-dialect-become-a-
language/