What are languages? What are dialects? Who's right? Who's wrong? What's up? What's down?
Statements using "linguistic science" to tell you about the true meanings of terms are abundant. Let me provide a couple of examples.
An article in the Atlantic by linguist John McWhorter begins:
What’s the difference between a language and a dialect? Is there some kind of technical distinction, the way there is between a quasar and a pulsar, or between a rabbit and a hare? Faced with the question, linguists like to repeat the grand old observation of the linguist and Yiddishist Max Weinreich, that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
But surely the difference is deeper than a snappy aphorism suggests. The very fact that “language” and “dialect” persist as separate concepts implies that linguists can make tidy distinctions for speech varieties worldwide. But in fact, there is no objective difference between the two: Any attempt you make to impose that kind of order on reality falls apart in the face of real evidence.
McWhorter argues that there is no real technical difference between a language and a dialect because, if you try to find any real objective difference between (examples of?) them, real evidence will show that such classifications are nonsense.
Okay, fair enough. But when people are talking about the differences between languages and dialects, are they necessarily talking about such technical differences? Or, has a strawman argument been set up here to discredit a more nuanced understanding of language and dialect (e.g. one that considers social dimensions, not just 'technical' (i.e. 'linguistic') definitions in considering what counts as a language and what counts as a dialect? Or something else (⇠ I must not make black-and-white fallacies myself; note to self: watch your own rhetoric!)?
Another example taken from The Economist:
HONG KONG'S education department caused a furore in January 2014 by briefly posting on its website the claim that Cantonese was “not an official language” of Hong Kong. After an outcry, officials removed the text. But was the claim correct? The law says that “Chinese and English” are Hong Kong’s official languages. Whereas some people say that Cantonese is a dialect of Chinese, others insist that it is a language in its own right. Who is right—and how do dialects differ from languages in general?
Once again: words, words, words. But what do these words mean? How are we evaluating what dialects and languages are? Can officials decide what official languages are? Can un-officials decide what un-official languages are? Halp us!
Languages vs dialects
The "language vs dialects" deconstruction has been a favorite punching bag for linguists for decades. I think I understand the "social justice" position pretty clearly, which I'll summarize as follows: attitudes towards the speech of marginalized groups has been used as an excuse to commit untold numbers of atrocities; recognizing that the speech of powerful groups and the speech of less powerful groups are essentially the same (i.e. they are all LANGUAGES/DIALECTS; no one speech variety is inherently superior to others), we can dismantle linguistic superiority complexes which are not supported by real evidence.
That "real evidence" is structural linguistic data showing, for instance, that the English of black Americans is more complex (➝better) than the speech of Asian Americans. Or, data showing that some language in the Amazon is fundamentally "simpler" than Japanese.
The problem I have is not with this position itself, but how it has turned into "term tyranny". You can recognize bad behavior (e.g. violation of the non-aggression principle (NAP) in the form of imperialism) and also recognize how the terms "language" and "dialect" can be used in different ways by people who come from different (especially non-linguistic) backgrounds.
Recently, I participated in a FB discussion, which began with the question:
What is the real fine line between a language and dialect?
For example: Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin are all officially different languages when they’re really just dialects of each other.
But, dialects of Arabic are pretty much completely different languages, yet they’re considered dialects of one language.
The "social justice" position I stated above was repeated in various forms by most people replying to the thread. Assembling a series of replies I made into a more-or-less coherent essay:
I think the typical "enlightened" answer to this question (i.e. that there aren't really languages and dialects, there are just dialects and that those dialects that are called "languages" are those with powerful governments/armies/navies behind them) is a little bit misguiding...
There are many senses in which people talk about different "dialects" and "languages"; typically linguists talk about the differences between languages and dialects based on STRUCTURAL differences (e.g. something to do with grammar) or SOCIAL considerations if they are more aligned to socio-linguistics or anthropology. This means following speakers' judgments about their speech as distinct from another group's speech and so on. There are reasons why people say "languages" and "dialects" are really the same thing in this sense. This is one way to break things up.
However, normal people talking about language aren't trying to pick apart attitudes about language in some multi-factor time series analysis isolating speaker perceptions about [insert jargon here]. Rather people are talking about "languages" and "dialects" to distinguish how they understand and group together the various ways people speak. Like it or hate it, there are countless resources prepared for big standard languages like French or German or (Mandarin) Chinese, which have been christened as "languages" by speakers of these standardized modes of communication and the people that aspire to learn them. Are they wrong?
Depending how you are discussing languages vs dialects, the lines you draw between languages and dialects are different. A linguist's definitions don't necessarily match up with a lay person's. However, this doesn't mean that neither linguists nor lay people CAN draw lines that clearly demarcate what they call a language and a dialect. For example, you might draw these boundaries: languages are those which Facebook lists (as of Jul. 2018). Dialects are everything else.
Saying that "language" and "dialect" refer to the same thing is one way to go and an approach many people seem to take. In practice linguists, lay people, and everyone else has their own standards for demarcating these notions, which they may apply with varying degrees of consistencies. (Linguists tend to try to be consistent because they are trying to conduct substantial research, whereas the bigot next door might be obviously driven by any definitions he can use to look down on his foreign neighbors as inferiors).
My point is that when we are talking about what a fine line between a language and a dialect are, we are talking about how people use terms. Now, we can compare which ways of using terms are better/worse based on how popular they are, how they perpetuate certain ideologies, etc. But to insist on one usage that is not particularly common among lay people (e.g. "dialect" = oppressed language) as being ultimately RIGHT is to reject communication in favor of repeating ideology by literally not meeting people on their own terms.
Lol. In editing this I'm kinda surprised at how many words are there, but hey. This is trying to lay out a point that just isn't getting through... I continue ranting:
If you say to me, "let's understand languages to be systems of communication used by a particular country or community", and I say "ok", then many forms of speech lay people call "dialects" (e.g. Cantonese) are, by our definitions, languages. So, when you and I are talking, we can freely distinguish languages/dialects and say all sorts of interesting things using those terms.
However, if we invite over another friend, and they use "language" in a different way, we shouldn't immediately say to that friend, "you are using the terms language/dialect INCORRECTLY". Rather, we should get that friend up to date on how we are using the terms "language" and "dialect" in our conversation. This doesn't mean that our friend is wrong, it just means that we are using the terms "language/dialect" in a more narrow, technical sense for the purposes of having a specific type of conversation.
In a similar way, we might have similar but different understandings of terms like "goal" or "foul" in different sports. A soccer player's definition of "goal" isn't wrong if a hockey player has a different definition for their game. Rather, they just have to come to an understanding of what "goal" means in what they're talking about, for example:
- goals in soccer
- goals in hockey
- similarities in the definitions of "goal" in soccer, hockey
- goal setting in self-help books
- goals, the invaders of Spian (joke)
There are many ways to use terms, especially words that can refer to lots of things like "language". A linguist might regard "language" as only referring to spoken language, whereas another person may include facial expressions and "body language" as part of "language". Who is being more correct or "scientific"? Telling everybody else YOUR way of using words is right and theirs is wrong is the very "prescriptivism" that like every single linguistics books criticizes. There is no one "right" definition of "language/dialect". When we actually communicate with people, we can try to be charitable and understand the different senses in which people use these terms, rather than assuming we have the "right" definitions/understanding.
I appreciate good intentions to look out for the little person and caring about marginalized speech communities. But reason, evidence, and successful communication don't have to die to point out that subjugation of people groups bad. What is a language and what is a dialect? Let's agree on what we mean by these terms before vomiting bucketfuls of ideology using these terms.
A pseudo-debate about the nature of language
What is a language? What is language? Two broad categories on what sort of existence languages have are (1) a language being a system that resides in the individual, and (2) a language being a system that is resides outside the individual, e.g. in a speech community.
On one hand, we recognize that individuals have differences in the words they know and how they use those words. Language must belong in the individual because only then can we account for linguistic knowledge being something that individual speakers have.
But clearly language belongs to communities. If you decide to use a word in an unusual way, nobody would understand you. So, shouldn't we consider language as socially constructed and the property of no single individual?
If those two paragraphs made you really annoyed and you didn't close the window, thanks for staying with me 😛. Here I implicitly encouraged a black-or-white logical fallacy by implying we must select the "nature of language" to ultimately reside in the individual or society. Why do we need to choose? Can't the symbols x, y, and z stand for very different things depending on the equations they are found in?
There lies one challenge that the social sciences and humanities have in communicating their findings to broader audiences. While a sufficiently abstract symbol like x, y, or z is easy enough to see as abstract, the idea that specific words used "correctly" refer to specific concepts is very widespread.
"What do you mean by the term BLAH" is a question to ask the person you are discussing with. This is not settled once and for all, but rather needs to be done every time there is confusion about whether word usages or ideas are what is being disputed. As was discussed in the preceding section, people use terms like 'language' and 'dialect' to refer to different concepts. Likewise, people may mean very different things even by single terms like 'language'.
How can you even begin contrasting languages vs dialects if you haven't even gotten 'language' clearly defined? I think you can't really, and that's why many discussions about such things are often pushed to the fringes of Internet conversation (and university classrooms) rather than being held up as case studies of reason and rigor in academics.
What is important for moving a conversation about 'language' or 'languages' forward is not to insist that there is one true/correct definition for some term, but instead to (literally) come to terms with differences in language use. This is done by focusing on establishing common ground through shared understanding, rather than acting like Humpty Dumpty.
an informal intro to linguistics 2k18