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Comment by Throwaway23412 | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem is the flimsy line between dialect and language. I remember getting into an argument years ago about this, that dialects can be so thick that you might as well as be listening to someone speaking another language.

A friend argued that it's still the same language, so you can understand what others are saying even with a different dialect. Please. The average person can't understand all of Scouse, AAVE, Southern American, Geordie, cockney, Hiberno‐English, etc. I still find myself rewinding dialogue in shows like Peaky Blinders.

The only reason people have a problem with AAVE is some sort of racial pretentiousness. Even the use of the phrase "Standard English" in this article is pretentious. Standard to whom? Brits certainly have a different perspective of what "Standard English" is from Americans.

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A language is a dialect with an army.

The commonly accepted - but rather tenuous - criterion for distinguishing between language and dialect is speakers of different dialects being mutually intelligible to each other when making the effort.

That can be said for Scouse, Southern American, Geordie, Cockney and Hiberno‐English, even though understanding speakers of those dialects talking among each other often is difficult for an outsider.

Unlike these varieties, AAVE technically isn't a dialect but a an ethnolect and sociolect, so race definitely is a factor here. Maybe, AAVE can some day become a generally accepted dialect that's not dependent on speaker ethnicity. However, I think it's more likely that AAVE influences other - considered more standard - varieties of English. In fact that's likely already happening to some extent through culture, music in particular, and of course people just talking to each other and taking up linguistic quirks and habits from each other.

> The commonly accepted - but rather tenuous - criterion for distinguishing distinction between language and dialect is speakers of different dialects being mutually intelligible to each other when making the effort.

What's interesting is that I've seen Spanish and Portuguese speakers do this (enough to have a conversation, though I can't say how well that went). On the other hand, there are certain Chinese dialects (though maybe not considered dialect by linguistics) where the speaker of one finds it just about impossible to understand what the speaker of the other is saying.

Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are mutually intelligible and the Roman empire's legacy lives on through them. My wife is a native Spanish speaker and she has no problem with all 3 in general. It's worth noting she wasn't impoverished, it requires a high level of education to achieve this. There are many Spanish speakers (because it's a massive part of the world) who don't truly know their own language and cannot do this.

As a relatively fluent Spanish speaker who can't really understand Portuguese and finds Italian completely unintelligible, I think you're using 'mutually intelligible' pretty loosely here.

I learned some Spanish in latin america by immersion. I can make sense of written Italian and Portugese. However in Spain I can't understand anything spoken.

I'm also relatively fluent and I'm the same way as you. You need to be Cervantes-level fluent, like my wife who was not only native born in a Spanish speaking country but educated in private schools and then college educated there as well. I also think some people may naturally be slightly more in tune with linguistics in general.

Spanish speakers are a huge group and many simply don't know their own language. It's like going to Alabama and expecting to find Shakespeare.

I'll grant you that mutual intelligibility is difficult to define but I'm using it in the sense that my wife is conversational with folks from Portugal and Italy when we travel there. That's a decent standard.

...in which we learn that one who fails to be educated in the appropriate schools can be fluent in their own language. And I'm left wondering if some people know what "language" is.

But then I am a poor benighted bastard living in Alabama.

I should've used Texas in my example. Apologies to the good people of Alabama.

Possibly.

Of course, I lived in Texas until about 8 years ago, when I moved to AL.

How do you distinguish between being a "superbly" educated Spanish speaker and speaking a little Italian and Portuguese?

There are many Spanish speakers ... who don't truly know their own language

Of course there are not. They may not know whatever it is you are talking about, but it's tautologically true that a group of people communicating with a given language know the language they are using to communicate (the language that they would likely refer to as "their own language"). I guess no one will care if you don't want to call that language Spanish (they won't heed your opinion, they just won't care).

Saying that someone doesn't know their own language is tricky. First, for a huge amount of people in South America, Spanish isn't the language of their past. Second, defining "knowing" in this binary way is also problematic. It's a continuum, where each express along this continuum what they need (or desire) to move through their day. So I don't disagree that someone, though a native speaker of Spanish, may not be able to understand Italian, but I don't think it's right to say that they don't know the language.

Edit: typo

I mean it in the sense of mother-tongue. It's like knowing Latin (to truly understand you own language) rather than struggling with complex sentences in native language. I've seen people who can hardly express themselves in their one and only language (Spanish and English in the cases I've seen).

That's a little bit of a stretch. Being a native speaker of Catalan and Spanish and having never studied Italian, I can tell you that if I listen to a conversation in Italian I don't understand more that 60-90 percent of what is being said. Portuguese is harder to grasp than Italian and much harder to speak. When I was in Italy I was amazed that I could speak simple sentences in made-up Italian that turned out to be correct Italian.

Exactly.

I didn't present numbers because those are hard to prove but I agree with your assessment. Anytime you're over 60% (at least 1-way which is what you were describing, your personal comprehension, not the Italian's), you're in great shape. 60-90% (a low estimate because it's one side) is getting into dialect territory. Simple statements and conversations are not a problem and that's definitely mutual intelligibility. Yes it is a bit of a stretch, but everything in one way or another is a stretch. As a general judgment call I think it stands. My point was, as a native English speaker and conversational speaker of Castellano myself- my English enables me to understand exactly zero other languages. Mutual intelligibility is indeed real in the Latin world. There's little to no mutual intelligibility with English, except maybe to Frisian, I've never heard it in person. But there is definitely mutual intelligibility between the former Roman Empire except France and Romania. I do understand some Italian. Absolutely nothing compared to you or my wife. My wife has the roughly 60-90% comprehension ability you do with Italian.

On the 'mutual' side of mutual intelligibility, from what I've seen educated Portuguese and Italian speakers understand her even better than she understands them. At least, again, an educated speaker who doesn't get confused with their own language first.

I don't think anyone calls Chinese languages "dialects" if they've ever heard more than one. There are some Canton dialects, but Wu is its own thing.

> mutually intelligible to each other when making the effort.

By that definition, Norwegian and Swedish is the same language. Danish is intelligible too, if written, not spoken.

Interesting. I'd call this language Scandic (IC), with the sub locale codes ic_SV, ic_NO and ic_DK.

My understanding is that if you have a country, you get to have a language (such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourgish_language)

Therefore the argument 'How come X is a language while Y is not' doesn't make sense if X has their own country and Y does not.

Look at Arabic; one "language" despite being barely mutually intelligible between, say, Iraq and Morocco.

Good point - but people explain that it is due to political reasons [1].

Ie same way that people in Luxemburg want to point out that they have their own language different from German, rulers of Morocco (who are Arabs - majority of Morocco's population native language is Berber) want to stress that they share same language & culture with rest of the Arab world.

In other words - if you are a country, you have the option to have your own language (even if it's mutually intelligible with a major other language). If you are just a part of a country, that option seems off the table (ie you need a non-mutually intelligible language to make that claim).

[1] http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/why-hindi-urdu-is-one-langu...

The thing about a language being "a dialect with an army" is a bit tongue in cheek. Of course we'd like more consistent ways to distinguish languages that don't depend on politics. When there's a continuum (like the Scandinavian languages) and it's hard to decide where to draw the arbitrary line, national borders are a pretty convenient place to settle on. But that's not so fundamental that it "doesn't make sense" to ask why we distinguish languages.

It's easy to imagine Norwegian and Swedish being considered the same language if they were the same country. It'd be a language with multiple written forms, but Norwegian already has two of those anyway.

But you can only get so far by simplifying the issue to say that language borders are national borders. That erases a lot of the linguistic complexity of Europe, it defies reality in Africa and South Asia, and it just wouldn't make sense at all in North America. (What's the Canadian language, besides a joke on South Park?)

The definitions are ultimately arbitrary because they're just abstractions and the specifics are often more political than scientific.

Most regional variation these days is what's colloquially called an accent: the exact same words, just with slightly different sounds (strictly speaking: the same phonemes produces slightly differently). Sometimes a few idiosyncratic words are mixed in for good measure.

What seems most surprising to me as a German about English is actually that in the UK there seem to be vastly more dialects compared to Germany but each seems to share much more vocabulary and grammar. The differences often entirely consist of pronunciation.

I guess this is because Germany is historically not one country but several: Bavaria really is something entirely different from Swabia, Saxony, Rhineland or Westphalia. It's just in modern times (literally only in the late 20th century) that most German speakers no longer speak their full regional dialects.

That said, "standard" English is simply a matter of definition. In the UK "standard" means RP, in the US it means GA. There's nothing special about these "standard" versions, they're just a specific dialect that is defined as the standard to be used as the official language. They're still dialects, though.

"Language" really just means "spectrum of mutually intelligible dialects". And that definition is already contradictory because not every pair of two languages within the spectrum is as mutually intelligible as any other. And sometimes different "languages" can be somewhat mutually intelligible (e.g. Afrikaans and Dutch) or even asymmetrical (e.g. Dutch speakers understand Afrikaans better than vice versa).

Heck, in everyday conversation it's probably best to always read "language" to mean "dialect". It's just a useful abstraction that mostly leaks too much to be actually useful.

Dialects Can indeed do this. My aunt is british: Her mother's dialect was so thick I could hardly understand her as a child. Fast forward to adult life, and I moved to Norway. Spoken dialects here can have just a few hundred people, though writing is more standardized. To confound it all, there are two official forms of Norwegian. Norwegians are expected to understand not only both forms of the language, but most dialects... along with Swedish and Danish (Swedish sounds similar, danish is written similarly).

Yet... There are instances where two Norwegians simply cannot understand each other. They are more likely to switch to english or try very very hard to stick to plain language.

I have less luck with the dialects - I can understand some with a few alterations.

On the other hand, I now understand different dialects of English much better.

The dialects are easy to understand, so to speak... not necessarily a matter five minutes, but orders of magnitude easier than learning, say, Dutch.

A former co-worker told me about moving from one (dialect) end of the country to the other, and working as a teacher. For two days the children in her class basically didn't understand her, then they had learned to map her phonemes to theirs and it was okay.

Indeed, Norweigen, Swedish and Danish are actually the same language, linguistically.

In this situation, it is said: a language is a dialect with an army and navy

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3328218-the-story-of-huma... - is a great and enlightening read

Or for another example, Serbo-Croatian used to be considered a language with Serbian and Croatian being just dialects. Then after Yugoslavia split apart into separate nation states, the Serbian and Croatian governments started insisting that they actually had separate languages. They even went to the extent of changing some words to increase the differences.

And yet, not only all speakers of one can understand perfectly the other, everyone can speak it effortlessly, and even understand localized accents and subtleties.

The essay mentions the situation with Norwegian dialects, and notes that unlike the United States and AAVE, or the UK with Cockney, Norwegians respect and honor their rural dialects --- and apparently have superior educational outcomes as one result.

I'd say the problem is that people get so emotionally invested in the stuff. The flimsy line between dialect and language should just be an interesting example of the ambiguity of human life, but people get enormously upset about it. AAVE should just be an interesting example of a dialect and how dialects develop, but everyone has to rush to judge it, not just examine and understand it.

The US has a long and proud history of rationalizing the perceived inferiority of black people using scientific-sounding arguments. Evolution, physiology, and psychology have all served this role, and linguistics is just another way to do it.

Standard English probably refers to what is taught in schools and written down in dictionaries. Germany has the Institut für Deutsche Sprache, France has Academie Francaise, but English seems to lack a formal governing body.

Its the BBC :-)

Or the Economist

In practice, the language “standard” is simply whatever dialect is used by the elites.

One of my language books offers a serious-ish witticism as definition: A language is a dialect that has a capital.

So,now,a language is a dialect with capital?

Perhaps I should have said a capital city or a seat of government.

And Peaky Blinders is just Brummy (birmigham) accent not full on yam yam - the Black country dialect

Its funny but Peaky Blinders accents make me feel at home - ok I do have connections to pre legalization bookies :-)

>A friend argued that it's still the same language, so you can understand what others are saying even with a different dialect. Please.

Even if you cannot understand it, it remains the same language. Language is defined by the syntax rules and vocabulary, not the exact way those are pronounced (which can vary even between the same dialect).

>The only reason people have a problem with AAVE is some sort of racial pretentiousness. Even the use of the phrase "Standard English" in this article is pretentious. Standard to whom? Brits certainly have a different perspective of what "Standard English" is from Americans.

There are still majorities and minorities, and the first define what's "standard". Besides, even the Brits have their standard and their not so standard English.

> Even if you cannot understand it, it remains the same language. Language is defined by the syntax rules and vocabulary, not the exact way those are pronounced (which can vary even between the same dialect).

Syntax rules like "no double negatives" or vocabulary like "fleek" and "pneumococcal" and "dreich"? All of that is English, and I can point to dialects of English that have each and dialects of English that don't have each.

> There are still majorities and minorities, and the first define what's "standard".

Where? In the neighborhood I grew up in, the majority uses double negatives. In the UK "colour" is the majority way to spell "color". If you want to argue that the majority determines the standards, then the standards are contextual, because different segments of the population are the majority in different contexts.

I agree with you, but I think the word "standard" gets deployed for lack of any better term. Maybe "Mainstream American English" would be more precise, but it's clunkier, too.

I think we use the term "Standard" because it accurately describes the fact that it is a standard enforced by a lot of institutions. Failure to comply with this standard is punished in a lot of ways.

To be clear, I'm not saying that's how it should be, I'm merely describing what exists.

Technically speaking there is no standard version of any language, outside artificial standards like those defined by the Academie Francaise for French. There certainly aren't any speakers of the standard version.

Technically every person has a so-called idiolect, which has a shared subset with what you would call the standard language but both includes vocabulary (and likely grammar) that is non-standard and also excludes some vocabulary (and again likely grammar) that is standard.

Just like a statistical average it's incredibly unlikely (and sometimes even possible) any one person matches that standard. The notion is only really useful when talking about groups -- as is the entire concept of a "language" (or even dialects).

The entire notion of whether something is "correct" or "incorrect" ultimately depends on mutual intelligibility and whether some authority (even supposedly "descriptivist" authorities like dictionaries effectively act as authorities) acknowledges it or not.

"Language" is a lot like "species". It's a useful concept at scale but it brakes down when you try to talk about relations between individuals and if you try to define the borders too clearly it becomes apparent that it's all just a leaky abstraction to make sense of the far too complicated mess you are trying to reason about.

I don't disagree that everyone has their own idiolect, but I don't think that's generally the most relevant attribute of the way someone speaks at the given moment. I think the group within which they are speaking has a much greater impact; i.e. the dialect I speak with my friends from high school is very different from the dialect I speak in a job interview for an academic software job. Sure, there are some words or structures I use more often that are unique to me, but the differences based on the context of my speech are way larger.

"Language is defined by the syntax rules and vocabulary..."

And it's a damn good thing that we have The Universal College of English Grammar, Vocabulary, Weights, and Measures to tell us how to talk good and what pseudo-words should be expunged. Otherwise, we'll end up speaking a weird bastardization of German, French, Latin, and who knows what else.

Not sure what the snark here is supposed to address, but in general we don't speak a "weird bastardisation of German, French, Latin, and who knows what else" when we speak English.

We speak the english language, for which dictionaries that cover almost all of its vocabulary (spare some neologisms) do exist.

That English has borrowed words from other/older languages (and incorporated them into its own syntactic scheme and vocabulary) does not mean those words are still German, Latin etc in the context of English.

They are just english words of German, Latin, etc etymology. And more often than not, even their spelling and meaning has changed from their originating language.

Definitions follow usage, not vice versa. If what you are saying were true, there'd be no way for language to first develop save for some divine being handing us a book of words we didn't know and magically teaching us how to use them.

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