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Comment by Bayart | Hacker News Reader

Aranese is fairly normal Gascon speech, I don't think it qualifies as its own subdialect [1]. This being said, there's something to be said about Gascon as a whole potentially being its own language, as is considered Catalan. Among Occitan dialects, it's highly eccentric.

As for Aranese speakers, to me (I have some amount of Limousin and Provençal) native ones [2] are understandable to the same extent as other Gascon speakers, but new speakers who bring Castellan phonological features are incomprehensible. If it manages to survives in this environment, it could truly be a new language in the making.

[1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Isoglosas_gasc%C3%B3...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdYpvY6Efos

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There's a pretty apt phrase that applies here: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy

Compare with the Serbian/Croatian "languages" that are far more mutually intelligible than varieties of the Chinese "language".

I've heard that Arabic also has far more variance than is between Serbian and Croatian. Even though we often refer to it as a single language, it's actually a very diverse selection of varieties that are not all mutually intelligible.

In short, the distinction is pretty arbitrary.

They used to say "Serbo-Croatian" before the war.

Only in Serbia, in Croatia it was "Croato-Serbian".

when you compare serbian and croatian and find them fairly similar it's worth keeping in mind that only holds true for the standard versions of those languages.

thing is these standard versions were developed and agreed upon more or less at a time -- mid 19th century and the whole nationalist movements thing in europe -- when there was a unitarian tendency among south slavic nations. so the standard versions are (1) essentially artificial, and (2) politically motivated to an extent.

once you get on the ground level of spoken language you find far more variance within each of the two -- the regional and even local dialects are very different from each other, to the point of seemingly being whole different languages were it not for the developed standard versions that tie them together.

The Croatian government is now trying to encourage more linguistic differentiation from Serbian by introducing neologisms that were never used in standard Serbo-Croatian.

with little or no practical success. but yes, standard language development is essentially an ongoing political process imo. nation states trying to prove they're unique basically.

i suspect this is the case all around the world to a greater or lesser extent.

Yes but historic dialect boundaries didnt follow modern national boundaries at all - see link below

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtokavian#/media/File%3ASht...

Which sounds like it contributed to the various wars on the Balkans.

I don't know if you are referring to other languages also spoken in Croatia which are not Croatian (Istriot). They might not be the same language, but I would bet that if two speakers, one of Croatian (of the three main dialects), and one of Serbian, want to communicate, they will find very little difficulty (like between British English and American English speakers) in doing so.

that's indeed very likely if they're using standard versions of their respective languages.

but if someone from let's say east istria and south serbia communicated in the traditional local dialects spoken there there'd be a significant degree of confusion and misunderstanding between them -- that's my bet at least.

Yes, a Mancunian and a New Zealander might have similar if not more trouble.

It's the same with Scots (as opposed to Scottish Gaelic). Is it a dialect or a separate (although closely related) language to English? If Scotland becomes independent, Scots would very likely gain full language status for as much political as linguistic reasons.

Then we have "Italian" and "German". If these countries had not undergone unification in the 19th century would Duolingo be offering courses in Venetian and Bavarian?

>Is it a dialect or a separate (although closely related) language to English?

As I see it, Scots and Standard English are two dialects of the same language.

>If these countries had not undergone unification in the 19th century would Duolingo be offering courses in Venetian and Bavarian?

Tuscan and High German became the standard with the Renaissance and the printing press, centuries before nationalism.

Different areas of Italy in particular had different literary vernaculars over time. One's that's particularly amusing to me is Franco-Venetian [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Italian

"High German" is basically the dialect spoken in the Hanover area.

> As I see it, Scots and Standard English are two dialects of the same language.

It doesn't matter how you personally see it. Linguists and other scholars are divided on the issue. It's recognized as a regional language by UNESCO and the Council of Europe as well as the UK and Scottish governments. There's also a spectrum from "Standard English spoken with a Scottish accent with some odd words thrown in" and broad Scots.

Danish and Norwegian (or at least Bokmål) are perhaps as close as Scots and English (I only have a passing familiarity with these so native speakers can confirm), but are considered distinct languages on as much political as linguistic grounds, which is my point - the distinction is as much political and historic as linguistic (i.e. there used to be a language only a few decades ago called "Serbo-Croatian").

>Tuscan and High German became the standard with the Renaissance and the printing press, centuries before nationalism.

It depends on what you mean by "standard". Tuscan was certainly the literary dialect, but most areas of modern Italy did not speak standardised Italian from the Renaissance period onward, except at the level of government.

>In short, the distinction is pretty arbitrary.

Linguistically, the distinction is much more objective (also it's not always clear cut, because there are asymmetries between speeches in terms of how understandable they are to each other) : two kinds of speech that are not inter-comprehensible are different languages. Dialects and sub-dialects are defined by isoglosses, see the map I link in my original post.

Arabic is, much like Chinese, both a linguistic group and a language (Modern Standard Arabic).

Imagine my first time discovering when I found out that Limousin(car) (apparently)is named after a region and that there is language named Limousin.

It's also the name of a cattle breed that's native to the region [1] and famed for its meat, as well as the name by which the very language discusses in this thread used to go by during the Middle Ages (as the Limousin dialect formed the basis for the normalized form of Occitan, that was used by the Troubadour movement ever since its inception by Eble II of Ventadorn).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limousin_cattle

It's also a girl's name - Limousine. We had a French girl by that name stay with us on an exchange visit.

I mean, it's only a Limousine if it comes fron the french region of Limousin. Otherwise it's just an unnecessarily long sparkling car.

The funny thing is that Aranese is an official language at Val d'Aran, with all of the requisite legal protections to speakers. This makes Spain the only country where Occitan/Gascon (assuming with you and others that it is the same language; some apparently disagree) is an official language.

Your second link is catalan to me... I could understand 100% and I don't know any Gascon language...

He's got a somewhat Catalan accent and Catalan itself used to be part of Occitan, the boundaries aren't quite clear where they meet (whether in Aran or in Roussillon). It became its own language after Peter the Catholic died at the battle of Muret. Catalonia became culturally and politically cut out from Southern France and Catalan developed its own standard in isolation from the other courts it previously was affiliated with.

I dont know how it is in other European countries, but at least in Spain, the slightest change in dialect+ some geographical distance will make people call their dialect a different language, and they may even not be wrong. And it is funny because that guy has a very marked Catalan accent, but they say it is the French side that brought French phonology to Occitan making it very difficult to understand.

This only applies to "regional" languages though. For example, Spanish has different dialects yet nobody would suggest Andalusian isn't Spanish, but an entire different language. The political motivation is clear.

Well andalusian does not have different words, just different accent and pronunciation, whilst catalan galician and basque have a different vocabulary, so there’s that.

Andalusian tongues have different words and different tenses. However, these are dialects because they have not been politicized like Catalan or Basque (less the Galician).

In the case of Galician, one of the first to write in the Galician language was Alfonso X, the Castilian king, so there’s that to using languages as a political tool.

Basque is a completely different language, there is no real debate about that one. It is not even a romance language. If you want to look for politicized linguistic debate in Spain, try Valencian vs. Catalan :)

Basque is a different beast, totally. An orphaned language that some say it has some Iberian or even North-African roots… However, is not an indoeuropeas languages, a gem on its own.

Having said that, the push for normalization of the Basque has mad some Basques angry because they don’t speak “standard” Basque.

Catalan is derived from Latin not Spanish, and Basque roots are not even Latin. So, it seems to me, that to say they are not dialects because they have been politicized is a politic statement in itself.

No, I never said that Catalan is a dialect, it is indeed a language.

But Catalan nationalists are even trying to remove all Spanish from the education [1][2] even by disobeying court sentences.

If you compare the situation between Catalan and Galicia. You can see it clearly. Galician is not used by most people nor politicians as a political tool. Catalan is sadly being used as such.

[1] https://www.elperiodico.com/es/sociedad/20211123/sentencia-2...

[2] https://www.europapress.es/nacional/noticia-parlament-catala...

You literally said that Andalusian and others "are dialects because they have not been politicized like Catalan or Basque", suggesting that what makes a language a language instead of a dialect it's its political weight.

Certainly, Catalan is used as a political tool, but it's a little hypocritical to think that Spanish is not. We all know how political questions should be solved in a democracy.

I explained myself poorly, English is not my first language. Andalusian is a set of dialects were Basque, Catalan and Galician are languages.

Having said that, Catalan and Basque have been used as a political tool for decades, much less the Galician, and not the Andalusian dialects of Spanish.

Hope this comment clarifies what I’m trying to say.

I'm probably going against HN rules on commenting but the only one being "politicized" here is you. Saying with a straight face that Euskera (aka Basque) should be a dialect of Castillian is at very least an ignorant position, if not straight a bad faith one.

I never said that Basque is a dialect. I’m saying that some Basque nationalists have used language or even DNA to divide the society between what they consider Basque, and the other ones.

I'm talking about the dialects of these languages (in the case of Catalan, Valencian and Balearic), which according to some constitute different languages altogether. But the same people who say these dialects are a separate languages, don't say that dialects of Spanish (e.g. Andalusian) are a separate languages, even though the degree of differentiation is roughly the same in both cases.

If you put yourself into a descriptive standpoint you will see that Andalusian has distinctive features: in phonetics (the most salient being they use open/close vowel sounds to mark plural/singular), in grammar (inversion of direct object & reflexive), in words and expressions (many of them are known, but never used in other regions, thanks to sharing a cultural background, TV, etc). Although, functionally, it is mutually intelligible (at least 90%) with other variations of Spanish. The functional aspect is what I would use to separate whether two ways of speaking fall into the same language or not.

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