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Comment by Ostrogodsky | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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