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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim

It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language.

>Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect.

That's more because academic linguistics, as developed in the latter half of the 20th century, had to pay lip service into several ideologies, rather than there not actually being good practical ways to discern e.g. arabic as a single basic language with different variants.

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> > 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim

> It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language.

It's both. The idea that Ukrainian is an uneducated farmer's dialect of Russian is a common talking point in the "Greater Russia / Russkiy Mir" narrative. Conversely, asserting the status of the Ukrainian language is a big part of Ukrainian identity in the face of an imperial invasion.

> That's more because academic linguistics, as developed in the latter half of the 20th century, had to pay lip service into several ideologies, rather than there not actually being good practical ways to discern e.g. arabic as a single basic language with different variants.

As someone who once studied General Linguistics, I don't understand this remark. I've learned that calling something a language is a political act and often of great significance to the speakers, but is almost never well-defined from a purely linguistic perspective. That's a fact. Although you can sometimes find typological criteria to further argue that a variety is a language on its own, for example there are good grammatical reasons for not counting Swiss German as a variety of German, you will also find examples the other way around where two varieties have large lexical and grammatical differences and still count as the same language.

The strongest criteria for what counts as a language are based on language origins (as opposed to typology), and these do not generally suffice or make meaningful distinctions to varieties (~dialects). Mutual comprehensibility can be very low for speakers of the same language, which is why most research focuses on varieties or on speaker groups that are of particular sociolinguistic interest.

I don't get why you talk about "academic linguistics" as if there was a non-academic one and why you think linguistics "had to pay lip service into several ideologies." What are you talking about?

It's simple: linguistics is a politicized discipline, and there's a prevailing ideogically motivated tendency to put every language and dialect on equal footing.

>As someone who once studied General Linguistics, I don't understand this remark. I've learned that calling something a language is a political act and often of great significance to the speakers, but is almost never well-defined from a purely linguistic perspective. That's a fact.

Yes, this ideologically motivated idea after enough repetitionbecame "a fact" of the field, as if describing some objective physical law, and even non-political students will be taught and stick to the same (and anybody with a dissenting opinion will be getting an earful if not committing career suicide).

This wasn't always the case, it's more so with liberalism prevailing, especially in the latter half of the 20th century.

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