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Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

When my Historical Linguistics professor mentioned that determination of dialect/language difference is mostly political I was amazed and argued with him for half an hour and still wasn't convinced after that. I thought there should be a way wherein a linguist can collect and then analyze corpora, then scientifically discover and label dialects, isoglosses, languages, etc. Later, I learned that although there are tools for doing this analysis, the resulting labeling is mostly based on political/ideological distinctions.

The common examples of the difficulties in determining language vs a dialect are: the "dialects" of Chinese; Macedonian vs Bulgarian; Swedish vs Norwegian vs Danish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect.

I think most linguists would consider AAEV to be a dialect of English.

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> determination of dialect/language difference is mostly political

I heard that expressed as "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an...

I found it quite true when you look at cases like Dutch vs. Afrikaans or Swedish vs Norwegian vs Danish. Declaring your dialect a "language" can be a tool of nationalism.

As counterexample I would still call American English and Brazilian Portuguese dialects, even though they have armies and navies. I'm not sure if I would call Afrikaans a dialect.

I think the key point is that no-one is being marked incorrect at school or told they are stupid etc. for using American spellings instead of "correct" British English spellings (or other language features). Probably the war of independence between the countries marking an important boundary for when those things changed.

My mother-in-law apologizes for accidentally using "slang" terms in front of my children, mostly because she was taught at school that her language was 'incorrect' and it was suppressed in favour of the 'correct' dialect of the ruling class who lived in another country.

> I'm not sure if I would call Afrikaans a dialect.

It started out as a Dutch dialect or creole, of course, and it is now a separate language.

But the process formation of a separate language was political as well as linguistic.

Americans self-identify with English just as much as Brazilians identify themselves with Portuguese. This issue arises when this is not the case.

I can think examples of any combination of "has army/not", "is language/dialect". Mutual intelligibility doesn't even matter either way.

has army, is dialect: Schweizerdeutch, American English, Brazilian Portuguese

has army, is language: Norwegian (v. Danish)

no army, is language: Yiddish, Afrikaans

no army, is dialect: Frisian

Frisian is an official language recognized by the Dutch government and the EU, in fact it is one of the two official languages of the Netherlands. It is taught in schools and spoken at official policy meetings.

Nonetheless, your point still stands as I'm sure there are valid examples of 'no army, is dialect'

Good examples, but "Afrikaans has no army" is debatable and IMHO misleading. It doesn't share an army with Dutch. And in the formative period from the Boer wars (1880, 1899) to 1994 I would say that it did have an army in absolute terms.

I had thought that English was more dominant in South Africa than Afrikaans, but I guess it's actually the other way around.

As usage of the two languages go, I put it nearer 50%-50% (with slightly more Afrikaans).

As political power went until 1994, all heads of state and of the army (and as far as I remember, all holders of other top positions) were Afrikaners.

Fuck, if that is the definition of a dialect then every single accent of a language is a new dialect.

When I studied linguistics, dialects were simply defined as regional variants of a language (and that includes the "central" dialect, which many would equate with the language itself), while an accent was what a non-native speaker would get (e.g. "English with German accent"). Whether some dialect rose to the political status of language, was a political question, and not really something for linguists to worry about until they took a course on sociology.

The way the word "accent" is used by most non-linguist English speakers, I'd say you're mostly right: People will say things like "she's got a Southern accent" – when she was born and raised in the South, speaking that same regional variant of the language that her parents spoke, ie. speaking that dialect.

As the famous saying goes "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy".

Which was said first, ironically, in Yiddish (a language that gains its status as such through its connection with an ethnic group, not military presence).

Link with more info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an...

a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot

Yiddish is fascinating. (And entertaining when spoken by Mel Brooks as an Ind ... er, Native American).

I could pretty readily read (Latin-transliterated) Yiddish with just a couple years of German language classes.

> "Eine Sprache ist ein Dialekt mit einer Armee und einer Flotte"

I read an intro to Yiddish when I was in the same position as you, and my immediate reaction was, "Wait, this is just German with some rough edges!"