Hacker News Reader

Comment by Daishiman | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com