Why isn't 'American' a Language?
bbc.com
bbc.com
For example: there are five major dialects of Hindi, some of which are mutually unintelligible -- yet few people call them separate languages. On the other hand, standard Hindi is mutually intelligible with Urdu -- they use different writing systems, but as spoken languages are roughly as close as American and British English -- yet they are considered different languages. Similarly, China has a vast diversity of mutually unintelligible languages -- or, rather, what outsiders call "languages", and what the Chinese government insists are merely dialects of a single language: "Chinese".
What's going on here? Max Weinreich's quip that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" seems to hit the mark. If Britain and America had not become allies in the late 19th century, then the ongoing antipathy between them would have required their speaking systems to be classified as "languages". But that would have been a political necessity, not a linguistic one.
As an aside -- as somebody who grew up in America and emigrated at age 31 to Britain -- I must say that the oft-cited differences in spelling and pronunciation are the least important areas of divergence. Much more significant (and confusing) are the idiomatic divergences. For example: in the UK, people commonly say "are you alright?" as a greeting, equivalent to the American "how do you do?" or "what's up?". But in American, "are you alright?" is an expression of serious concern -- something you might say to somebody walking around in a state of confusion with an apparent head injury. It was extremely disconcerting when people kept asking me this -- I thought I must be acting/looking really strange to provoke such continual concern!
(To add to the fun, in the UN it's called "Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian", but who's counting?)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_language#Sociopolitic... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_standard_Bosnian...
So I took that as some evidence that not all English dialects are mutually intelligible.
Same with Bavaria, really. Most of us from Munich have a very light dialect that's really not that difficult compared to many people from the countryside.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrLjsCCGnuo
edit: The Bavarian dialect also has quite a few grammatical quirks, whereas the Saxons just pronounce German very different, but the grammar is very standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawlermen_(TV_series)
Edit: Further article on the subtitling and the reactions to it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/5244738.stm
And this trick is also played in France (my country). Alsatian is called a dialect (insinuating a dialect of French) whereas is it linguistically related to German; and indeed it doesn't have a fixed written form and Standard German (Hochdeutsch) orthography is often used for it. Same goes for Flemish, etc. While now France's dialect policy is a complete turnabout of his old one (repression), the dialect word is still used in place it shouldn't technically be.
There are a bunch of Janus words and phrases. Things like "table a motion" mean totally different things.
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/to-...
But see also moot point which is used similarly in both places, but which also has a specific and different English usage.
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2006/11/moo...
In the case of french, say:
- Metropolitan and Canadian might understand each other
- Metropolitan and Sub-Saharan too
- but Canadian and Sub-Saharan not so much
You get used to it after a while and Swiss people will try to meet you halfway and speak a bit less dialect (which then sounds strange to other Swiss people). They have some words that are different but Germans normally get. As with AE and BE, it gets funny when the same words have totally different meanings.
On that note: Swiss-German is one form of Alemannic, a dialect also spoken in South-Western Germany, varying from region to region as it does in Switzerland, but do not call it a dialect, they see it as a separate language.
African French is very close to metropolitan French because the language is less than 200 years old in Africa. You see the same effect anywhere a language has spread recently, there's much less divergence and variation.
Most Germans are bilingual in Hochdeutsch (Standard German) and a local "dialect". The question of whether a given speech is a dialect or a language is a political one, not a linguistic one.
^Disclaimer: I live in Eastern Europe, I've never met a Black person (I know many dark-skinned people, but they aren't negroes, ergo not Black), I've never even met an American, I may be wrong about the "most"
Most people who do speak somewhat High German are unable to understand a heavy dialect. Somebody who speaks dialect is almost never able to speak acceptable let alone perfect High German. Even people who manage to suppress the accent are easily recognized, because they often build incorrect grammatical constructs (use of different pronouns, use of dative instead of genitive and so on).
I'd have have to expend similar effort with someone speaking Jamaican Patois or thick Glaswegian English.
I guess my point is that it's a simple task to label languages if you apply prior knowledge of their historical context, but it might not be the most useful categorisation, either in terms of linguistic similarity or in terms of regional identity of the speaker
In the end practical reasons - trade, business and mutual cultural influence kept the language from splitting up.
That being said, official AE and BE are pretty much identical and the same rules apply on both sides of the Atlantic. It is only logical that different words are used, because of the different contexts that people live in, but that doesn't mean that AE and BE are distinct languages.
Here are some excellent examples:
http://www.onestopenglish.com/grammar/grammar-reference/amer...
> But the serial comma can also create ambiguity. Consider the following adjusted version of the dedication [discussed in the preceding paragraph]: To my mother, Ayn Rand [,] and God. With the serial comma, the reader could understand the dedication as meaning either that the book is dedicated three ways or that the book is dedicated to the writer’s mother, who happens to be Ayn Rand, and to God. Omitting the serial comma makes the latter meaning less likely.
[0]: http://www.adamsdrafting.com/the-serial-comma-can-cause-ambi...
You can't really eliminate that source of potential ambiguity in isolated excerpts, only in larger works or bodies of work by adopting consistent practices that go beyond whether or not you use the Oxford comma (mostly, structuring sentences so that if one or more items in a list needs a non-restrictive appositive, it is either just the last item -- which is already set off with a conjunction whether or not it also has the Oxford comma preceding it, so the following appositive is unambiguously not a list item) or using parentheses rather than commas for non-restrictive appositives attached to list items (which is clearer even for two item lists, where item-separating commas, Oxford or otherwise, don't actually come into play.)
Because it's on a news website: BBC.
But in common use I wouldn't be surprised if it was 98% or less
consider words like "pissed", "pants", "suspenders", "fag", "chips", "bisquit", "jelly", "pavement", etc.
they mean different things in British and American English, even though etymologically they come from the same source
I would. One bit of evidence against this is the amount of the Extra's script Ricky Gervais had to rerecord for an American audience. Most of the change was for unshared cultural references (local food brands etc.) and only a couple for words (fanny).
Due to the level of exposure, I believe the difference between generic Brit and generic US is less than the dialects within the countries e.g. older generations of Yorkshire vs. Cornish, Glaswegian vs. Cockney etc. can suffer great difficulties understanding each other.
The number of unshared words is much higher, methods of denotation and sentence construction are different and even the pronunciation of shared words become unrecognisable (I'm not a linguist, so open to correction). I'm sure there are similar extremes in the US.
They were complains of American fans not understanding Peter Capaldi as the new Doctor, as he has a (VERY understandable) Scottish accent.
Besides, nobody understands Southerners anyway.
Counting differences between dialects involves a lot of boring questions about which contractions, changes of pronounciation or grammar etc. count and which don't. Does "I'm like" in the sense "I say" count? There are too many low-value questions to really get neat precise numbers.
American English: "A source for that? I would be surprised it was actually 99%."
Maybe if you count spelling, it might be less, but it's not like 'colour' and 'color' are different words in functional terms.
Regardless of what Max Weinreich may have said (which was more of a political/philosophical statement than an academic one, and he didn't even coin the phrase), the variation between english dialects is not enough to call it a language.
Some pidgins are considered languages: they're spoken as lingua franca by large populations and is quite different from English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Slovak_and_Czech
Apparently "present-day standard Slovak wasn't codified until the 19th century." Then it's not something invented after the breakup.
Czech and Slovak have also quite a lot of differences in grammar (for example Czech have one more case in their declination system).
I read the other comments here before typing out this comment. As several of the comments say, distinguishing different varieties of speech as "dialects" rather than "languages" is often a matter of politics rather than a matter of linguistics. It happens that I was one of the Wikipedians who was active in updating the Wikipedia article "English language"[1] earlier this year so that it is now a "good article" by Wikipedia's article rating criteria. For years, there were all kinds of stupid edit wars on that article by editors who didn't bother to look up or read any sources, but when several Wikipedians agreed to look up sources together and check what the sources actually say, we reached consensus about how to improve the article. The main point about the English language is that it has a very large speech community with high mutual comprehensibility spread all over the globe. The spread around the globe came first from trade, migration, and colonization, but even after the British Empire dissolved, the spread of English has been maintained by telecommunications, travel, broadcasting, film, book publishing, study abroad, and the efforts of many national governments of non-English-speaking countries to promote knowledge of English through formal schooling and government administration. The majority of people who use English day-by-day now are not descendants of English settlers who live in the "inner circle" of English-speaking countries. When we consider that railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, voice radio broadcasting, passenger airplanes, and talking motion pictures were all invented in English-speaking countries, and were used in international communication as early for United States-to-Britain communication as for international communication between any other country pairs, it is not surprising that English has stayed remarkably homogeneous across the vast territory of the United States and has even stayed mutually comprehensible despite the political separation of the United States and Britain. Like the majority of my ancestors (I have only a little English ancestry, from which I gain my family name), most Americans are descended mostly from people who did NOT speak English when they arrived in North America, but who learned English to communicate with one another as residents of the United States. My two maternal grandparents were both born in Great Plains states of the United States, but their schooling (only primary schooling) was conducted entirely in the German language, and they learned English as a second language as native-born United States citizens to interact with neighbors.
There were earlier comments in this thread about Chinese. Absolutely, positively the different Sinitic languages are distinct languages, not mutually comprehensible, and it does violence to the English usage of the term "dialect" to refer to Mandarin and to Cantonese as "dialects" of Chinese. I speak Modern Standard Chinese fluently and have worked for many years as a Chinese-English interpreter. I have also studied Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Hakka (listed in decreasing order of proficiency). Mandarin and Cantonese are more distinct, in several respects, than English is from German or than French is from Spanish. Calling both Mandarin and Cantonese "dialects of Chinese" is simply a matter of the politics of China denying linguistic reality.
The distinctions among Sinitic languages as distinct languages apply even if you write them down in Chinese characters. Chinese characters still represent speech (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[2] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[3] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[4] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[5] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.
I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...
The only measure of correctness for language is use, and when speaking in English, American is only commonly used in one way--in English, American is almost universally unambiguous. No other country name contains the word America, and no one else commonly refers to themselves as American in English.
I don't go around telling Colombians they can't call themselves Colombians because Columbia is another name for the Americas. It's also not a problem here because we don't recognize one American continent.
Who refers to themselves by continent anyway? In what sense is it useful to identify to yourself as someone who lives somewhere in the entire western hemisphere? There is also no common language, race, ethnicity, or culture that unifies North and South America.
satori99 Waves hello from Australia :)
By the way, do people from New Guinea get on your case about calling yourselves Australian (since it is part of the continent), like South Americans do to us?