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Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

French is also spoken very very differently in various regions of the world... Haiti, France, Quebec, Africa. German too has significant variations. Does that mean each dialect should be considered a unique language? My take is that if two people can communicate with each other in the same "language," regardless of where they are from, then it really is the "same language."

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Also not that simple because of dialect continuums, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum

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

Swiss understand High German, because it is basically the language they write, but somebody from Hannover will have a hard time trying to understand somebody from Bern.

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.

It's not that simple, as far as I know Hindi and Urdu are effectively the same language when spoken, with some small divergences but use a different character set. How would regard that?

As the same language. I believe it is uncontroversial among linguists to regard spoken Hindi and Urdu as regional dialects of the same language. Their writing systems are radically different, of course.

Depends on how colloquial you get. For fornal/poetic use, they are vastly different.

I don't believe linguists consider the writing system as part of the language as such. Multiple languages have shifted writing systems for convenience or political reasons without the language itself changing.

There are degrees of communication though, and degrees of distance between languages. For example, Scandinavians can typically make themselves understood with speakers of other Scandinavian languages, but they're not the same language. Same with Spanish and Italian.

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

A better title would be: Why didn't 'American' become a language?

the printing press

Maybe 10% of the Haitian population speak French. Everybody else speaks Kreyol. There may be some Haitians who can't speak Kreyol at all but very few.

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.

If that constitutes bilingual to you, surely speakers of African American Vernacular English are bilingual too?

The ones who also speak High English (British English? Newscaster English? Academic English? Something along these lines...) are, yes. From what I understand, most^ just use AAVE all the time and don't learn to speak High English.

^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"

As someone from central Germany, who moved around in Southern Germany quite a bit I have to correct you: When you ignore English, French etc., most Germans are not bilingual, they are hardly monolingual.

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).

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