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Dialect
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This article is about dialects of spoken and written languages. For dialects of programming
languages, see Dialect (computing). For the programming language named Dialect, see Dialect
(programming language). For the literary device, see Eye dialect.
The term dialect (from the Greek Language word dialektos, Διάλεκτος) is used in two distinct ways,
even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular
group of the language's speakers.[1] The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but
a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class.[2] A dialect that is associated
with a particular social class can be termed a sociolect; a regional dialect may be termed a regiolect
or topolect. The other usage refers to a language socially subordinate to a regional or national
standard language, often historically cognate to the standard, but not a variety of it or in any other
sense derived from it. This more precise usage enables distinguishing between varieties of a
language, such as the French spoken in Nice, France, and local languages distinct from the
superordinate language, e.g. Nissart, the traditional native Romance language of Nice, known in
French as Niçard.
A dialect is distinguished by its vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation (phonology, including
prosody). Where a distinction can be made only in terms of pronunciation, the term accent is
appropriate, not dialect. Other speech varieties include: standard languages, which are standardized
for public performance (for example, a written standard); jargons, which are characterized by
differences in lexicon (vocabulary); slang; patois; pidgins or argots.
The particular speech patterns used by an individual are termed an idiolect.
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[edit] Standard and non-standard dialect
A standard dialect (also known as a standardized dialect or "standard language") is a dialect that
is supported by institutions. Such institutional support may include government recognition or
designation; presentation as being the "correct" form of a language in schools; published grammars,
dictionaries, and textbooks that set forth a "correct" spoken and written form; and an extensive
formal literature that employs that dialect (prose, poetry, non-fiction, etc.). There may be multiple
standard dialects associated with a single language. For example, Standard American English,
Standard Canadian English, Standard Indian English, Standard Australian English, and Standard
Philippine English may all be said to be standard dialects of the English language.
A nonstandard dialect, like a standard dialect, has a complete vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, but
is not the beneficiary of institutional support. An example of a nonstandard English dialect is
Southern American English. The Dialect Test was designed by Joseph Wright to compare different
English dialects with each other.

[edit] Dialect use in arts

Sometimes in stories authors distinguish characters through their dialect.

[edit] "Dialect" or "language"

There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing a language from a dialect. A number of
rough measures exist, sometimes leading to contradictory results. Some linguists[3] do not
differentiate between languages and dialects, i.e. languages are dialects and vice versa. The
distinction is therefore subjective and depends on the user's frame of reference.
Language varieties are often called dialects rather than languages:
• because they have no standard or codified form,
• because the speakers of the given language do not have a state of their own,
• because they are rarely or never used in writing (outside reported speech)
• or because they lack prestige with respect to some other, often standardised, variety.
The term idiom is used by some linguists instead of language or dialect when there is no need to
commit oneself to any decision on the status with respect to this distinction.[citation needed]
Anthropological linguists define dialect as the specific form of a language used by a speech
community. In other words, the difference between language and dialect is the difference between
the abstract or general and the concrete and particular. From this perspective, no one speaks a
"language," everyone speaks a dialect of a language. Those who identify a particular dialect as the
"standard" or "proper" version of a language are in fact using these terms to express a social
distinction.
Often, the standard language is close to the sociolect of the elite class.
In groups where prestige standards play less important roles, "dialect" may simply be used to refer
to subtle regional variations in linguistic practices that are considered mutually intelligible, playing
an important role to place strangers, carrying the message of where a stranger originates (which
quarter or district in a town, which village in a rural setting, or which province of a country); thus
there are many apparent "dialects" of Slavey, for example, by which the linguist simply means that
there are many subtle variations among speakers who largely understand each other and recognize
that they are each speaking "the same way" in a general sense.
Modern-day linguists know that the status of language is not solely determined by linguistic criteria,
but it is also the result of a historical and political development. Romansh came to be a written
language, and therefore it is recognized as a language, even though it is very close to the Lombardic
alpine dialects. An opposite example is the case of Chinese, whose variations such as Mandarin and
Cantonese are often considered dialects and not languages, despite their mutual unintelligibility,
because the word for them in mandarin, "Fangyan", was mistranslated as dialect because it meant
regional speech.
See also Mesoamerican languages and Sarkar's criteria on dialects.

[edit] "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

Main article: A language is a dialect with an army and navy
The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich published the expression, "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey
un flot" ("‫" א שפראך איז א דיאלעקט מיט אן ארמײ און פלאט‬, "A language is a dialect with an
army and navy"; in Yivo-bleter.

[edit] Political factors

Modern Nationalism, as developed especially since the French Revolution, has made the distinction
between "language" and "dialect" an issue of great political importance. A group speaking a
separate "language" is often seen as having a greater claim to being a separate "people", and thus to
be more deserving of its own independent state, while a group speaking a "dialect" tends to be seen
not as "a people" in its own right, but as a sub-group, part of a bigger people, which must content
itself with regional autonomy.[citation needed] The distinction between language and dialect is thus
inevitably made at least as much on a political basis as on a linguistic one, and can lead to great
political controversy, or even armed conflict.
The classification of speech varieties as dialects or languages and their relationship to other
varieties of speech can thus be controversial and the verdicts inconsistent. English and Serbo-
Croatian illustrate the point. English and Serbo-Croatian each have two major variants (British and
American English, and Serbian and Croatian, respectively), along with numerous other varieties.
For political reasons, analyzing these varieties as "languages" or "dialects" yields inconsistent
results: British and American English, spoken by close political and military allies, are almost
universally regarded as dialects of a single language, whereas the standard languages of Serbia and
Croatia, which differ from each other to a similar extent as the dialects of English, are being treated
by many linguists from the region as distinct languages, largely because the two countries oscillate
from being brotherly to being bitter enemies. (The Serbo-Croatian language article deals with this
topic much more fully.)
Similar examples abound. Macedonian, although mutually intelligible with Bulgarian, certain
dialects of Serbian and to a lesser extent the rest of the South Slavic dialect continuum is considered
by Bulgarian linguists to be a Bulgarian dialect, in contrast with the contemporary international
view, and the view in the Republic of Macedonia which regards it as a language in its own right.
Nevertheless, before the establishment of a literary standard of Macedonian in 1944, in most
sources in and out of Bulgaria before the Second World War, the southern Slavonic dialect
continuum covering the area of today's Republic of Macedonia were referred to as Bulgarian
dialects.
In the 19th Century, the Tsarist Government of Russia claimed that Ukrainian was merely a dialect
of Russian and not a language in its own right. Since Soviet times, when Ukrainians were
recognised as a separate nationality deserving of its own Soviet Republic, such linguistic-political
claims had disappeared from circulation.
In Lebanon, the right-wing Guardians of the Cedars, a fiercely nationalistic (mainly Christian)
political party which opposes the country's ties to the Arab world, is agitating for "Lebanese" to be
recognized as a distinct language from Arabic and not merely a dialect, and has even advocated
replacing the Arabic alphabet with a revival of the ancient Phoenician alphabet - which missed a
number of characters to write typical Arabic phonemes present in Lebanese, and lost by Phoenician
(and Hebrew) in the second millennium BC. This is, however, very much a minority position - in
Lebanon itself as in the Arab World as a whole. The Varieties of Arabic are considerably different
from each other - especially those spoken in North Africa (Maghreb) from those of the Middle East
(the Mashriq in the broad definition including Egypt and Sudan) - and had there been the political
will in the different Arab countries to cut themselves off from each other, the case could have been
made to declare these varieties as separate languages. However, in adherence to the ideas of Arab
Nationalism, the Arab countries prefer to give preference to the Literary Arabic which is common to
all of them, conduct much of their political, cultural and religious life in it, and refrain from
declaring each country's specific variety to be a separate language.
Interestingly, such moves may even appear at a local, rather than a federal level. The US state of
Illinois declared "American" to be the state's official language in 1923,[4] although linguists and
politicians throughout much of the rest of the country considered American simply to be a dialect.
There have been cases of a variety of speech being deliberately reclassified to serve political
purposes. One example is Moldovan. In 1996, the Moldovan parliament, citing fears of "Romanian
expansionism," rejected a proposal from President Mircea Snegur to change the name of the
language to Romanian, and in 2003 a Moldovan-Romanian dictionary was published, purporting to
show that the two countries speak different languages. Linguists of the Romanian Academy reacted
by declaring that all the Moldovan words were also Romanian words; while in Moldova, the head
of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova, Ion Bărbuţă, described the dictionary as a politically
motivated "absurdity".
In contrast, spoken languages of Han Chinese are usually referred to as dialects of one Chinese
language, because the word "fangyan", which means regional speech, was mistranslated as dialect..
The article "Identification of the varieties of Chinese" has more details.
In the Philippines, the Commission on the Filipino Language declared all the indigenous languages
in the Philippines as dialects[citation needed] despite the great differences between them, as well as
the existence of significant bodies of literature in each of the major "dialects" and daily newspapers
in some.
In Germany of the 18th and 19th century, several thousand local languages of the continental west
Germanic dialect continuum were reclassified as dialects of modern New High German although
the vast majority of them was (and still is) mutually incomprehensible, despite the fact that they all
existed long before New High German,[5] which had at least in part been shaped as a compromise
or mediative language between these local languages. To further support the intended process of
nation building, a vague myth of some common germanic original language developed, and German
dialectology began to name dialect groups after presumed and real groups of historic tribes having
existed from BC to about 600 AD, from which they were assumed to have descended. Linguistic,
historic and archeological evidence for such connections is scarce, meanwhile several such ideas
were proven false, yet they lead to several pertaining misnomers in German dialectology. Today, all
diverse local languages under the Standard German umbrella are collectively referred to as "german
dialects",[6] the vast majority of German speakers still believe, they were variations of "original" or
even Standard German.
The significance of the political factors in any attempt at answering the question "what is a
language?" is great enough to cast doubt on whether any strictly linguistic definition, without a
socio-cultural approach, is possible. This is illustrated by the frequency with which the army-navy
aphorism discussed in the preceding section is cited.

[edit] Historical linguistics

Many historical linguists view any speech form as a dialect of the older medium of communication
from which it developed.[citation needed] This point of view sees the modern Romance languages
as dialects of Latin, modern Greek as a dialect of Ancient Greek, Tok Pisin as a dialect of English,
and Scandinavian languages as dialects of Old Norse. This paradigm is not entirely problem-free. It
sees genetic relationships as paramount; the "dialects" of a "language" (which itself may be a
"dialect" of a yet older tongue) may or may not be mutually intelligible. Moreover, a parent
language may spawn several "dialects" which themselves subdivide any number of times, with
some "branches" of the tree changing more rapidly than others. This can give rise to the situation in
which two dialects (defined according to this paradigm) with a somewhat distant genetic
relationship are mutually more readily comprehensible than more closely related dialects. In one
opinion this pattern is clearly present among the modern Romance tongues, with Italian and Spanish
having a high degree of mutual comprehensibility, which neither language shares with French,
despite some claiming that both languages are genetically closer to French than to each other:
[citation needed] In fact, French-Italian and French-Spanish relative mutual incomprehensibility is
due to French having undergone more rapid and more pervasive phonological change than have
Spanish and Italian, not to real or imagined distance in genetic relationship. In fact, Italian and
French share many more root words in common that do not even appear in Spanish. For example,
the Italian and French words for various foods, family members, and body parts are very similar to
each other, yet most of those words are completely different in Spanish. Italian "avere" and "essere"
as auxiliaries for forming compound tenses are used similarly to French "avoir" and "être", Spanish
only retains "haber" and has done away with "ser" in forming compound tenses, which are no
longer used in either Spanish or Portuguese. However, when it comes to pronunciation, some Italian
sounds are familiar to Spanish speakers, and native speakers of Italian and Spanish may attain some
limited degree of mutual comprehension using single words or short phrases.

[edit] Interlinguistics
One language, Interlingua, was developed so that the languages of Western civilization would act as
its dialects.[7] Drawing from such concepts as the international scientific vocabulary and Standard
Average European, linguists developed a theory that the modern Western languages were actually
dialects of a hidden or latent language. Researchers at the International Auxiliary Language
Association extracted words and affixes that they considered to be part of Interlingua's vocabulary.
[8] In theory, speakers of the Western languages would understand written or spoken Interlingua
immediately, without prior study, since their own languages were its dialects.[7] This has often
turned out to be true, especially, but not solely, for speakers of the Romance languages and educated
speakers of English. Interlingua has also been found to assist in the learning of other languages. In
one study, Swedish high school students learning Interlingua were able to translate passages from
Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian that students of those languages found too difficult to understand.
[9] It should be noted, however, that the vocabulary of Interlingua extends beyond the Western
language families.[8]

[edit] References
1. ^ Oxford English dictionary.
2. ^ Merriam-Webster Online dictionary.
3. ^ Finegan, Edward (2007). Language: Its Structure and Use (5th ed.). Boston, MA, USA:
Thomson Wadsworth. p. 348. ISBN 9781413030556.
4. ^ "American" as the Official Language of the United States.
5. ^ see also: Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache and Dachsprache#Change of roles during
history
6. ^ including Slavic, Frisian, Dutch, and Danish ones.
7. ^ a b Morris, Alice Vanderbilt, General report. New York: International Auxiliary Language
Association, 1945.
8. ^ a b Gode, Alexander, Interlingua-English Dictionary. New York: Storm Publishers, 1951.
9. ^ Gopsill, F. P., International languages: A matter for Interlingua. Sheffield: British
Interlingua Society, 1990.