How Should We Define Languages and Dialects?

When is a language A language?

What constitutes a language?

And I, sort of, am thinking about this question as I'm heading off on my

trip to Denmark, Sweden, and Poland.

Uh, and I've been practicing my Danish and my Polish, my

Swedish is already fairly good.

And so then I think to myself, well, Danish and Swedish and

Norwegian are very, very close.

They're kind of mutually comprehensible.

The Danes have an easier time understanding the

Swedes than the Norwegians.

The Swedes have a harder time understanding the Danes, but essentially

the vocabulary is very, very similar.

The structure is very, very similar, and yet they are

recognized as separate languages.

Now I move on to Polish, which I've been essentially only listening to and reading,

and I don't know how I'm gonna do there.

I will certainly do some videos when I'm in Poland.

You know, in Denmark, I might do some videos and you'll see that

I'll still be speaking Swedish, but they'll understand me.

I, I've, I don't think I'll be pronouncing Danish, but when I'm in Poland, I'm in

a totally different language system.

So if I'm gonna try to say anything, I'm gonna have to say it in Polish.

Now I know other Slavic languages, but they're sufficiently different

and, and no one suggests that Polish is actually Czech or Ukrainian or.

It's a separate language.

There is no issue there whatsoever, but these languages influence each other.

So if you say take, uh, Czeck and Slovak, now those are considered

separate languages, but they're so similar that Czecks and Slovaks

have absolutely no difficulty understanding, understanding each other.

So why is that two separate languages?

Question.

All right.

Uh, a similar situation, uh, occurs in, in the Balkans where, okay, Slovenian is

somewhat of an outlier, but, uh, Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian are so similar that

probably, you know, differences within those countries can be as great as the

differences between those languages.

And yet there are some people who say, well, I speak, you know, I'm a Serbian.

I don't speak Croatian.

Uh, but a majority of people there, from what I've heard, agree that

it's essentially one language.

Although Serbian does, can use Cyrillic alphabet, but also does

use the Latin alphabet at times.

I don't fully understand why they use the one or the other.

Um, also in the Balkans you have Macedonian and Bulgarian

that are very similar.

Again, I don't speak either of those languages, so, so you start to see

where sort of the political situation tends to determine whether a a, a form

of a language is considered a language.

In other words, is there a country there?

Uh, but that's not necessarily clear either because, you know, in Canada we

have the people in Quebec and in New Brunswick and elsewhere in Canada who

speak French, but we have two languages.

So it's a bilingual country.

The the situation of Ukrainian, there are people in Russia who don't

want to admit that the Ukrainian language exists when in fact...

I don't know the full story of the evolution of Ukrainian and,

and the Belarusian language.

I think they were essentially the Ruthenian language, and that

was one form of say, Eastern Slavic languages and Russian.

It was a sort of a different form and the, uh, lexical distance, in other

words, the vocabulary uh, as between, you know, Russian and Ukrainian is

actually more distant than say the relationship between Ukrainian and Polish.

Getting back to my Polish situation, and of course there are all kinds of

historical reasons why that's the case.

If we look at, at Asia, for example, there's 90 million speakers of

Cantonese, yet Cantonese, is it a language or is it a dialect?

The interesting thing is that most Cantonese speakers consider

themselves to be Chinese and are not that interested in having a separate

language status for Cantonese.

To the best of my knowledge, some do, but a majority don't.

The ones that I have met, they don't make a big deal out of, of the fact

that Cantonese is a separate language.

They're happy to speak Cantonese.

They have Cantonese radio, but they're Chinese and they speak Chinese.

Um, you know, in Taiwan you have this Min Nan language, which is also spoken

in the southern part of Fujian Province.

That seems to be more recognized as a separate language, although again, I

can't, I'm not an expert, so maybe it's just considered a dialect of, of Chinese.

You often hear Chinese languages, what I would consider to be languages,

are considered dialects because that's how the people who speak those

languages seem to look upon them.

From what I can tell, um, I'm not knowledgeable about differences between

Indonesian and, and, and Malaysian, for example, or, you know, Thai and,

and Laotian or any of those situations.

I'm not at all familiar with them.

Uh, so at what point is it a language?

At what point is it a dialect?

If you go back to Europe, of course, uh, there used to be a lot more

regional languages in France, in Italy, in Germany, for example.

And then gradually there was this sort of centralizing trend in the

19th century in particular as part of the sort of national awakening.

So the Germans gotta have one language, the French have gotta have one language,

and they and the Italians, and they ended up essentially discouraging and in some

cases depressing or even forbidding people from speaking these regional languages.

In Spain, the regional languages seem to have survived better.

So Catalan and uh, and Gallego, Galician, uh, is still there as a regional

language within the romance group.

Of course, Basque is a another regional language, and even within

the Catalan language, some people in the Balearic Islands or Valencia say

that their language is different.

It's a different language.

Or is it Catalan?

Again, I don't know.

I'm not in those discussions.

But there is a sort of, sort of subjective nature as to what

we consider to be a language.

Um, you know, I I, I have no familiarity with Nahuatl, for example, in Mexico,

but I understand that there are some interesting situations with Nahuatl

or Guaraní in Paraguay that they're most closely related, sort of Native

North or Native American language may not be the one that's nearby, but

sometimes there's one from further away.

But they are certainly recognized as languages.

We have a case of Esperanto.

There is no Esperanto country, but people who speak Esperanto feel very

strongly that it's an important language.

So maybe the decision on whether something is a, a language or not, or a dialect

that should depend on what the speakers of that language think and believe.

I think if, if, uh, the speaker of a certain language says, I speak language

X, it's a language, it's not a dialect.

I think we have to accept that.

Uh, and if that is, then, if that gains general acceptance, then not only is

the speaker of that language saying it's not a dialect, it's a language.

But if we accept it, then it gains general acceptance and then that then

becomes a language and not a dialect, but it's, it's a difficult situation.

You know, people might refer to, say the, uh, Haitian, uh, what do they

call it, Creole, uh, sometimes the term patois is used to describe a sort

of, you know, uh, a hybrid language.

But look at the languages of Europe that, um, you know, emanated from,

from Latin, uh, in France and in, in, uh, Spain and so forth.

The Iberian Peninsula, they must have been some form of patois, even English,

which is a, a hodgepodge mixture of, I guess there's some Celtic words in

there I don't know, but predominantly Germanic words and, and words not so

much from the Romans, it turns out, but more from the Norman French and out of

that evolution, patois, whatever you want to call it uh, came the language

that is known today as English.

So the fact that a language is a mixture of other languages or that

is an sort of process of evolution, none of that is, is disqualifying.

None of that is strange.

It's all a part of how languages evolve and, uh, ultimately the decision

on whether a patois or a Creole or a dialect is a language or not

becomes and remains quite subjective.

So I look forward to lots of comment from people who know a lot

more about this subject than I do.

Thank you for listening.