Talk:Dialect

Comments

The author of this seems to think that non-standardness is an essential part of the definition of dialect. My understanding of the way linguists use this term is that that is not part of the definition at all. The degree of standardness or non-standardness is irrelevant to the question of whether a dialect should be so called. Michael Hardy 21:59 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

You're right. The problem is rather the common non-linguist usage of the words "language" and "dialect".

I prefer the definitions:

"A dialect is a variety spoken by a geographically defined speech community."

"A sociolect is a variety spoken by a socially defined speech community."

-- Ruhrjung 05:35 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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Dialects have not died out in France. If you click on the Occitan link you wil discover it's still widely spoken. Perhaps another country could be adduced as an example, or the statement could be clarified. Trontonian

Since it hasn't been clarified, I removed this bit: "In many countries dialects pretty much died out, for example in France, where many dialects and languages like Occitan (once a literary language) were spoken." Dialects are widespread in France, as are other languages. Breton, Basque, Alsatian, Corsican, and Flemish are widely spoken. Alsatian is often considered to be a dialect, come to think of it, and it could be argued that Flemish is one. Trontonian

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I have read that linguistics (maybe not sociolinguistics) refers to varieties of language, whose variations may be shared by members of similar class or education level (the sociolect or social dialect of above) or by members a certain region or town (the traditional dialect). The standard variety of a language is considered a dialect along with less prestigious varieties.

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Your socalled "valid" information does not help to understand the problem, it only confuses. Read the Abstandsprache, Ausbausprache, Dachsprache concept and try to understand it and you will learn that it works very well. Get aout of you language closet! (User:145.254.191.8, unsigned)

English-speaking linguists don't use those words, and they don't define 'dialect' in the way you want them to. Salsa Shark 02:31, 28 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Search Google for ausbausprache or ausbau language in english texts and you will find they do, even if it's only a few educated linguists and not ordinary people, e.g.:

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Language.

http://www.arts.ed.ac.uk/celtic/papers/wmclparl.html.

http://www.rdg.ac.uk/slals/wp6/sallabank.pdf

http://www.bib.uab.cat/pub/quaderns/11385790n7p167.pdf

http://www.translatorscafe.com/cafe/MegaBBS/thread-view.asp?threadid=956&start=1

Nationmaster is a copy of Wikipedia contents, thus you can also quote Language (or maybe an old edit, in case that fact was deleted in the meantime). andy 11:26, 28 Jan 2004 (UTC)

http://www.uni-trier.de/uni/fb2/anglistik/Projekte/stubbs/german.htm indicates that Ausbausprache is a german word often used by english speaking linguists.

The dutch wikipedia site nl:Standaardtaal uses the Abstanssprache/Ausbausprache/Dachsprache/dialect-continuum-concept without naming the german terms. This concept was developped mainly to explain why Dutch and German are two different languages and why many German dialect are not, even though many German dialects differ more from standard German as the Dutch languages does. This concept today is used to solve many disputes about the question what is a "language" and what is a "dialect", e.g in the case of Scotts, Galego, the french based languages spoken on the channel-island and so on. PLEASE restrain your preconceptions against Germans and German scholarship!

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I will continue to label your work as vandalism, for the following reasons.

1. Your argumentative tone ("Dialect IS a linguistic term ...") and your use of "if only" in the last paragraph are not only unscholarly, but violate the neutral point of view espoused by Wikipedia. Such comments are fully appropriate for your own user page (of course you haven't got one - you haven't got the guts to sign in with a proper user name, so of course you haven't got a user page) but they have no place in an article. I will continue to delete such subjective arguments.

2. Your accusation that I - and others who are "watching" this article - are harbouring "preconceptions about Germans and German scholarship" proves to me that YOU are NOT a scholar. Your accusation is completely false. In a lot of ways, I consider myself to be pro-German - and I see nothing wrong with the Abstanssprache/Ausbausprache/Dachsprache concept AS A USEFUL TOOL for analyzing the dialect/language problem. However, it is NOT the only possible frame of reference. It is good - as far as it goes. Other frames of reference yield different results, however. To say that only the Abstanssprache/Ausbausprache/Dachsprache paradigm is correct is a subjective judgement, not an objective fact, and should not be presented as a fact.

3. I have read the associated articles. There is nothing wrong with the concept as an analytical tool akin to a measuring device. When you measure something, do you use inches or centimeters? They yield different results, don't they? But neither renders the other invalid. Likewise, there are a number of tools for analyzing the relationship between dialects and languages. They give different results that are not directly comparable. *That is a major part of why the distinction between a language and a dialect is a very subjective one.

As I said, the paradigm you shared has its merits. I would hope that somebody (maybe even you) will incorporate it into the article, along with the other analytical tools that are discussed. If nobody else does it, I'll do it myself when I can squeeze in the time over the next few days. (David Cannon 28 January 2004 02.30am)

could you explain how the Abstanssprache/Ausbausprache/Dachsprache categorization system applies to Chinese. Mandarin is clearly a Dachsprache, but I have no idea how say Cantonese, Min-Nan, and Shanghaiese fit into the system. -- User:Roadrunner

It only fits in this categorization because originally it was used only as a written language in a form of writing, that does not tell anything about the pronunciation. Like 2+2=4 can be unterstood by everybody, who uses western numbers, Chinese characters can be used by everybody, who ever learned them, all the same how they are pronunced. Many Japanese can read a text written in Chinese characters, without having leanred Chinese at all, only because the same characters are also used as "Kanji" in the Japanese writing system. Therefore replacing traditional Chinese writing by the much easier Pinyin system would destroy Chinese unity and Cantonese cold not be seen as a dialect of Mandarin, because it is so different, thus a Abstandsprache. Shanghaiese is not that different, it could be integrated in a system written in Pinyin, as Swiss dialects are intergrated in the Standart German system. Vietnamese adopted a latin based spelling system in order not to be incorporated into "Chinese" and Korean developes "Hangul" for the same reason. Both Vietnamese and Korean are Abstandsprachen in regard to "Chinese". The Chinese writing system in a way can work like a programming language, which can easily used by speakers of different languages.

Reading the Dutch (nl:Dialect) and German (de:Dialekt) article about dialect may be VERY helpful. With the obove mentioned concept the long lasting confict if Dutch is a German dialect was solved! [[]]

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For your information, I'm not even American - as you would know if you had bothered to check my user page. Irrelevant controversies such as the Iraq War have NO bearing on a discussion of linguistics, and give the appearance of a man grasping for straws. Stop bringing up irrelevant side-issues. (David Cannon)Davidcannon 19:21, 28 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the rearrangment, incorporating and giving equal preference to the viewpoints of numerous contributors. Sometimes a hardy controversy may result in a better mutual understanding of different viewpoints. "The evil vandalizer"

• Thank you, too. I'm sorry I called you a vandal - I no longer think you were. Just a passionate person who got a bit carried away; I can see that I got a bit carried away, too. Yes, vigorous debates can eventually lead to a more comprehensive article, too. Again, I'm sorry I used the word "vandal" too carelessly. (David CannonDavidcannon 02:07, 29 Jan 2004 (UTC))

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Hey folks. I just wanted to point out, in this bit:

Parallel examples abound. Macedonian, although mutually intelligible with Bulgarian and often considered to be a Bulgarian dialect, is touted by Macedonian nationalists as a language in its own right. Taiwanese nationalists make similar claims for Taiwanese to be recognized as a language, rather than a Mandarin dialect.

This is misleading. You begin by talking about Bulgarian and Macedonian being mutually intelligible languages/dialects, and then go on to suggest that Mandarin and Taiwanese are similar. This is not correct. If anything, this parallelism could only be used to suggest the dynamic nature of the dialect/ language divide: that is, Macedonian/Bulgarian -- considered seperate languages for political reasons, in fact very closely related, and Taiwanese/Mandarin -- considered dialects for political reasons, but in fact not more closely related than French and Spanish and certainly not mutually intelligible.

Further, no one has ever suggested that Taiwanese is a dialect of Mandarin; even the very pro-Mandarin ROC government does not suggest this. Rather, it is suggested that Taiwanese (and Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hakka, etc) are all dialects of an overarching 'Chinese Language' with anchors in a common written form. Whether or not this is true is more a question of politics than Linguistics, of course -- as is pretty much any argument about languages and dialects, as this article demonstrates quite well.

At any rate, I would suggest that someone clarify that Mandarin is not to Taiwanese as Bulgarian is to Macedonian, which is currently being (falsely) implied.

Frisian

Would Frisian really be part of the Dutch-Low German-German continuum? As far as I have understood it, it is quite different, although it has borrwed a lot of vocabulary from these aforementioned languages..

topolects

should topolects be included within this section on dialects?

top·o·lect (tŏp'ə-lĕkt') n. A set of similar dialects constituting any of the larger distinct regional varieties of a language. For example, Mandarin Chinese is a topolect that includes the dialects of Beijing and Nanjing, and is distinct from Hakka, another topolect of Chinese.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2004, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Drex44

Mutual intelligibility

One part of the article states there is no clear definition that can distinguish between a language and a dialect, and experts can disagree, depending on context. This is my understanding, as well. But in the Dialect or language section, the entirely unsourced second paragraph of the section intro makes a claim that "mutual intelligibility" is the deciding factor linguistically speaking between language and dialect, and says, two varieties are said to be dialects of the same language if being a speaker of one variety confers sufficient knowledge to understand and be understood by a speaker of the other; otherwise, they are said to be different languages. I dispute that. For one reason, that would make the mutually unintelligible varieties in England "languages". This definition also seems to have affected the definition in the guideline at WP:DIALECT, and it seems problematic to me that an unreferenced section in this article may have influenced a guideline. (Or, is it the other way round? Either way, not good.) This section badly needs some sourcing.

The subsections after the section intro contain a more nuanced approach, including discussion of the completely non-linguistic (i.e., political, social, and other) factors, and do mention that many linguists refuse to be pinned down on the question. Given that, besides being unsourced, to the extent that the section intro is like an article lead, it does not properly summarize the remainder of the section.

There is an additional problem with the quoted definition, namely that it assumes that "mutual intelligibility" is a symmetric relation, when it is not. Spanish is far more intelligible to monolingual native speakers of Portuguese, than vice versa. Does this make Spanish and Portuguese "dialects" for the Portuguese linguist, and "languages" for the Spanish linguist? I'm sure many other (and better) examples exist. Mathglot (talk) 00:55, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

Indeed intelligibility is not a symmetric relation – that's the reason for adding the qualifier "mutual". Kanguole 14:13, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

However, mutual intelligibility is not a transitive relation, so it does not yield a well-defined notion of "same language". It is also difficult to measure objectively. Kanguole 16:45, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

The insoluble problem of language/dialect?

This, from the lead (italics and bold added): "The dialects of the same language are mainly distinguished from each other by differences in linguistic features such as phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary."

Yet the same is true of closely cognate languages that are historical remnants of a dialects of stage of the source language whence they evolved and that no longer exists. In present-day synchrony they cannot be categorized honestly (i.e. with empirical accuracy) as dialects of anything other than the now non-existent common source.

Illustration: Sp. Nuestra casa no es grande = It. La nostra casa non è grande = Cat. La nostra casa no és gran = Gal. A nosa casa non é grande = Port. A nossa casa não é grande = Sic. A nostra casa nun è granni; common lexicon partly forced for comprehension, but cf. = Fr. Notre maison n'est pas grande = Occ. Nòstra ostal es pas grand. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 18:03, 12 June 2026 (UTC)