Dialect vs. language: Learning starts at home

[muckefuck]

Today, as an antidote to clothes shopping and dorks in green plush hats, we sought solace in the basement of Borders on Boul Mich. To my surprise, it has the best foreign language reference section I've seen in this city outside of Hyde Park. My prize from this visit was: Okinawan-English wordbook : a short lexicon of the Okinawan language with English definitions and Japanese cognates. (All in romanisation for kana-ignorant wankers like me.) monshu looked over it and then asked, "So would you say it's more of a dialect or a language?"

I tried to fix him with the baleful stare of the blogger who's being told that he hasn't been read (or, if read, not understood). But this is monshu--that's about as effective as a fly-whisk on a vampire bat. It's a reminder of how far I still have to go in getting my views across even to intelligent people who are interested in language and willing to let me bang on about it.

I must say, I'm very impressed by the replies to my prefatory post, but--if anything--it's made the entry even harder to write due to all the points raised that deserve to have responses incorporated into it. One thing that I think needs to be clarified is that I think the question of whether something is a "dialect" or a "language" is separate from the question of what varieties are genetically related to each other. For one thing, judging from the number of times I've seen English called a Romance language, the average person doesn't seem to have a firm grasp of genetic relationships in a linguistic context. They don't realise that calling a certain variety a "dialect" may imply that there is a higher-order division--a "language"--that said "dialect" belongs to.

Questions about whether or not a variety is a "language" are fundamentally questions about status. I often see comments dismissing various forms of speech as "not a real language", implying that its speakers are trying to claim a distinction for it to which it is not entitled. My impression is that the popular definition of "languages" in the Western world is very much influenced by their reification as objects of classroom study. That is, a "real language" is something you can take a class in. There are textbooks that teach it and readers written in it, a country (or countries) in which it is the official and ubiquitous means of communication. People read newspapers, watch movies, and sing songs in it.

The more a variety diverges from this prototype, the less secure people are about calling it a "language" and a minority group's struggle for "language" status for their native variety necessarily presumes an effort to obtain all of these characteristics. The chief problem that I see with this model is that it is really quite specific to a European/North American context where natural (i.e. not learned through formal instruction) multilingualism is foreign to the majority. Try to apply it to societies in much of Asia or Africa, where multilingualism and diglossia are the norm, and it quite falls apart.

That is where the pseudo-scientific criterion of "mutual intelligibility" is invoked, to provide a heuristic where political factors are an unreliable guide. But, as I mentioned in comments previously, this seemingly useful criterion is fundamentally subjective, relying on question-begging, uninterrogated assumptions of what it means to "understand" another speaker. Where it contradicts political considerations (e.g. in Scandinavia), it is conveniently ignored.

Comments

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

textbooks that teach it and readers written in it, a country (or countries) in which it is the official and ubiquitous means of communication. People read newspapers, watch movies

Have you read Ben Anderson's Imagined Communities?
Discussions on nationhood and nationalism have trodden this ground for a while - giving language a high place in the whole business of nation contruction. It's interesting to see the same thing approached from the linguistic side. Perhaps, to over-generalise a very little bit, languages are difinitively things that nations have (and the two things co-define each other), while dialects can only be the province of minorities. If you buy into the idea that 'national'-style sovereignty originated in Europe and/or European colonies, this would seem to support your second point about language exclusivity.

I'm agnostic on the issue of whether 'nations' originated in Europe (it seems to me like one of those back-formations historians are always working with, which don't appear obvious to people living life forwards), but if there is, indeed, a close correlation with monolingualism, then that's definitely... erm... suggestive.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Imagined communities, but it sounds like my cup of tea.

Nationalism, nation-states, and national languages certainly seem to have developed in tandem. The logic of one nation, one country, one language simultaneously drove both the unification of Germany and dissolution of Austria-Hungary. It caused Turkey to reinvent itself practically overnight as a country where the letters Q, W, and X are banned as threats to national integrity and a new nationality, "the Kurds", to emerge where previously there had been only a patchwork of different clans, sects, and communities.

But it's a good question how much of this concept of "nation" is a Western invention, given the long-standing existence of Korea, Japan, and China. China, being far more linguistically and culturally diverse than the first two, is an especially interesting example of how people can come to identify so firmly with a state and the sense of nationhood it embodies that they are willing to subjugate their local ethnic identities to it.