Dialect versus language
The relevance of this to our work in BT should be obvious.
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https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-06-21/dialect-versus-language-whats-big-deal:70 in global code Skip to content PLAY HEART ROWS Main menu Arts, Culture & Media Dialect versus language what's the big deal? The World in Words June 27, 2017 3:30 PM EDT By Nina Porzucki facebook twitter share Comment dialect_language2.jpg Credit: Simon Evans This week on the podcast we step gingerly into scalding waters to explore: What is the difference between a language and dialect?
Player utilities PopoutShare Download File download Listen to the Story. Linguists hate to define it.
As a linguist I will not engage in trying to define language and trying to define dialect and Im not alone in that, said linguist Bojan Beli.
Hes certainly not alone.We reached out to linguists and language experts and were met with sigh after sigh.
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Each week on The World in Words, Patrick Cox and Nina Porzucki tell stories about languages and the people who speak them. SUBSCRIBE There are many rubrics that people cite as indicators of a dialect versus a language. Take mutual intelligibility. If two varieties of speech are mutually intelligible, surely they must be dialects of one language. But what happens when theyre not?
Then theres the old clich, coined apparently by a Yiddish scholar, A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Is language and dialect purely politics?
This week we visittwo regions where these labels might make you scratch your head: Scandinavia and the Balkans.
Show Contents:
00:00 Looking for new, nerdy, wordy podcasts?Take a listen to the new podcast Very Bad Words. Host Matt Fidler digs into taboos and naughty language
00:30 The line that Nina treads with hesitation ... distinguishing between language and dialect
01:30 As a linguist I will not engage in trying to define language and trying to define dialect and Im not alone in that, said linguist Bojan Beli
01:45 Linguists dont feel a sense of physics envy because they cant classify all speech as either a language or dialect says Lane Green, language columnist for The Economist
02:17 When does red become orange? When does a dialect become a language?
02:44 Charlotte Gooskens is a linguist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. She originally from Denmark. Danish is her mother tongue. And she loves the Swedish/Danish crime TV series called, The Bridge
04:06 Charlotte studies mutual intelligibility. The ability for Danes, and Swedes, and Norwegians to understand one another
04:33 Patrick reminisces about visiting the bridge between Copenhagen and Stockholm and shares the Danish and Swedish words for bridge
06:00 Norwegians, Swedes and Danes call their languages, neighbor languages
06:36 A brief political history of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden
08:10 Theres a joke that Norwegian is Danish with a Swedish accent
08:36 Mutual intelligibility is an asset to the region
09:11 The ability to speak across languages is called receptive multilingualism according to Charlotte
10:22 Danes often understand Swedes better than Swedes understand Danes. Why?
11:20 Charlotte studied the asymmetry of understanding between Swedes and Danes
13:50 Warm and fuzzy feelings for Swedish culture and that beloved character Pippi Longstocking
16:22 Its story time. Are you sitting comfortably?
18:45 The original concept of language was a function of literate societies
19:48The standard French, the standard German that we know are really just dialects that won a race
21:15 Using the power of the state to crush out linguistic diversity
21:50 Many nations have used language to knit a country together. Language has also been used to pull a country apart like in the former Yugoslavia
22:56 Robert Greenberg is a professor of linguistics and dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Auckland. He studies BCS (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian). He tells a story of being in Croatia in 1989
24:10 Visiting the grave of Ljudevit Gaj, a 19thcentury linguist and leader of a pan-Slavist movement
27:30 How mutually intelligible are Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian?
30:00 The new Croatian neologism for helicopter
30:47 Instead of naming the language, many people from the former Yugoslavia write and say, our language
31:26 Cigarettes in Bosnia have a health warning translated into three languages: Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian even though the sentences are virtually the same
A package of cigarettes in Bosnia featuring a health warning in three languages: Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. 32:00 In March 2016 many linguists and academics came to together to sign a Declaration of Common Language in Sarajevo
33:00 Ellen Elias Bursa worked on the English Translation Unit of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Haguefor six years . She witnessed sensitivities around language during the trials
34:43 Despite sensitivities about language, there was very little debate in the courtroom about what was being said
35:32 One of the few complaints about interpretation came from Vojislav eelj, a Serbian politician who spent 11 years in detention while he was on trial
37:13 So when does red become orange?
37:47 Why not just use another word altogether and get rid of language and dialect?
38:44 Thank you!Hit us up on Twitter @lingopodor leave us a review at Apple Podcasts
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Ah, the old divide between splitters and lumpers. Although it's an oversimplification, it is fair to say that too often historically there was a great deal of ethnocentrism involved in classification, or, dare I say it, racism? Two European language areas would be called "languages"; hence Dutch and German, or Spanish and Portuguese. Two African language areas that would be "dialects". Some of these latter would be much farther apart from each other than the European examples, but still the colonials couldn't acknowledge them as worthy of the term "language." The great problem for us in translation would be to determine which language area or dialect would be most effective in translation. Would a "central" dialect be understood widely? Would any dialect have enough prestige to ensure it would be read? Was a common language feasible? I could go on for pages.
"A language is a dialect with a navy" More important for our work, "A language is a dialect with a Bible." We have seen this over and over in some parts of the world, when Christian churches which are supposedly joined on the basis of language suddenly split into two, one of them insisting that their language is different from the language of the rest of the people in the group. They deserve their own association or their own church. And they definitely deserve their own Bible! I saw another form of this in Papua New Guinea. It is true that the "dialects" of the language had fairly important differences, but probably if they had all been served by one church they would have agreed to have a translation in one of the dialects. But instead, three different churches were working in three different dialects. So of course they all insisted that the dialect difference was too great and each one needed their own translation. Norm Mundhenk
Two points made in the podcast I think are relevant to the interesting comments made by Phil and Norm: 1. The issue of dialect vs. language is ultimately always a political one. 2. Categories in any field, including the "hard" sciences, are often not binary ( for example, where exactly on the color spectrum does orange become red?). These kinds of questions are seemingly insoluble other than in some arbitrary way, but nevertheless often make us think more clearly about the issues.