<div dir="ltr">Isn't that more or less the same proposal Cysouw and Good made in 2013? <a href="https://dlc.hypotheses.org/623">https://dlc.hypotheses.org/623</a></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">El vie, 19 de nov. de 2021 a la(s) 16:48, JOO, Ian [Student] (<a href="mailto:ian.joo@connect.polyu.hk">ian.joo@connect.polyu.hk</a>) escribió:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman">Dear all:</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">I have a suggestion:</span><br>
<strong style="font-family:Times New Roman">Let’s stop using “language” or “dialect” to refer to specific language varieties. Let’s call them “lects”.</strong><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">Reason:</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">When conducting typological research, we oftne have to choose whether to call a language variety a “language” or “dialect”.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">For example, when a researcher encounters in the field two language varieties that are mutually intelligible to some degree, are they dialects of the same language, or two different languages?</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">In such cases, there is no clear-cut answer. This is because</span><strong style="font-family:Times New Roman"> the distinction between language and dialect is inherently sociocultural</strong><span style="font-family:Times New Roman">.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">We can bring up several reasons to call a variety either a language or a dialect, such as mutual intelligibility and genealogical distance. But in the end, intelligibility and genealogical distance have little to do
with language/dialect dichotomy. There are many mutually unintelligible varieties socially labelled dialects, and vice versa.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">We often set European languages as standards to argue for the languagehood of distinct varieties. For example, a researcher could say that “the intelligibility between A and B are lower than the intelligibility between
German and Dutch. Because German and Dutch are separate languages, A and B should also be considered separate languages."</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">But such usage of European languages as standards is essentially Eurocentric. There’s no reason why the scale of dialecthood in Europe should apply to non-European languages.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">In the end, </span><strong style="font-family:Times New Roman">because the dialect/language distinction is sociocultural, we should not employ sociocultural terms to refer to genealogical divisions.</strong><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">As an alternative,</span><strong style="font-family:Times New Roman"> I suggest abandoning this dichotomy altogether and referring to any language variety as a lect.</strong><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">If we want to refer to two related lects as a whole, we can refer to them as a </span><strong style="font-family:Times New Roman">supralect.</strong><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">If we want to refer to the different varieties of a single lect, we can refer to them as </span><strong style="font-family:Times New Roman">sublects.</strong><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">For example:</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">Swiss German is a dialect of the German language. -> Swiss German is a sublect of the German supralect.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">The Chinese language consists of many dialects, such as Mandarin and Cantonese. -> The Chinese supralect consists of many sublects, such as Mandarin and Cantonese.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">The main difference is that this is not a binary distinction, but multi-layered distinction.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">For example, the Chinese supralect has Cantonese as a sublect, which also has Guangzhou Cantonese, Hong Kong Cantonese, etc. as sublects, and so on.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">Logically speaking, a family could be the highest layer of a lect (“Indo-European lect”, “Sino-Tibetan lect”), although there would be little practical need to employ the term “lect” in those contexts.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">As for the term “language”, I suggest only using it to refer to the language as a phenomenon (</span><em style="font-family:Times New Roman">langage</em><span style="font-family:Times New Roman"> in French), not specific
varieties (</span><em style="font-family:Times New Roman">langue </em><span style="font-family:Times New Roman">in French), such as in “the human language.”</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">I suggest that this could save us from the typologically meaningless debate over what is a language or a dialect (which could still be meaningful in sociolinguistics, just not in typology).</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">Please let me know what you think about this suggestion. I, for one, have decided to use the term “lect” instead of “language/dialect” throughout my doctoral thesis.</span></div>
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>From Hong Kong,
<div dir="auto">Ian</div>
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