[Lingtyp] Suggestion: “Lect” instead of “language/dialect”

[JOO, Ian [Student]]

Dear all:

I have a suggestion:
Let’s stop using “language” or “dialect” to refer to specific language varieties. Let’s call them “lects”.
Reason:
When conducting typological research, we oftne have to choose whether to call a language variety a “language” or “dialect”.
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?
In such cases, there is no clear-cut answer. This is because the distinction between language and dialect is inherently sociocultural.
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.
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."
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.
In the end, because the dialect/language distinction is sociocultural, we should not employ sociocultural terms to refer to genealogical divisions.
As an alternative, I suggest abandoning this dichotomy altogether and referring to any language variety as a lect.
If we want to refer to two related lects as a whole, we can refer to them as a supralect.
If we want to refer to the different varieties of a single lect, we can refer to them as sublects.
For example:
Swiss German is a dialect of the German language. -> Swiss German is a sublect of the German supralect.
The Chinese language consists of many dialects, such as Mandarin and Cantonese. -> The Chinese supralect consists of many sublects, such as Mandarin and Cantonese.
The main difference is that this is not a binary distinction, but multi-layered distinction.
For example, the Chinese supralect has Cantonese as a sublect, which also has Guangzhou Cantonese, Hong Kong Cantonese, etc. as sublects, and so on.
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.
As for the term “language”, I suggest only using it to refer to the language as a phenomenon (langage in French), not specific varieties (langue in French), such as in “the human language.”
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).
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.

From Hong Kong,
Ian
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