LL-L: "Language varieties" LOWLANDS-L, 22.NOV.2000 (06) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: Sandy Fleming [sandy at scotstext.org]
Subject: "Language varieties"

> From: Stefan Israel [stefansfeder at yahoo.com]
> Subject: "Language varieties"
>
> Ethan Barrett asked:
> Language vs dialect
>
> > how do we
> > distinguish seperate languages from seperate dialects of the
> > same language?
>
> ouch- that's a question that's bedeviled this list repeatedly,
> and as a trained linguist, I can tell you-  there is no reliable
> criterion to determine whether related varietes should be
> considered dialects or languages.  It's not like boiling water,
> that has a clear and abrupt transition at 100 degrees C;
> language varities won't have an abrupt transition (unless

True enough, but we could compare the "dialect/language" question with
another sort of question about temperature - the one where someone's about
to go outside and asks someone who's just come in, "Is it cold outside?" The
answer is partly subjective and partly objective - it depends on such things
as the actual temperature outside, whether there's a wind, the person's
tolerance to the cold, how well wrapped up the person was when he was
outside, and so on. If you put such a question to a _group_ of people who
have just come in, you can expect differences of opinion in the answers, but
this doesn't mean the question is pointless - it can still help you to
decide whether to put a coat on or not.

It seems to me that whatever it might take to satisfy linguists on the
question, people do have certain ways of judging to their own satisfaction
whether a given dialect is a language in its own right or whether it's a
dialect of a more prestigious language. The sort of heuristics people use
seem to include such questions as:

1. Is it taught in school?
2. Is it taught as a subject at university?
3. Is there a literature written in it?
4. Is the language mutually unintelligable with the accepted lingua franca
of the region?
5. Does it need a full dictionary of its own rather than the unique portion
of its vocabulary being included in some other language's dictionary?

And so on. To take the question on the British mainland, for example,
English can answer such a resounding "yes" to the first three questions that
it's taken as the lingua franca and the fourth question becomes irrelevant.
So people judge English as a language. Welsh and Gaelic are strong on the
first three and absolute on 4. and 5., so again, people judge these as
languages. Some traditional English dialects such as Geordie and Wessexian
do not too badly on 4. but fail miserably on the other four, and so are
judged by many people to be dialects of English. Scots is somewhere in
between - it would probably score about as highly as English on 5., score
over 50% on 4. (reading it is difficult for English monoglots, hearing it
even harder), it scores quite highly on 3. (there is lots of quality and
popular literature, some of global significance), it is also well studied in
universities, sometimes offered as a course option, although it's quite weak
on 1.

I think that people who have a good grasp of the position of Scots with
respect to other languages could only conclude from this that Scots really
needs to be treated as a separate language. The controversy arises due to
ignorance of the answers to these questions - Scots speakers find Scots so
easy to understand, they can't imagine it not being intelligable to the
English (so misjudge question 4.), the larger dictionaries of the language
are rarely seen in shops or public libraries, the literature is there but
most of it molders in secondhand bookshops. All this "darkness" leads Scots
speakers to misjudge these questions and conclude that they speak a mere
dialect of English.

You could of course extend this list of questions - people do sometimes take
political considerations into account in reaching their conclusion, for
example.

Sandy
http://scotstext.org
A dinna dout him, for he says that he
On nae accoont wad ever tell a lee.
                          - C.W.Wade,
                    'The Adventures o McNab'

----------

From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject: Language varieties

Sandy,

I like your model list of test questions (above) a great deal and think it can
be really helpful.

The only one of the criteria I am not so sure about is the first.  The reason
is that a language may for political reasons not be allowed to be taught or
used in schools, even those that are clearly languages by most people's
standards.  There are plenty of examples of this in the world.  Rather than
give "exotic" ones, let me give two in the Lowlandic area.  Yes, Afrikaans and
Low Saxon/Low German are now considered languages (though not yet in the minds
of some).  However, there was a time when they were not *allowed* to be used
in school, when children would in fact be punished for using them (Afrikaans
for a period under British rule of South Africa).  Was this not so also in the
case of Scots?  Would you then say that these three varieties scored lower
before official recognition, that they where then closer to "dialect" due to
administrative prohibition?  In other words, I am hesitant to accept this as a
criterion because it seems to assume that the makers of linguistic and
educational policies are unbiased or neutral or follow no political direction,
or that the political direction they follow is benevolent.  All too often
governments deliberately prohibit use and teaching of minority languages in
order to make them go away, i.e., die out.  Does your criterion No. 1 not give
them the power to influence the language-or-dialect status of a given variety?

The second criterion can also be picked at a bit, because dialects can be
subjects in research and teaching.  However, yes, this would probably be
within the context of the languages to which they are regarded as belonging.

Generally speaking, though, I think your analysis is going in the right
direction.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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