Back in 2014 I posted about The Most Common Language In Each US State—Besides English And Spanish; now, courtesy of Anshool Deshmukh, I present an update based on the 2019 U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey:
Tagalog is the second most commonly spoken language in American households (after English/Spanish) with 1.7 million speakers, even though it only reaches top spot in Nevada. Unsurprisingly, Louisiana and states bordering eastern Canada have a healthy number of French speakers.
Further analysis of these common languages reveals a fascinating story. […]
I’ll let you click the link for the map and the rest of the story, but it makes an interesting comparison to the earlier post. Thanks, Bonnie!
Translating the Census folks’ lumper “Chinese” category into “Mandarin + Cantonese” is sort of nice, but also sort of weird since I suspect the Census figures include additional Sinitic languages/topolects beyond those two … (as well as respondents who said “Chinese” w/o further specification and who cannot necessarily have been presumed to have meant Mandarin in 100% of the cases).
I agree.
Oh.
It’s a useful word.
Tagalog is the second most commonly spoken language in American households (after English/Spanish)
Eh? Then Tagalog is the _third_ most commonly spoken language. Or are we lumping “English/Spanish” as one language? That’s roughly as daft as lumping Mandarin/Cantonese.
And could someone explain what’s going on with Hawaii? The 2014 version said “Tagalog in Hawaii” [next after English/Spanish]. Also “In addition, Hawaiian is listed as a Pacific Island language, so following the ACS classifications, it was not included in the Native American languages map.”
The 2021 map seems to colour Hawaii ‘Ilocano+’ = “Ilocano, Samoan, Hawaiian, Marshallese or other Austronesian languages”. Well ok then English/Spanish _is_ also one language (IE+) which group should also include French, German, Portuguese, Dutch, …
Or are we lumping “English/Spanish” as one language? That’s roughly as daft as lumping Mandarin/Cantonese.
Clearly they’re not doing that; it’s just sloppy writing.
Yes, but if you were to add a term, what would it be? Wu isn’t going to work: 80 million Chinese people speak dozens of topolects that fit into that hypernym, but essentially none of them recognize its name 吴语 as applicable to what they speak.
AntC, they mean it’s second among the languages which aren’t English and Spanish, where Chinese is first.
It is bad writing.
As for what’s going on in Hawaii, my home, I don’t think they should have lumped Ilocano, Hawaiian, Samoan, etc. That said, Ilocano and Tagalog have vastly more speakers in Hawaii than Hawaiian, Samoan, Tongan, Chuukese, Pohnpeian, Paluan, etc. On the other hand, on our walk this morning, my wife and I noticed two cars in the neighborhood parked very close to one another. One had a Samoan Pride sticker and the other had a Tongan Pride license plate holder. Plenty of diversity here.
Lumping Lousiana French together with the French spoken here in Maine and the other northern New England states may be somehow convenient for the purveyors of these statistics,
but that doesn’t meld them into a single language.
Ilocano and Tagalog have vastly more speakers in Hawaii
Thank you. And if we’re lumping languages, Ilocano belongs more closely with Tagalog than with the Pacific Island languages including Hawaiian. Which would put us back to the 2014 result.
Perhaps it’s politically awkward to show non-Hawaiian as the more spoken language in Hawaii?
Regiolekt is used in German dialectology for the regional mesolects that cover much larger areas than the endangered dialects.
Wu doesn’t seem to have any unique shared innovations; apparently it’s a rather geography-based “everything else” category.
There’s perhaps a narrow Wu Chinese vs East- to Southern- China Regiolekts/topolects — which is what JC is reaching for.
“Historical linguists view Wu of great significance because it distinguished itself from other varieties of Chinese by preserving the voiced initials of the ancient Middle Chinese and by preserving the checked tone as a glottal stop.[2] The phonological divergence between Wu and other Chinese is significant, …” says wp of the narrow Wu — which would exclude Cantonese.
I notice the data for this exercise comes from an “American Community Survey”. Then does Mandarin/Cantonese work as an umbrella term for a ‘Community’? Does Ilocano+Tagalog rather than Ilocano+Pacifica excluding Tagalog?
Does Louisiana+Maine/Northern U.S. French? Or is Maine/Northern more of a community with Canadian French speakers?
from my parochial nyc perspective, “chinese” as an umbrella term for sinitic topolects/languages definitely goes far beyond cantonese & mandarin (which are likely still the largest subgroups here) – the big wave of fujianese immigrants around the turn of the century made that definitive for anyone who had doubts! and i’m sure that the sinitic diversity here is nothing compared to los angeles and other places on the pacific coast.*
and/but there are so many ways to play the lumping/splitting game here! if louisiana acadian french, massachusetts québecois french, and maine new brunswick french are all combined, should haitian kreyól (not to mention the other carribean and indian ocean frenches & creoles) be lumped in? should brazilian and cape verdean portugueses & creoles be split off from new england iberian portuguese? which arabics are prevalent in michigan and tennessee, and are they at all the same?
and why on earth would you lump pennsylvania anabaptist german with yiddish and not with, um, german? that lumping/splitting combination is just absurd, on any grounds except headgear (which last i heard was not a linguistic factor).
(i’m guessing the enigmatic “other west germanic languages” is trying to be a nod to the other anabaptist germans – unless there’s a frisian or flemish enclave somewhere in south carolina** – but i’d also put money on plautdeitsch & hutterite being listed as “german” in north dakota and putting german-speakers into first [third] place there***).
.
* the other big vernacular lumping here is “russian”, which gets used to talk about pretty much all immigrant communities from the u.s.s.r. and post-soviet states, whose home languages are as likely to be crimean tatar, bukhori/tajik, azeri, or georgian as russian. i’ve often wondered what percentage of the ny census numbers for “russian” are speakers who use it as a lingua franca alongside another cradle-tongue (and what percentage of the immigrant generation are first-generation russian-primary because of soviet state/social pressure).
** seems unlikely. a u.s. version of colonia dignidad seems more likely, but i’d expect that to have been set up in los alamos or langley.
*** and on pennsylviana dutch listed as “german” playing a similar role in the kentucky numbers.
How to lump and split these languages depends on what you’re going to do with them. If you’re looking for the ten most spoken languages in a region so you can make multilingual signs or ballots, then it doesn’t matter how you lump the tiny minority languages. If you are using them as proxies for ethnicities with different social status, then it makes sense to put Micronesians (lumped together and discriminated against in Hawai‘i) in a separate bin, but Yiddish, German and Pennsylvania Dutch in separate bins, etc.
headgear (which last i heard was not a linguistic factor)
On LanguageHat you say this?
No definition of Wu includes Cantonese. I’m talking about Wu as defined in its Wikipedia article, seemingly held together by nothing but shared retentions and geography.
All of these plus Mandarin and Cantonese are more closely related to each other ( = descended from Early Middle Chinese, Mandarin and Cantonese probably also from Late Middle Chinese) than to the Min topolects of Fujian (including Taiwanese).
AntC says: Perhaps it’s politically awkward to show non-Hawaiian as the more spoken language in Hawaii?
I don’t think so. I think Hawaiians and friends of the Hawaiian language have much to be proud of for bringing the language back from the edge of extinction, but I don’t think anyone feels that it would be politically awkward to “admit” that Hawaiian is spoken by only a sliver even of the sizable native Hawaiian population here. (It’s very hard to estimate the percentage of the “Hawaiian” population for many reasons, but it must be between 20 and 35%.)
Here’s a good short history of Hawaiian language revitalization:
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/06/22/452551172/the-hawaiian-language-nearly-died-a-radio-show-sparked-its-revival
Most non-Hawaiian residents, if they think about it at all, probably feel some reflected pride from the Hawaiians’ own cultural resurgence. This is quite natural, too, given that most people here have family members and ancestors of multiple ancestries. People respect Hawaiian culture, Japanese culture, Chinese culture, Filipino culture, etc., etc., because they themselves have a little bit of all those cultures, if not in themselves directly, at least through extended families, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. But none of this prevents crazy bureaucratic decisions, often involving poor choices about statistics, often made by those unfamiliar with the local situation.
the big wave of fujianese immigrants around the turn of the century …
(I presume you mean around the turn of _last_ century. I also find it hard to remember I’m living in another century than the majority of my life.)
To compare with the Sinitic communities in New Zealand: I’d say the splitting is much more by politics than place-of-origin or cradle tongues. We too had a wave of Fujianese (and some Cantonese) late C19th /post WWI/pre PRC; then a wave escaping PRC (predominantly Shanghainese, some HK/Canton); now those coming to get a Western education before returning to PRC either to visit family or permanently (mostly Mandarin-speaking even if that isn’t their cradle tongue).
But yeah, how to capture that in an “American Community Survey” where nobody will give a straight answer wrt PRC.
Do people now commonly use “turn of the century” to mean the time around 2000? At least, as much as they did in 1921 to mean the time around 1900?
Technically, sure, but if it’s actually a fossilized expression, like fin de siécle, then I’d rather not change my habits needlessly.
@Y: We discussed the usage a little bit some years back. I don’t think the historical usage data that I found readily available at the time gave an entirely clear picture of what people meant by “turn of the century,” or the even more fraught “turn of the [Nth] century,” at various times in the last 120 years.
@AntC @Y: i use “turn of the century” for the most recent turn of the millennium with active irony and a certain amount of erisian (erisiastic?) intent, but “the century” for me is almost always the XXth.
@DE: i was hoping for someone to bite that bait harder!
It got a chuckle out of me, but I neglected to express my appreciation in such a way that Hatters could see it.
There is a danger of overinterpreting sparse data. When I was in Mexico in 2003 I made a mental note of the licence plates I saw, with the following results:
Mexico: virtually all
USA: 5
Portugal: 2 (on two separate occasions in two different places)
Luxemburg: 1
Guatemala: 1
USA and Guatemala correspond more or less to what one would guess, but Portugal and Luxemburg?
I expect A Seleção and d’Roud Léiwen were playing a friendly in Mexico to avoid the violence associated with their rabid followers at home.
I just happened to be reviewing a document released last week by the (U.S.) Census Bureau, giving its latest “Determinations Under Section 203” pursuant to the Voting Rights Amendments of 2006, in which it identifies which political subdivisions of the U.S. (usually at the county level, but sometimes at a lower level than that) have per some complex formulae a sufficiently large presence of a qualifying “language minority group” as to obligate the local authorities to provide “minority language assistance” in the administration of elections.* I was interested to see that they now use “Chinese (including Taiwanese)” as one of their labels, although in context their labels are more ethnic/political than strictly linguistic, which leads them into some odd places like using “Bangladeshi” as a label for a “language minority group” even though LEP U.S. citizens who are fluent in Bengali will inevitably be a mix of immigrants from Bangladesh and India (as well as probably a handful from some third place in the Bengali-speaking diaspora).
*Thus the focus is e.g. not on what percentage of the total population in the given jurisdiction speaks Spanish at home, but what percentage of the potential voter population (U.S. citizens and over 18) speaks Spanish AND has limited understanding of English.
Phonemic hats.
In Minnesota the map lumps together “Amharic, Somali, and other Afro-Asiatic languages” – it’s not clear if Arabic is included in the count, and in any case this makes as much sense as counting English, Polish, and Spanish as a single language elsewhere.
Coming in late, but this is a fun, generally accurate, and only moderately fluffy pop piece of journalism about an interesting topic. and “oh sure” or “oh, I guess” would probably be the author’s best response to almost all of the criticisms, except for the one which seems to call English and Spanish a single languages, which I suspect was just a slip.
Criteria are seldom purely linguistic and sometimes include historical or geographical considerations. There’s no consistency — Ilocano could be lumped geograpically with Tagalog instead by a different criterion, but wasn’t, while Arabic could be lumped with Somali linguistically, but wasn’t..
In the 19th c. Norwegians and Swedes tended to be lumped by non-Scandinavians, which greatly annoyed Knut Hamsun and mildly amused the Swedish-American Henry Johnson (“Another Side of Main Street”).
There aren’t a lot of Native Americans E. of the Mississippi, and I suspect that the states which list Hopi as the most common Native American language, and many of the states which list Cherokee, are states with very very few speakers of Native American languages. Andrew Jackson did his job well.
Arabic could be lumped with Somali linguistically
If you’re also prepared to lump English with Urdu, sure. (Or even with … Welsh.)
Following Trond’s link further, to
https://badconlangingideas.tumblr.com/
I particularly like
Not bad… not bad at all.
The sequel!
I also like the change from emphatic particle to accusative prefix… it makes all sorts of sense, really.
Indeed with Hungarian! Afroasiatic is big.
“topolects”
@LH, it makes sense if we understand “dialect” as a variety intelligible to speakers of X (X is our point of origin).
But the irony is that for me a “dialect” is just a langauge variety, usually territorial, usually traditional.
I agree that the prototypical situation for English speakers is something like German dialects. (There is a complication: the term is international. Imagine that someone mentions “Arabic dialects” (in any langauge: dialects/диалекты/fāngyán) to a Chinese-speaking student. Of course she won’t be able to reconstruct the situation from the name. Particularly she will get the diglossia wrong. But will she think that “Arabic dialects” are mutually intelligible?)
I said “oh” because it is all that I think about the word:) I am not ready to criticize it, for example.
The thing about fāngyán is that it’s not a size-related or distance-related classification. It’s not a statement on whether it’s another language, or indeed another language family. That’s why translating it as “dialect” can be very misleading, and why Mair and others thought topolect was necessary.
According to data that may be a bit older than that used for this map (and thus may or may not still be accurate), Spanish is the most-commonly-spoken non-English language in a mere 48 out of 50 U.S. states, with the exceptions being Maine (French in second, Spanish in third) and Hawaii (Spanish in sixth place, as of 2009-2013 data, behind English/Ilocano/Tagalog/Japanese/Chinese).
There are some other states where the percentage of Spanish-speakers is very low compared to national averages but those are states where third-possibility languages are even rarer, statistically speaking. But this is still a fairly recent development as the Hispanic population has continued to spread out geographically throughout the U.S., e.g. I expect if you went back 30 or 40 years there might still have been more Lakota-speakers than Spanish-speakers in the Dakotas.
Mair’s paper.
This is unrelated to this topic, but what is the language written in Cyrillic script at 1:34 in the new video of the wonderful Belgian artist Stromae? This is the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3QS83ubhHE
There’s a comment by John C. to the 2014 post saying that as of then the number of states where Spanish was not in second place was more than the number (two) I mentioned above which I’ve seen more recently. Note that the Alaska data from 2009-13 has Spanish well-behind “Other Native North American Languages” grouped together but then takes a sufficiently splitter approach that it’s ahead of any single subcategory unless you start desplitting by combining some of those categories without going all the way back to a single lump). Spanish was however already a little bit ahead of Tagalog, which has long had a presence Up There.
@bertil, it is transliteration of lorem ipsum to Cyrillic.
consect
etur
adipisc
Sed ut perspiciatis unde
omnis iste natus error sit….
Thanks, Drasvi! I didn’t realize that.
In terms of American diversity talk Hawai’i is hardly even in the picture, because the Hawai’ian baseline is so entirely different than that of the lower 48. (Alaska is a different too, but not as much, being inhabited mostly by the white dregs of the lower 48).
@bertil, they used ц /t͡s/ for c. Russian reading of Latin ce- and co- is /t͡sɛ/ and /ko/.
The name of the letter is це or цэ (t͡sɛ). I guess this is why they chose ц for transliteration, but it looks weird.
Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit….
Gosh, that lorem ipsum thing does appear to be a mangled passage from de finibus bonorum et malorum, as drasvi indicates. The connection was discovered in the 1980s, sez here: Source text
Lorem at LH.
WAYYYYY before my time. Well, two years anyhoo.
It was just a dumb April Fools post, but by God it was lorem.
@John Emerson: Persnickety copy editing here. The Hawaiian glottal stop (ʻokina) is written with an ʻ (U+02BB) if you have it, or else with the similar-looking ‘ (opening single quote, U+2018), but not with a ’. The place name is Hawaiʻi, but the English name of the language is Hawaiian, without the glottal stop.
@David Marjanović, I do not think Mair would call Korean “a Chinese topolect”. As for the size etc, yes but it is exactly what I said: it makes sense when you define “dialect” as a unit with predetermined properties, so that you can say: “X is a dialect, Y is not a dialect”.
It is not how I understand the word. Size does not matter…
I carefully chose the only apostrophe-like thing on the keyboard I use. I was also recently rebuked for not using the tilde on the n-like Spanish letter with a tilde, but in my informal chats I just don’t care and sometimes even misspell English and fail to proofread it, but when I transcribed a Portuguese poem some time ago I carefully used the 10 or so diacriticalized letters required (they say that Portuguese has 16 in all, though è, ì, ò, and ù are rare).
Probably the helpful comment software translated the plain apostrophe into the curly single quote of its choice.
About my understanding of “dialect”:
As I grew up I saw many linguists using the word in different ways. I could only generalize them as “a variety”.
Yes, “Chinese dialects” were a part of my definition, but:
– I do not see why it is proper to base my definition on “Russian dialects” but not “Chinese dialects”.
(It is not why if understand “dialect” this way, but if I needed an argument, this would be a strong one, because here our arguments become fully circular. If we include Chinese dialects in “dialects”, then “Chinese dialects” is not misleading, if we exclude them, then it is:))
– sometimes (rarely) someone would say something to the effect of “Slavic dialect of IE”. It needs a context where “Slavic variety of IE” makes sense, which is a rare situation. But when a linguist can say “variety”, she also can substitute it with “dialect”. (And this is the reason why I understand “dialect” so).
Then I add to the definition a list of qualifications starting from “usually…”, describing how the word is used in contexts.
By “usually traditional” above I mean the following: sometimes you need to avoid confusion between a local variant of literary langauge and local “old” dialects studied by dialectologists. It is not “incorrect” to call a regional variety a dialect, it is a dialect. But it can lead to misunderstanding, so you say “regional variety of …” isntead.
What I called “prototype” only matters when I hear the word without context. This protype depends on who I am.
The above It is how I understand it. It is descriptive, I am not saying that it is “correct”.
Once two old freinds of mine (a classical philologist and formal semanticist) wasted 3 hours on “what is a dialect”. For the semanticist Moscow and Petersburg speech are “dialects”, obviously (both agreed that the difference is minor). For the philologist it is absurd. They repeated the same arguments for abotu 7 circles, and strangely, they did not enjoy it. I decided to withdraw and abstain from figuring out what specialist usage is “incorrect”. But if I define it differently, I will have to.
I do not see why it is proper to base my definition on “Russian dialects” but not “Chinese dialects”.
I’m not sure what you mean by “Chinese dialects” (which is part of the problem with the term), but if you mean, e.g., Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, etc., surely you are aware that “Russian dialects” have essentially no differences by comparison. The Chinese “dialects” are different languages by any scientific definition. If you mean different varieties of, say, Mandarin, you need to specify that. The word “dialect” is meaningless without specifics of context.
Not-so-smart quotes are the scourge of the internet, and that’s why it’s not a good idea to put any marks in “Hawaii” and “Hawaiian” unless you know exactly what you’re doing. Follow the lead of the actual person in Hawaii who posted upthread.
My keyboard easily types pre-curled quotes, and the comment engine doesn’t mess with them.
If you type in ' do you get an unmolested '? Answer: yes.
If you type in ' do you get a modified ‘? Answer: yes.
The Chinese “dialects” are different languages by any scientific definition.
@drasvi, Professor Mair has many posts on Language Log exploring why it’s so misleading to translate Chinese ‘fāngyán’ as “dialect”. For example here, which includes further links. Or “… “dialect” gets into differences of vocabulary, grammatical constructions, and so on — but still implies mutual intelligibility (which is why I’ve always, even before becoming a Sinologist, considered it strange to call Cantonese, Taiwanese, etc. “dialects” of “Chinese”).”
Korean is a language isolate (says wikipedia). That it draws much vocabulary from neighbouring Japanese or Sinitic languages does not make it a “dialect” of them — go by the ‘mutual intelligibility’ test.
English draws much vocabulary from (Norman) French/(Medieval) Latin, but it’s not mutually intelligible with French or Latin-derived languages. English’s substrate is Germanic (in a way that’s comparable across Han Chinese varieties/topolects), but English is not mutually intelligible with Dutch or Low-German.
Nobody is saying there is a number-of-speakers test or geographical test to demark a language vs a dialect (vs a topolect). Hmm this gets messy in the Balkans: Serbo-Croat-Bosnian would be distinct languages only by partisanship criteria.
The pragmatic difficulty with the mutual intelligibility test in China is that everybody is forced to deal with the State in Mandarin. So (probably) speakers of Cantonese/Wu/Min/Shanghainese can more-or-less understand Mandarin. Then we have to apply the test one-way only: is Cantonese intelligible to someone who speaks only Mandarin?
Amongst the Chinese diaspora (say in the U.S.A.), and depending when a person/their ancestors left China, it’s more probable that a Cantonese speaker won’t understand Mandarin. There’s ample evidence that although some ‘fāngyán’ are mutually intelligible, most are as distinct as what get called separate languages by Linguists.
Prof. Vybegallo (“Monday begins on Saturday” and “Tail of Troika” ) peppered his speech with expressions in “French dialect”.
I mean that I see “Chinese dialects” in linguistic publications. Accordingly, I do not think that the word implies intelligibility.
When I hear “Klingon dialects”, I do not expect the Klingon situation to be similar to the Russian situation. Maybe they are Chomskyites and know inborn universal Klingon grammar and “Klingon dialects” are first languages of those who have it (Universal Klingon Grammar).
The word “dialect” is meaningless without specifics of context.
Yes, it is my understanding of the word: a variety, usually a territorial variety, but it is a highly context-dependent word.
I mean that I see “Chinese dialects” in linguistic publications
Not modern ones in English, I hope. English-language linguists haven’t used “dialect” that way in a long time, as far as I know. Unless, as I said before, you mean dialects of a particular Chinese language (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.).
Not-so-smart quotes are the scourge of the internet, and that’s why it’s not a good idea to put any marks in “Hawaii” and “Hawaiian” unless you know exactly what you’re doing. Follow the lead of the actual person in Hawaii who posted upthread.
I don’t want to sound philistine, but this is nerdview. Nobody outside of Hawaii cares about exactly what mark is put in the word, or indeed whether there should be a mark there at all. If someone asks, by all means explain the details, but to wander the internet trying to correct the usage of all comers seems to me like telling the tide not to come in.
W/ no disrespect intended to Signor Emerson, it seems to me that inserting any sort of additional mark or glyph into the boring whitebread outsider spelling “Hawaii” will be construed as a gesture of insider-knowledge hipness, meaning that you inevitably run the risk of mockery from other insider-knowledge hipsters if you can be accused of having gotten the details wrong. Better not to try in the first place if you don’t want to run into persnickety insistence on the incredible importance of distinctions between three different typographical thingamabobs that all look like fungible apostrophes from twenty paces away.
FWIW, I note that the memoir “Dreams from My Father” by The World’s Most Famous Living Hawaiian (viz. Barack Obama), uses the unmarked “Hawaii(an)” spelling. Whether he deliberately took a mainlander-friendly unpretentious approach or was just a hapless victim of his publisher’s house style is not known to me.
The usage of the correct thingamabob is absolutely standard in Hawaiian news media and official signs. I learned the usage from highbrow publications but after even one visit to Hawai‘i it felt normal. I suppose someone from Hawai‘i might feel that “Wilkes Barre” or “Winston Salem” or “Truth-or-Consequences” are OK, but likewise a brief visit to those places will fix ’em.
OK, I take it back. The online Star-Advertiser, Hawai‘i’s biggest paper, dispenses with all Hawaiian thingamabobs. Was I imagining things?
Hawai‘i’s Senator Schatz spells it Hawai‘i on his website, as do Reps. Case and Kahele. Sen. Hirono spells it Hawaii. Kahele’s website lists the extent of his district with all the bits in place but misspells Waimānalo as Waimanālo.
1st occurence of “dialect” in Russian/Russian Slavonic books. I will quote the original: Linguas Matrices vocare possumus, ex quibus multæ dialecti, tanquam propagines, deductæ sunt *
3d occurence: А҆рїѳме́тїка, си́рѣчь наꙋ́ка числи́телнаѧ. С̾ ра́зныхъ дїале́ктѡвъ наславе́нскїй ꙗ҆зы́къ преведе́наѧ, и҆ во є҆ди́но собрана̀, и҆ на двѣ̀ кни́ги раздѣле́на.
“Arithmetic, that is counting science. From various dialects to Slavonic/Slavic langauge translated and collected together/in one, and in two books divided”.
4th (or more?) occurence: Реченїя евреїская, еллї[н]ская и латїнская ѡбрѣтающаяся в новомъ завѣтѣ не преведенная на славенскїй дїалектъ, за свойство и лѣпотꙋ онѣх дїалектѡвъ
“Jewish, Greek and Latin words/phrases found in the new testament [that were] not translated to the slavic dialect due to the property and beauty of those dialects” (a glossary)
(just some history for the sake of history…)
@drasvi you don’t give us the date for those publications — as @Hat pointed out “Not modern ones in English, I hope. English-language linguists haven’t used “dialect” that way in a long time, “; and indeed as Prof Mair’s lengthy article makes clear in the notes, the meaning of “dialect” for modern English-language linguists has become more specific/technically defined than its various historical usages. And that has added to the confusion in translating ‘fāngyán’.
Secondly, there’s no reason to expect that someone writing in Latin or Russian would use an etymologically-connected word “dialecti”, “дїале́ктѡвъ” in exactly the same sense as modern English (linguists’ technical usage).
See ‘False friend’ (in its second sense).
BTW usages like the above ” peppered his speech with expressions in “French dialect”.” are jokey English understatements/irony, trying to belittle differences between languages — as if the whole of humanity speaks one language, with merely small regional differences.
The Englishman abroad is often depicted as believing everybody in the world understands English — if only you speak slowly and loudly enough.
AntC, the Latin text is from a work written by Josef Justus Scaliger in 1599, where he is discussing langauge families (he calls them Matrices: “origins, wombs”). It was translated to Slavonic in 1650s. I did not give the Slavonic translation. The “Arithmetic” was writen in 1690s-1700 (and published later) and the glossary for foreign words in the New Testament is 1670s (I was mistaken).
@drasvi:
There was a period, during the high noon of Neogrammarian ascendency, for English-language works to talk even of the “Germanic dialects” (viz English, High German, Dutch, Swedish, Gothic etc.) However, as AntC and Hat say, this sort of thing is thoroughly obsolete in Anglophone linguistics, where the mutual-intelligibility criterion (difficult though it can be to apply consistently in practice sometimes) has long since become industry-standard.
In lay English usage, “dialect” generally means “Inferior language”*, which is part of the reason linguists tend to insist nervously on their own technical sense of the word.
* Sadly typical southern Ghanaian’s question to a Kusaasi person, expressing tepid interest in Kusaal: “How do you say that in your dialect?” This is what the sarky comment אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט is getting at, too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy
and also why the lovely PRC is hostile to the notion that Cantonese etc are “languages.”
That’s how historical linguists could use the term substrate, but they don’t. Instead, substrate is used for the language a population spoke before a particular language shift if it has left loanwords or other influence on the new language – so English has a thin Latin and a thin British Celtic substrate.
Maybe you had the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in mind.
Is that an accent and a breathing on a vowelless word?
it seems to me that inserting any sort of additional mark or glyph into the boring whitebread outsider spelling “Hawaii” will be construed as a gesture of insider-knowledge hipness, meaning that you inevitably run the risk of mockery from other insider-knowledge hipsters if you can be accused of having gotten the details wrong.
Sure, in the kind of venues where people delight in wasting their and everybody’s time and energy in playing that kind of gotcha. The Hattery has not historically been such a venue, and I would hope it will not become one. Traditionally we accept everyone’s written communications in a generous spirit rather than finding nits to pick.
The only truly correct form is Havaiʔi …
(To be fair, Hawaiqian has so few consonants that it seems a pity to lose any.)
(To be fair, Hawaiqian has so few consonants that it seems a pity to lose any.)
Ha!
I wonder if a *hawaii (as opposed to hawaiʻi) has a possible interpretation in Hawaiian, considering hawa and ii and ii. (I’m not sure about the status of those last two words. Maybe later sources would add a glottal stop to them?)
I am the greatest of sinners.
Mutual intelligibility: in a history of Spanish anarchism I read that the first Spanish anarchists learned about anarchism from some Italian sailors in one of the Spanish port towns. According to the story, they just faked it in their respective languages. A French Canadian friend told me that when traveling in Mexico she quickly learned to fake it there. So it’s not a clear dividing line.
My guess is that there is a lot of this anywhere that a standard language has not been imposed by the state, or has not emerged during extensive and somewhat centralized trade (two different processes with different results).
Aloha—Speaking from Hawaii, specifically Honolulu, even more specifically Makiki. It’s probably a good idea not to put in glottal stops and long vowel marks unless you’re very sure about them. There is a movement to put them in; info here:
https://www.hawaii.edu/site/info/diacritics.php
And that’s a good thing. I agree that the symbols for glottal stop and long vowels are useful for those who know how to use and read them, as do many or most people in Hawaii. I think the use of the symbols is seen here as a sign of respect for the Hawaiian language and people, too, respect that was long absent.
But for a writer not used to using these symbols who is addressing an audience not in the know, it’s probably not worth using them. Furthermore, if you know the language, it’s my understanding that you don’t need the symbols in most instances, just as Arabic and Persian texts are not usually voweled for those who know the languages. Someone who cannot pronounce Kalanianaole Highway, Aiea, Kealakekua, Waianae, Kolekole Pass, and Hauula won’t get much benefit from the symbols.
Exactly right.
@Xerîb, the etymology of Hawai‘i was mentioned here.
@Pohaku, in your experience, do people often distinguish in pronunciation between Lanai (i.e. Lāna‘i), the island, and lanai (or lānai), the common Hawaiian-style porch?
Immigrants tend to follow friends and relatives, so there are often surprisingly distinct connections between places. I’m intrigued to learn how Arkansas came to attract a community of Ilocano speakers.
By the way, the American Community Survey is simply the ongoing inter-census survey conducted over the phone by the Census Bureau to get a closer handle on population trends.
@Pohaku, in your experience, do people often distinguish in pronunciation between Lanai (i.e. Lāna‘i), the island, and lanai (or lānai), the common Hawaiian-style porch?
———-
I don’t trust my instincts on this, so I searched YouTube for a video with locals saying the word “Lanai.” By chance, the first one I clicked on at random was great. It’s a travelogue around the island of Lanai (or Lāna‘i), including interviews with Lanai locals (many of whom appear to be immigrants from the Philippines).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awAQWYISm4A
The funny thing is, I realized that the video was made by a friend of mine who lives right across the street from us here in Honolulu!
Anyway, I hear my friend (the narrator) being more precise about using the glottal stop in Lāna‘i than most of the Lāna‘i locals.
Please bear in mind that there are only tiny numbers of native speakers of Hawaiian here in Hawaii, and most people hear very little Hawaiian spoken, whether by native speakers or not. I cannot remember the last time I heard anyone speaking Hawaiian in public, unless at a hula festival or other specifically Hawaiian gathering. My impression is that broadcasters and linguistically sensitive people (whatever their own backgrounds) try to use “correct” forms of Hawaiian words, as do those who have been educated or socialized in Hawaiian (e.g., in immersion schools, in Hawaiian classes, in the family).
If France were in this situation, imagine…the country would be filled with native residents who did not speak French, all trying to decide how to pronounce words like Paris, baguette, Boulogne, and lingerie, with very little guidance from a tiny coterie of native French speakers.
>*Thus the focus is e.g. not on what percentage of the total population in the given jurisdiction speaks Spanish at home, but what percentage of the potential voter population (U.S. citizens and over 18) speaks Spanish AND has limited understanding of English.
Sort of. Except the trigger is the number* who “speak English less than ‘very well’,” which is very different from “limited English understanding.”
This has some interesting implications. In a jurisdiction where I worked, we met the threshold for Hindi, which subsumed Gujarati and Urdu. We chose Hindi for ballots. Very few Hindi ballots were requested. English is pretty widespread among South Asian immigrants, but naturally, many are modest and unwilling to say they speak it “very well”, so they choose “well”. We felt a big part of what was needed was simply representation. Having chosen Hindi somewhat arbitrarily for ballot translation, we made a big effort to recruit poll workers of all lects. And went a bit further by letting people know that lack of fluency shouldn’t discourage them from working We felt that an elderly Indian American who spoke English only “well” might actually be more encouraged to vote learning that a neighbor’s daughter who spoke no Hindi beyond hello would be working than realizing they could request a Hindi ballot from a team of Anglo retirees. (Not that we ever excluded anyone who was fluent. Election offices just need poll workers. Lots of them.)
We had a lot more Korean speakers who couldn’t get by in English than Hindi speakers. But because of different community structure, they didn’t meet the voting rights threshold, and we didn’t feel we could legally provide a translated official ballot on our own authority. We did create a sample ballot in Korean and distributed it widely.
I would support raising the definition to those who speak English “less than well.” But lowering the thresholds. In my old jurisdiction this might not trigger Hindi, but would certainly have mandated Korean.
Interestingly, Polish was not a mandated language, despite its being our most common language after the “English/Spanish” that most of us speak (with the growth of Spanglish, English and Spanish are just ends of a dialect continuum now.) The language provisions of the VRA always excluded European languages other than Spanish. Maybe on the theory that like Arabic and Somali, they’re so closely related to English that everyone can make it work. 😉
Or maybe it was a political decision rather than a need-based policy.
—
* Technically most counties are triggered at 5%, rather than “a number”, but larger counties often reach the threshold of 10,000 for language communities that make up a smaller percentage of the population. Here too, I would suggest that a better way would use lower thresholds at finer geographic gradations. Again, this would probably have the impact of eliminating Hindi, but bringing in other languages with arguably greater need. The large number of South Asians who speak English “well” are distributed widely through the county, precisely because they speak English well enough to thrive in places where there is no significant community of Hindi or Urdu speakers. Whereas Korean-Americans and Tagalog speakers do tend to cluster, no doubt in part to be able to take advantage of groceries, restaurants and places of worship where their language is spoken. A finer-grained standard would better target expensive translation, which has costs, both monetary and in terms of an office’s ability to manage a job that has grown vastly more complex in the last 20 years.
Also, when discussing the policy of translating ballots, Democrats should explain that having a translated ballot frees the non-English speaking voter from having to rely on their liberal children for assistance with marking their ballot.
i’m sure i’ve mentioned this before, but i can’t hear a “mutual intelligibility” conversation without thinking of the folks i met in brno in 2002 who told me that they – in their early/mid 20s then, so raised in czechoslovakia – found the language spoken in bratislava and eastward perfectly intelligible, but that their younger siblings – raised after the velvet divorce (and so taught to understand czech and slovak as deeply different) – found it very hard to understand. i can’t remember whether this was said in international bad english, or in czech, which my polish-cradle-tongue traveling buddy found fairly simple to understand (as she did slovak and bulgarian).
At least in German linguistics (but as far as I know also in other Continental European traditions) there exists a definition of dialect as a variety related to the written register / dachsprache used. Only in that sense one can speak about German dialects, as many of them are not mutually comprehensible with each other or with Standard German. That definition also excludes Dutch and Flemish dialects (using a different Dachsprache), which when using the mutual intelligibility criterium alone might be counted as German dialects (depending on the intelligibility threshold used). Using that kind of definition, Chinese topolects might be classified as dialects as well. (As has been said before, that’s not the definition normally used by English language linguistics, but they still tend to speak about German or Italian dialects, which according to the usual definition should be divided into dozens of languages.)
Also, the border between Germany and the Netherlands lies at 90° to a whole series of isoglosses, including but not limited to the major ones between (south to north) Central Franconian, Low Franconian and Low Saxon – the dialects right across the border from each other are (or used to be) more similar to each other than those on the same side.
Lest we forget, what really makes the Chinese situation atypical is the writing system. Since these Sinitic languages are written using a non-phonetic system, it is possible to have widely divergent topolects like Mandarin and Cantonese written in (not identical but) unusually similar ways. Given the cultural importance of Chinese characters for speakers of various Han languages (and the general tendency in literate societies to think of the written, rather than spoken, language as primary), it makes sense thar there is a tendency to think of Sinitic users as using* the same underlying language. Chinese nationalism has also made this a politically advantageous point of view for the state’s leaders to adopt.
* I originally wrote, “Sinitic speakers as speaking,” here but I realized that speakers was inapt here. Readers** would not be right either, since the societal attitudes are shared by many illiterate speakers.
** Is there a normal word for users of a written language other than readers? It doesn’t always have quite the feel I want, but there probably is nothing better. Aside from writers being obviously wrong in its implications, it misses some of the relevant users. (Charlemagne famously could read, but he never learned to write.)
| English’s substrate is Germanic
@DMThat’s how historical linguists could use the term substrate, but they don’t. Instead, substrate is used for the language a population spoke before a particular language shift if it has left loanwords or other influence on the new language – so English has a thin Latin and a thin British Celtic substrate.
Um thanks. But I’m now more confused than ever. Perhaps someone could sort out wikipedia on stratum — not that that’s where I got my usage, but my usage has been working fine for me in other readings, and is not inconsistent with this table.
By “Germanic substrate” I meant Anglo/Saxon/Jutish, with Norman French superstrate. That wiki has an earlier table showing ‘Common Brittonic’ substrate prior to the Anglo-Saxon arrivals. Really? What from Brittonic grins through into modern English? Sorry but Latin doesn’t get a look-in wrt English. (Roman Latin had more now-observable influence on Welsh?) By “Medieval Latin” I meant Biblical and the vast abstract/scientific vocabulary, including case-in-point ‘dialect’ (1570’s Greek via Latin).
I’m of the Middle English creole persuasion: core vocabulary is A-S; grammar is greatly simplified A-S; Brittonic has left some vestigial vocabulary/place names — perhaps call it an ‘adstratum’, but no more than Old Norse/Vikings from the Danegeld.
@AntC 1570s?! Seriously? I wonder what made the word so popular in that century.
As you could see the earliest attestation here is a translation of a book writen at almost the same time.
@drasvi the Rennaisance; and the great voyages of exploration (from Europe), boldly going to all those places with strange languages.
what really makes the Chinese situation atypical is the writing system.
There are the Dungans, though.
The modern Dungan language is the only spoken Chinese that is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, as they lived under Soviet rule. It is a Russian-based alphabet plus five special letters: Җ, Ң, Ү, Ә and Ў. As such, it differs somewhat from the Palladius System that is normally used in Russia to write Chinese in Cyrillic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language#Writing_system
I picked up somewhere that Hawaiian phonotactics insist on a glottal stop between identical vowel phonemes, so the sign does not need to be written in that word. That may have been an old convention though. (Two different vowel phonemes could be a diphthong, but only some of those exist — WP cites the original use of the sign as used to distinguish kou and koʻu, which is not inconsistent with leaving it out between vowels that cannot be a diphthong).
Brett:
> ** Is there a normal word for users of a written language other than readers? It doesn’t always have quite the feel I want, but there probably is nothing better. Aside from writers being obviously wrong in its implications, it misses some of the relevant users. (Charlemagne famously could read, but he never learned to write.)
There’s a similar problem with the word “writers”, isn’t there? The vast majority of people who spend their time writing are not “writers”.
Um thanks. But I’m now more confused than ever. Perhaps someone could sort out wikipedia on stratum — not that that’s where I got my usage, but my usage has been working fine for me in other readings, and is not inconsistent with this table.
Wikipedia is (as is not uncommon) confused and confusing. “Stratum” is neither here nor there; “substrate” is used as DM says, and no linguist would say Germanic was a substrate of OE.
Roman Latin had more now-observable influence on Welsh?
Yes indeed, up to and including a whole lot of pretty basic vocabulary (“child”, “want”, “fish”, “dry”, “learn” …)
“Um thanks. But I’m now more confused than ever.”
The creolist use of “substrate” is distinct from the ordinary historical linguist’s use of that word. In certain approaches to creolistics, a creole is taken to be the product of a substrate and a superstrate, where “substrate” means the previous L1(s) of the creole’s founders, as opposed to the L2 towards which they shifted to create that creole, which is the superstrate (and typically provides almost all of the vocabulary). In non-creolist contexts, a language is taken to have relatively minor influences from substrates and superstrates, where the substrates were spoken in the area before its arrival, and the superstrates were spoken by dominant minorities there after its arrival. Massive language shift is possible but not required, and neither superstrate nor substrate typically accounts for more than a small part of the basic lexicon or grammar. English fits very poorly into the former conception of creoles, as Thomason showed; far too much is retained from Old English to call that its substrate by either definition.
@Lars: In Hawaiian a sequence of two identical short vowel phonemes is equivalent to a long vowel. There isn’t anything like glottal stop epenthesis between two identical vowels in compounds and such. As far as I can tell, such sequences (which are rare) are dealt with through vowel dissimilation.
@Y: So if hawaiʻi didn’t have a glottal stop, you should spell it {Hawaī} innit. The point about compounds is interesting, but doesn’t make a difference to the logical necessity of having the ʻokina there. (Two identical short vowels still cannot follow each other without an intervening glottal stop, so writing it is redundant. I’m not saying that always writing it is a bad design, just that not writing it would work just as fine and it would be a minor quirk compared to some of the things that Danish [or English or French] orthography does).
So what happens to the dissimilated pairs of short vowels? Do they turn into diphthongs when possible?
If Hawaiʻi didn’t have a glottal stop, it would be a different word…
The Hawaiian glottal stop is just another consonant, and is not particularly distinguished phonologically from any other. There is no regular epenthesis of glottal stops or any other consonants.
The causative prefix ho’o- combines with one ‘sand’ to form ho‘ōne ‘to polish with sand’.
I earlier saw an example with dissimilation (where the second vowel changes, like a-a > a-o) but I can’t find it.
I am familiar with creolist “substrate”. It is usually a language, and I understand it as “the complement to superstrate”. Cf. “interviewee”: there is always a -er somewhere around in your mind, even if she is not mentioned. This substrate is a bottom as opposed to its top.
In historical linguistics substrate often refers to traces of something in the langauge in question, also to the substrate language itself. I understand it the same way as in natural sceinces, and it is a different sorf of a bottom: the thing you are walking atop of. Such a difference naturally follows from the treethink: the observed language and its proto- (who once arrived to the area) form an abstract line, to which substrates and other sources of borrowings and influences are external.
Sorry for a messy text, I am sleepy at the moment. I wrote it because these two different interpretations of “sub-” are funny.
“industry-standard”
@David Eddyshaw, what do you mean? English speakers call Xish dialects according to international traditions of Xistics.
English Wiktionary is an obdurate holdout on the “Chinese as a language” issue, with rather messy results compared with most other languages.
Under “translations of the English term”, Chinese is always given as a single category, subdivided according to topolect. Since this is usually done alphabetically, “Cantonese” comes before “Mandarin”. “Dungan” is treated as one of the topolects. For a lot of high-level vocabulary (e.g., “international”, “democracy”), translations in each topolect are nothing more than topolectal pronunciations of the same term as written in Chinese characters. (For lower level, everyday vocabulary, of course, topolects have different words.)
@Bathrobe, I do not know about other users, for me this grouping is convenient. If they grouped everything by family, it would be even better.
Though, honestly, I rarely look up Chinese translations. It is convenient with Greek, and I often have to browse the whole list to find representatives of a linguistic OR cultural group (say: Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Uyghur).
I see we have moved on from the buzzwords of business to the buzzwords of linguistics! Nice!
Much linguistic terminology changes meaning from language from language, as the languages work different from each other. A noun in Swedish/German/English and a noun in Chinese have very different properties, and it’s not strange that dialect would mean different things too. I find that native English speakers are more fond of making up new unique terms for Chinese grammar, while native Chinese speakers are happy to use the classic terms that are also used for English. And why shouldn’t they? After all, there’s no rule that the meaning in English grammar is the correct meaning and the meaning in Chinese grammar is less correct. I feel the same goes for dialects. Just as nouns in English have a singular and a plural forms, and nouns in Chinese don’t, dialects of English are mutually understandable and dialects in Chinese aren’t.
As an aside, the writing system for different Chinese languages isn’t as similar as people think. Sure, you can choose the pronunciation when reading characters, but it doesn’t help when grammar and vocabulary is different. Sometimes people write “phonetically”, so the characters sound more or less right when reading with Mandarin pronunciation. That has its advantages, but if you only know Mandarin it’ll look weird.
@Y: Obviously it would. That’s not my point. My point is that if you see a spelling with two identical vowels in a row, that means there is a glottal stop between them because otherwise they would be spelled as a long vowel. Epenthesis was a red herring, sorry.
Those of us who love and cherish the humble glottal stop welcome this Hawaiian spelling innovation, but believe that the consonant to be symbolised in this time-saving manner should instead be /l/ (as in “Honouu.”)
(This nearly works as a heuristic for reconstructing proto-Swahili: zala for zaa, mzele for mzee …)
True that using different meanings for technical terms, what Frye called “terminological buccaneering”, is inevitable. But to say that Vietnamese and Korean are dialects of Chinese violates not only technical but also ordinary understandings of dialect, and introducing topolect[*] helps avoid terminal as well as merely terminological confusion.
[*] A calque of fāngyán into Classical; V and K are among the ‘local languages’ of southeastern and northeastern China respectively.
I find Mair’s coining of the word ‘topolect’ curious. I can understand why he would want to discard the word ‘dialect’ as it gives a distorted impression of the Chinese situation. Mair would be the first to say that the so-called ‘dialects’ are actually separate languages.
But ‘topolect’ is a calque. The Chinese term 方言 fāngyán means ‘place language’. The modern colloquial equivalent is 地方话 dìfāng-huà, also ‘place language’. It implies that every little place in China has its ‘local language’. Possibly ‘patois’ is a close equivalent, but without the strong pejorative implications. But by adopting ‘topolect’, Mair is implicitly adopting the Chinese view that local varieties have no ranking or status as ‘separate languages’. They are just a welter of varieties with no standard or clear separate identity of their own apart from the national language. Under this conception, ‘Cantonese’ is just a geographical designation with no internal organisation, recognised standard or dialects of its own. (In fact, Guangzhou, and perhaps increasingly Hong Kong are the standard for Cantonese.) So I find Mair’s advocacy of ‘topolect’ against ‘dialect’ curious, given his similarly staunch advocacy of Cantonese and Minnan as separate languages. If he is so upset by the erosion of these languages under the onslaught of putonghua (guoyü), why is he acquiescing in the traditional view that they are mere 方言 or local speechways specific to particular places?
I also find Moa’s comment curious. Sure, there’s no rule that the meaning in English grammar is the correct meaning and the meaning in Chinese grammar is less correct. But the Chinese word for ‘noun’, 名词 míngcí, is just a translation from Western languages, possibly via Japanese. The Chinese are happily using this term partly because the grammar that they adopted for teaching in schools in the 1950s used the translated term 名词.
I feel the same goes for dialects. Just as nouns in English have a singular and a plural forms, and nouns in Chinese don’t, dialects of English are mutually understandable and dialects in Chinese aren’t.
Well, no. ‘Dialect’ was introduced into English discourse on Chinese as the equivalent of 方言. At the time it was introduced, it possibly had a different meaning from what it does now (as commenters upthread have pointed out). So ‘dialect’ is an English translation of 方言 based on an antiquated concept of dialect. It’s quite true that 方言 represents a different conception of language from what we’re used to in the English-speaking world, which is why Mair coined ‘topolect’. But to maintain that linguistic terminology changes meaning from language from language because languages work differently is to ignore the historical reasons for the existence of such terminology. ‘Dialect’ was applied to Chinese since it seemed like the closest fit at the time. That does not mean that ‘dialects’ are different things in English and Chinese (intelligible vs non-intelligible); merely that terminology got fixed in a certain way that many people now find misleading.
‘Dialect’ is somewhat different from ‘noun’ because ‘noun’ is a syntactic category while ‘dialect’ is a social one. Since conceptions of language varieties differ widely it’s not surprising that different languages have different ways of conceptualising them. That is why terminology like Dachsprache was introduced to try and bring clarity to a confused intercultural situation.
Incidentally, I’ve never heard the view that Korean and Vietnamese are 方言, although I did once meet a Chinese woman from the south who thought she could pick up Vietnamese just like she picked up other dialects in the south.
But ‘topolect’ is a calque. The Chinese term 方言 fāngyán means ‘place language’. The modern colloquial equivalent is 地方话 dìfāng-huà, also ‘place language’. It implies that every little place in China has its ‘local language’. Possibly ‘patois’ is a close equivalent, but without the strong pejorative implications. But by adopting ‘topolect’, Mair is implicitly adopting the Chinese view that local varieties have no ranking or status as ‘separate languages’.
Not true; just because he’s calquing his term on Chinese (assuming he is — do we know that for sure?) doesn’t mean it necessarily has the same meaning. He’s perfectly entitled to coin an English term on the basis of a Chinese model and make it mean whatever he wants it to mean.
@John Cowan, did anyone ever said that Vietnamese is a dialect of Chinese? And how “Vietnamese is a topolect of Chinese” is better?
I see instead people speaking about Wu varieties (not quoting translations) in this thead and calling them topolects.
@Bathrobe, Mair proposed topolects for translations.
* Incidentally, I regard ‘prescriptivism’ and ‘grammar nazis’ in English as a very particular instantiation of a widespread phenomenon, that of implementing a prestige standard style. I’m sure that all languages have conceptions of what is ‘correct’, but the English-language version is a particularly pernicious, obnoxious and pernicketty instantiation. I don’t think that the same type of organised and narrow beliefs about grammatical usages exists in Japanese or Chinese, for instance.
It definitely exists in European languages, including Russian. I can’t believe that East Asians don’t enjoy using language as a way to prove their own superiority, but maybe they don’t do it via “prestige standard style.”
Not true; just because he’s calquing his term on Chinese (assuming he is — do we know that for sure?)
Then what do you think ‘topolect’ means?
It definitely exists in European languages
Of course it exists in other languages. But in a language like Chinese it is just as likely to refer to the correct writing and use of characters or classical expressions, for instance, rather than shibboleths like splitting the infinitive. In Japanese it might refer to the correct usage of honorifics. (There are prescriptive injunctions, like stigmatising potential verb forms like tabereru, but prescriptivism doesn’t form a huge body of nitpicking grammar rules like in English.)
But by adopting ‘topolect’, Mair is implicitly adopting the Chinese view that local varieties have no ranking or status as ‘separate languages’.
Here is Mair himself:
But in a language like Chinese it is just as likely to refer to the correct writing and use of characters or classical expressions,
Bzzzt. There isn’t _a_ language ‘Chinese’ — is the whole point. And one of the difficulties Mair is trying to address is that there’s only one Sinitic language (Mandarin) that can lay claim to “correct writing and use of characters”. Other Sinitic languages/varieties try to use those characters (supplemented with ad-hoc characters made up in the same style) or have various written forms using Latin or Cyrillic alphabets, but nothing with anything like the wide acceptance, tradition or authority behind Mandarin.
I don’t know if you (@Bathrobe) have paid attention to what Mair actually says (you certainly post plenty on LLog), but you can’t possibly come away with the impression Mair is adopting the Chinese view that local varieties have no ranking or status as ‘separate languages’.
_Is_ Mair calquing from 方言 fāngyán ? ‘topolect’ dates back to 1960’s. @DavidM has already noted German ‘Regiolekt’. Surely linguists need a whole swag of terms for languages that are historically related but now spoken in distinct places — or were long-enough established in places to become a distinct variety, before wider dispersal.
‘topolect’ is about as good a term as we’re going to get. ‘Cantonese’ is a place-based term for a language, even though it’s spoken widely through the Chinese diaspora. (And that’s probably why CCP is trying so hard to suppress it in Canton and HK/Macau — to break connections outside of PRC.) Likewise Wu, Fujianese, Min, Hokkien are place-based terms.
The ‘topo-‘ part isn’t perfect: for example ‘Hakka’ is not really associated with any place.
Mair has said that he did come up with “topolect” as a calque. I’m not sure if he considered whether that might help undermine his assertions of what the term actually means.
I don’t think that the same type of organised and narrow beliefs about grammatical usages exists in Japanese or Chinese, for instance.
I’ll disagree on Mandarin (no idea what you mean by “Chinese” — not a language). The weibo-sphere in China lights up after every formal Party speech by Xi Jinping, to point out how he mangled pronunciations and garbled the syntax of literary allusions. (This despite him getting heavy coaching before giving speeches.) He’s sneered at as a rather uncultured plodding apparatchik — in pretty much exactly the way of ‘prescriptivism’ and ‘grammar nazis’ in English, and contrasted with Mao’s command of prestige standard style (master calligrapher, published poems in classical forms, ‘innit) .
the English-language version is a particularly pernicious, obnoxious and pernicketty instantiation.
As pinpointed by Miriam Margolyes, it’s an instrument for the lower middle-class to preserve their (petty) privileges — “because they have most to lose”. The working classes never paid attention to it. The Upper-class twits flaunt their disregard, just as much as they disregard paying taxes or following Covid restrictions.
Accidentally found this thread after a lot of discussion had already happened…
@LH, it makes sense if we understand “dialect” as a variety intelligible to speakers of X (X is our point of origin).
But the irony is that for me a “dialect” is just a langauge variety, usually territorial, usually traditional.
I agree that the prototypical situation for English speakers is something like German dialects.
I somewhat suspect that the prototypical situation for English speakers is the local English varieties of their country. In fact AFAIK most German “dialects” are not mutually intelligible at least in their traditional forms (these days moribund or nearly so).
At least to me, “language variety, usually territorial, usually traditional” sounds about right, though it does feel weird to talk about “dialects” that are clearly their own languages. (In the context of English it presents as the debate over whether Scots qualifies as a dialect of English, and/or whether any further variants of Scots qualify as languages in their own right.)
By “usually traditional” above I mean the following: sometimes you need to avoid confusion between a local variant of literary langauge and local “old” dialects studied by dialectologists. It is not “incorrect” to call a regional variety a dialect, it is a dialect. But it can lead to misunderstanding, so you say “regional variety of …” isntead.
Note that this is very important for Russian in particular, where regional variants of the (otherwise nearly uniform) literary language are quite healthy and don’t seem to be going anywhere (but mostly only manifest in some word choices and a bunch of minor accent details), while actual dialects are very rare and almost entirely limited to out-of-the-way villages. (And the really divergent ones are likely to be extinct, on the account of the relevant areas having been almost entirely depopulated during WW2.)
AFAIK the (somewhat) similar situation in Germany is usually referred to by the term “mesolect”. I’ve never heard of Russian mesolects that I could recall but it probably would be a good way to describe (e.g.) the difference between Moscow and Saint-Petersburg.
Hmm this gets messy in the Balkans: Serbo-Croat-Bosnian would be distinct languages only by partisanship criteria.
FYLOSC is one language, with a bunch of (slight and mostly artificial) regional variants; the entire Southwest Slavic group to which it belongs does contain multiple languages, but AFAIK all of them except FYLOSC and (depending on the classification) maybe Slovenian are almost entirely limited to what is now Croatia.
If France were in this situation, imagine…the country would be filled with native residents who did not speak French, all trying to decide how to pronounce words like Paris, baguette, Boulogne, and lingerie, with very little guidance from a tiny coterie of native French speakers.
AFAIK something very much like this is the current situation in Ireland.
Lest we forget, what really makes the Chinese situation atypical is the writing system. Since these Sinitic languages are written using a non-phonetic system, it is possible to have widely divergent topolects like Mandarin and Cantonese written in (not identical but) unusually similar ways. Given the cultural importance of Chinese characters for speakers of various Han languages (and the general tendency in literate societies to think of the written, rather than spoken, language as primary), it makes sense thar there is a tendency to think of Sinitic users as using the same underlying language. Chinese nationalism has also made this a politically advantageous point of view for the state’s leaders to adopt.
Indeed; but until perhaps a century or two ago the same was just as true of Vietnamese and Korean, and to a lesser extent Japanese, none of which are linguistically Sinitic. OTOH AFAIK Inner Mongolian (and Uyghur) escaped this despite being firmly geographically Chinese; possibly because both of them had pre-existing non-Sinitic scripts.
In my own words from three years ago…
‘The varieties are kind of covered in that you can kind of write (Mandarin or) Cantonese or Hakka or whatever in CJK ideographs (as Unicode calls them), the same way you can kind of write Japanese or Korean or Vietnamese in them.
Granted, when read, it’s going to result in some darn stilted Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Hakka, or Cantonese. (And probably even Mandarin, for that matter.) But it’s possible, and people have actually done that (in all of those cases, IIRC).”
Of course it exists in other languages. But in a language like Chinese it is just as likely to refer to the correct writing and use of characters or classical expressions, for instance, rather than shibboleths like splitting the infinitive. In Japanese it might refer to the correct usage of honorifics.
Speaking as a wild guesser: Chinese’s extremely nonphonetic writing system, especially as combined with its very isolating grammar, means that prescriptivisms about spelling and prescriptivisms about pronunciation are effectively separated from each other (and the latter, of course, heavily dependent on the specific variant), and there’s almost nothing to prescriptivise about grammar as such. (The correct choice of noun classifiers, perhaps.)
Pronunciation prescriptivism (the Chinese version of My Fair Lady) surely exists, though I’m not sure which exact form it takes. Spelling prescriptivism would indeed mean “correct use of characters”; e.g. AFAIK modern Chinese had innovated separate characters for “he”, “she”, and “it”, which are pronounced identically. I’m not sure to what extent the classical expressions qualify as prescriptivism at all; I suppose there has to be a lot of debate on the exact contexts in which they are appropriate.
Japanese, meanwhile, has another situation that might prevent prescriptivism as understood in Europe: the sheer variety of speaking (and/or writing) registers (of which honorifics are a part), such that nearly any prescriptivism would imply “this is wrong for this specific register” rather than “this is wrong overall”. Of course the exact correct use of kanji (and of kanji vs. kana, and of hiragana vs. katakana) is likely highly subject to prescriptivistic tendencies.
In any case AFAIK (I’m definitely out of my waters here and can easily be wrong) the word order in Japanese is too rigid for grammatical prescriptivistic rules to work very well; trying to apply rules contradictory to the actual ones would just result in a sentence that doesn’t work, or, worse, works but means a different thing.
But by adopting ‘topolect’, Mair is implicitly adopting the Chinese view that local varieties have no ranking or status as ‘separate languages’.
I mean what else could he call them? “Chinese languages” is ambiguous and could be interpreted as “languages of China”, and consequently include e.g. Tibetan, Inner Mongolian, and Uyghur, which aren’t even normally written in Sinitic characters.
And in any case some of the varieties are clearly subordinate to others, so we can talk about e.g. the Hong Kong dialect (of Cantonese, or of Chinese, depending on your definition), or perhaps the Hong Kong topolect or the Hong Kong variant or whatever, but surely not (yet?) the Hong Kong language.
I think I’ve seen some people, exasperated by the terminological confusion, just use plain “lects” (both for Chinese variants and, IIRC, in some other contexts).
The term “topolect” or fāngyán 方言 is not necessarily needed for most English-language linguistic discussions of Sinitic languages – you can use “language” or “dialect” as appropriate – as in “Chéngdūhuà 成都话 (‘Chengdu speech’) is a dialect of Mandarin”, or “Cantonese is one of the Chinese languages”, and there will be no issue. However, Standard Written Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, etc. use fāngyán to refer to both of these things (which is fine, that’s just how it’s done in Sinitic languages). But this is a real problem when you want to translate the term fāngyán from Sinitic into English.
That’s where “topolect” is especially useful. It’s useful for a lot of other things, too – Mandarin, for example, is not really a language but a language family – “topolect” works if you want to talk about the Mandarin language family, Southern Mandarin, Sichuanese Mandarin, Beijing Mandarin, or whatever. And if you want to be specific, you can always say “language family”, “language”, or “dialect”. Or whatever.
I can’t seem to find my previous response (comment 4340140) anywhere, despite it being linked from the sidebar. I wonder if it somehow went down the spam filter.
[EDIT: it’s up now and I still have no idea what happened.]
Some commentary on the bits that came up while I was writing it…
_Is_ Mair calquing from 方言 fāngyán ? ‘topolect’ dates back to 1960’s. @DavidM has already noted German ‘Regiolekt’. Surely linguists need a whole swag of terms for languages that are historically related but now spoken in distinct places — or were long-enough established in places to become a distinct variety, before wider dispersal.
For that matter surely linguists need (and probably have, but I can’t think of any offhand) a whole swag of terms for lects (can I call them that?) at various levels of distinction – dialects vs. subdialects vs. supradialects, but preferably with more levels. Russian has at least three levels below язык “language”: in order, наречие, диалект, говор.
I’m also not sure where exactly does “mesolect” come in…
The weibo-sphere in China lights up after every formal Party speech by Xi Jinping, to point out how he mangled pronunciations and garbled the syntax of literary allusions.
This sounds like exactly what Bathrobe wrote in their clarifying post: “the correct writing and use of characters or classical expressions”. Though I should probably add another option, which I actually missed in my own commentary as well (not sure how) – the (prescriptively) correct pronunciation of particular (exotic) characters.
no idea what you mean by “Chinese” — not a language
Ah, prescribing usage now. To each bonnet a bee.
I use “Chinese” to refer to putonghua (the national standard), otherwise known as “Mandarin”. (“The Chinese language” is common usage. Except in Hong Kong it generally refers to Mandarin — it would be ornery to insist that it meant Xiang, for instance.)
For other “dialects”, I prefer to use the name of that “dialect”, e.g., “Cantonese (Yue)”, “Wu”, etc. This is not to imply that they aren’t “Chinese” (since they are languages that are identified with China), but simply to give them a separate identity from putonghua as opposed to being some imaginary super-language of which they are supposedly “dialects”.
As for Xi Jinping’s missteps, as January First-of-May pointed out, I specifically mentioned “the correct writing and use of characters or classical expressions, for instance”. What I said was that “prescriptivism” in Chinese isn’t a set of proscribed (and petty) grammatical usages as it is in English.
@ AntC
you can’t possibly come away with the impression Mair is adopting the Chinese view that local varieties have no ranking or status as ‘separate languages’.
I wish you would read. I specifically noted that Mair is a strong proponent of “dialects” having the status of separate languages. My point was that the calque ‘topolect’ seems to undermine this.
@ January First-of-May:
I mean what else could he call them? “Chinese languages” is ambiguous
I think Mair prefers the term ‘Sinitic’ here.
Again, in translations it would be weird to adopt any other view than the author’s and Mair did not propose “topolect” as a Western name for Chinese languages.
Prompted by this thread:
OSAKA — The distinctions are clear, a Kansai native might tell you. To express, for example, “she’s not coming” (“kanojo konai” in standard Japanese), Osaka people would say “kanojo kehen,” Kyoto people “kanojo kihen” and Kobe people “kanojo kohen.”
But while outsiders might be scoffed at for only recognizing Osaka-ben (dialect), the stuff of comedy television, there’s a Kansai speech pattern that even most residents couldn’t identify: Senba kotoba (language).
Actually an Osaka subdialect, Senba kotoba is sometimes referred to as the “true Osaka-ben” because of its 17th-century origins in Chuo Ward’s Senba commercial district — a symbol for many Osakans of their city’s proud history as a center for Japan’s textile, finance and securities industries.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2001/05/20/general/kansai-dialect-survives-on-cd/
Language Conveys Culture, Society, and Times
3 Types of Speakers in Bali
HIRANO In this Tomorrow’s Pioneers, I’d like to talk with young researchers at the Graduate School of Language and Culture about how they are engaged in research, with what intention, and what they found from language culture research. First, Professor Hara, please tell me about your research.
HARA My main research theme is the building of code-mixing corpus and the description of sociolinguistic dynamics of Balinese and Indonesian languages spoken in Bali. In Indonesia, many ethnic groups speak many languages. In Bali, there are two languages: Balinese as a mother tongue, and Indonesian as a national language. I’m working on clarifying how both languages are used and mixed.
HIRANO Can’t people speaking these languages communicate with each other? Are they different, for example, like Japanese and Korean?
HARA Yes, they can’t communicate that much. In Bali, people habitually speak both languages. TV programs have increased the opportunity for the Balinese people to have contact with the Indonesian language from their childhood. In recent years, some young people living in urban areas can speak Indonesian better than Balinese. Both languages are mixed in their conversation. This is called code-mixing of Balinese and Indonesian. In sociolinguistics, the word “code” refers to a language or dialect, and code-mixing refers to the mixing of multiple languages and dialects.
[…]
Balinese is divided into two dialects: a lowland dialect and a mountain dialect. Most of Balinese speak the lowland dialect. Speakers of the mountain dialect are small in number and the mountain dialect is thought to be the dialect of people who were originally in Bali.
[…]
What Balinese and Japanese Have in Common
MURAKAMI Yeah. The reaction to Indonesian must differ by generation. Using Indonesian instead of Balinese honorifics is a plausible explanation. Is this movement common in young people?
HARA Young people cannot use honorifics properly. People learn honorifics in adulthood. In the future, young people may not speak Balinese even in adulthood.
HIRANO So what you’re saying is, ‘they speak Balinese and use Indonesian instead of honorifics,’ right?
HARA They have that option. For example, one must use honorifics when speaking with a top priest of Hindu. Young people cannot use honorifics very well, but speaking with such a person carelessly will make them feel uncomfortable. So I infer that they think, ‘I’ll speak in Indonesian, which will not sound rude.’
MURAKAMI It is something akin to Japanese honorifics. Languages in the Tohoku region were simple and had no systems of honorific speech. I hear that, in modern days, they introduced systems of honorific speech of standard language out of necessity.
HARA I see. Changes in Japanese dialect are similar to the relationship between Indonesian and Balinese.
https://www.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/news/storyz/storyz_research/201312_sentanjin
The mountain dialect reminds me of Johanna Nichols’ refugia.
Not true; just because he’s calquing his term on Chinese (assuming he is — do we know that for sure?) doesn’t mean it necessarily has the same meaning.
In the article linked to, Mair says:
“One solution to the dilemma might be to create a new English word that intentionally has all the ambiguities of fangyan”. Mair suggests ‘topolect’.
In his own words, Mair is claiming that ‘topolect’ is meant to convey the meanings of the Chinese word 方言.
Mair does come down on the side of NOT calling 普通话 (putonghua) ‘Chinese’, saying it is “presumptuous for us to call Mandarin (i.e., putonghua, guoyu, huayu, etc.) “Chinese”. (In terms of typology, as I have shown above, it is also imprecise to do so.) For the present, it is best to wait until the Chinese themselves achieve a
greater degree of unanimity on this subject before we abandon a word [Mandarin] that has served us well since at least 1604″.
I happen to disagree on that, but I do agree with him that the term “Chinese” should not be used indiscriminately for the Sinitic languages of China.
The Fangyan 方言, the Han dynasty dictionary of regionalisms compiled by Yang Xiong which is the origin of the Chinese term customarily translated as dialect and by Victor Mair as topolect, does include what could very well be Old Korean terms from the region of Joseon/Chaoxian 朝鮮 roughly a century after the kingdom was conquered by the Han (of course, the exact identification of the language can’t be definite when you only have a list of words recorded in Chinese characters). So in the original usage, it looks like fangyan was applied even to non-Sinitic varieties within the empire. Of course, I’m not saying that’s how the term is used in Chinese nowadays, though from what John Cowan quotes from Mair above, there are even late Qing texts that consider Western languages to be fangyan.
In this original usage, there is no claim that the various fangyan are subordinate to a larger whole. It just means regional speech. Korean and Vietnamese may have been described as fangyan of the Han Empire, but no one was claiming that there was a Han language that these and other fangyan of the empire belonged to.
In today’s Korean, the Sino-Korean term bang’eon 방언 方言 is used either in the everyday sense of saturi 사투리, which refers to a nonstandard, regional speech variety (roughly “patois”), or as the translation of “dialect” in the linguistic sense (following the widespread practice of using Sino-Korean terms for technical vocabulary). So it has roughly the same broad semantic range and coexistence of everyday vs technical definitions as in English “dialect”.
@January First-of-May,
You responded to a comment that widely divergent topolects like Mandarin and Cantonese could be written in unusually similar ways by saying that this was also the case for Vietnamese and Korean, and to a lesser extent Japanese, until a century or two ago.
I’m not sure what you meant to state, but if we take what you stated literally, it simply isn’t true. Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese, to the extent that they were written with Chinese characters (using the rebus principle and/or inventing new characters), looked nothing like how any Sinitic variety was written with Chinese characters any more than written Vietnamese today looks like Latin just because of the same writing system. Instead, what happened was that literate people in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan mostly wrote in Classical Chinese (literary Sinitic) or in a hybrid language where the content words were in Sinitic and linking words were in the local vernacular.
You can read anything in Classical Chinese in say the Korean pronunciation, but no one will claim that it is in Korean anymore than someone reciting Latin poetry in the traditional English pronunciation will claim that it is in English. I could also try to write Korean in Chinese characters, but that would be about as easy as doing the same with English.
Today’s written Chinese is based on Standard Mandarin. Most literate Sinitic speakers (excepting unusual cases like Dungan) use this written standard, including Cantonese speakers (even if their written Chinese is often peppered with Cantonese influences). So Cantonese speakers will write in the same basic language as Mandarin speakers, though when reading the text out loud they would use Cantonese pronunciation, creating an unsual register that is based on Mandarin speech but pronounced as in Cantonese.
Cantonese does have its own written tradition and you can see it written in informal settings such as on social media. You can recognize it easily from its use of Cantonese-specific characters for some high-frequency words. I’m not aware of any other Sinitic variety besides Mandarin and Cantonese that is widely written using Chinese characters today, though I would be happy to be proved wrong.
Written Mandarin and Cantonese can have considerable differences, but they are recognizably related. The same cannot be said for Vietnamese, Korean, or Japanese written in Chinese characters. If you simply had a list of nouns, say “liberty, equality, fraternity”, then they might be similar or even identical between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. But once you begin to construct actual sentences, there is no similarity except in the shared content words that derive from Sinitic roots, just as Dutch and Indonesian have lots of similar looking shared vocabulary but are completely different apart from those.
Thank you, Jongseong Park, for that detailed comment about Korean (which was insightful) and Chinese (with which I totally agree). I’ve been too busy to respond in detail to everything that has been appearing in this thread.
Since I once lived in Osaka, I was aware of much of what juha posted, and also of Senba as Osaka’s commercial hub of old, but I don’t think I was aware of the Senba sub-dialect as a thing.
Thank you, Jongseong Park, for that detailed comment about Korean (which was insightful) and Chinese (with which I totally agree).
Seconded!
By me – not, to my knowledge, in the literature.
I’ve imported the term from here; it’s a technical term of creole linguistics, but readily applicable elsewhere, it seems to me.
The regiolects of northern & central Germany, then, are regional mesolects – more or less identical over much larger areas than the dialects of the same areas, which are in many of those cases moribund. They are, or started as, attempts to create a colloquial register for Standard German.
German WP article Regiolekt; it’s only about German. The Russian article is mostly about Polish. An English one does not exist.
the more i think about it – which this thread has been very helpful for! – the more i think “topolect” is a remarkably useful term. but more so the less hung up its usage is on mair’s intentions, sinitic languages, or the historical semantics of “chinese”.
in english, “dialect” is pretty inextrictably wound up with notions of linguistic* inferiority and marginality, as well as being used indiscriminately for all kinds of socially differentiated speech. “topolect”, as something that’s specific to geographical variation but flexible as to scale, gets places that “dialect” can’t. u.s. english, northeastern u.s. english, new york city english, staten island english, can all be topolects (in different relational contexts), without the garbage that usually accompanies talking about any of them as “dialects” or (as is more usual, colloquially) “accents”.
if we take weinreich as a guide, perhaps a dialect is implicitly hoping to seize state power, while a topolect isn’t interested in militarizing itself. (is this the difference between belarusian and tutejshi?)
.
* as a projection, of course, of judgements of inferiority placed on speakers of lects other than a particular period’s ‘standard’ – i.e. prestige** lect(s).
** a prestige lect can, clearly, be one marked as middlebrow (like “standard” u.s. english) as easily as one marked as high-class or aristocratic.
I think I agree with all of that.
An euphemism treadmill then.
I can say how else English is different from others.
1st, accent-dialect competition.
2nd dialect-lect competition
3nd dialect-[-lect] competition (sociolect, genderlect).
The later is convenient for others too, because it is sociolinguistics. 1. is uniquely English.
“topolect”, as something that’s specific to geographical variation but flexible as to scale
Yeah, if “topolect” was better established and didn’t just look like Victor Mair’s personal peculiarity, it would have been a good term to use as a contrast to “sociolect”, i.e. referring to geographic variants as opposed to (e.g.) social class variants. Perhaps there’s still a chance.
(Perhaps there’s still a chance for “mesolect” in David Marjanović’s sense, for that matter.)
Note, as well, that there can be different prestige lects in different contexts even within what is otherwise the same language; perhaps the most famous example is how in Ancient Greek different genres of literature were traditionally written in different variants of Greek, but AFAIK there are more modern examples as well. (IIRC, Hollywood actors are expected to speak Californian even if it’s not necessarily a prestige variety otherwise…)
“Accent” in English dialectology (of, mostly, English) refers to varieties defined by differences in pronunciation, independent of differences in vocabulary and grammar. That’s a useful distinction especially in the US.
My first reaction to “sociolect” is always “that’s a British thing”. Of course that’s an exaggeration, but it really is much easier to pinpoint someone in Britain as, say, “definitely lower middle class” by just listening to them than it is in most other places.
Yes, it is useful, but it affects definitions and understanding of dialects.
A random link:
Peter Trudgill, 1975 Accent, dialect and the school (here) : “….Secondly, differences in pronunciation alone are not sufficient to make for differences in dialect. Pronunciation differences make merely for a difference of accent (see below).”
It is absolutely English. The contrast with the Russian sutuation (we first learn about pre-stressed o’s in the northern and laringeals in the southern dialects) is striking.
Compare to my understanding:
1. Speech of a village X : does have peculiarities in any level (phonology, syntax, etc).
2. A set of variants characterized by a set of phonetical isoglosses – likely there are other associted isoglosses.
3. “accent” – when someone uses the word, she means that she is not interested in other associated isoglosses, and is speaking about dialects from phonetecal perspectuve.
In other words: I understand English “accent” as a claim about what kind of claims I am making.
Accordingly in “English dialectology” that studies English dialects terms are used this way, but … English Arabists define Arabic dialects based on phonetical isoglosses (I think with the assumption that there are more of them).
The confusion arises from that “English dialectology” is understood as “the English school of dialectology ‘in general’ “, the definitions like the above are given for “general dialect”, while there is a plenty of English-speaking dialectologists who study foreign dialects and use terms according to local traditions.
Thank you, rozele, for a very constructive comment. Detaching Mair’s coinage from its context of Chinese dialectology is a very useful step. Perhaps we should be ridding ourselves of the word “dialect” altogether.
I suspect it would be useful in the context of Dachsprache, Abstand language, Ausbau language, etc. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstand_and_ausbau_languages).
@dm
AAVE is not really an accent; I think sociolect would be the correct word (I am not singling out AAVE, there is also Spanglish). Also, in the US, in large cities and in areas where the regional accent is more pronounced (mainly south and west), I think there are sociolects. Even within AAVE you could probably find sociolects, I think this was part of the comedy of “She’s Gotta Have It”. What you are saying for England is that there has been historically a pressure in the middle classes to avoid speaking with a regional or “lower class” accent, or to use certain vocabulary and expressions, which is reinforced by the school system and formerly (not so much now) by the media.
@PlasticPaddy: I have found that there is a lot of variation in what constitutes “African-American Vernacular English.” This is not surprising for a lect that is found over a wide geographic area, always coexisting with other speech varieties. However, even just within one South Carolina metropolitan area, I hear a great deal if variation. For some users, AAVE really does seem to be just an accent. For example, my son had an American History teacher in middle school, who exhibited very strong AAVE phonotactics, but his vocabulary and grammar were completely standard (at least at school). On the other hand, some AAVE speakers with essentially the same accents also make heavy use of the AAVE aspectual system and AAVE-specific vocabulary.
I do not see it as endless prescriptivism. There is professor Higgins (and well developed phonetics), accents are taught in drama schools and it is absolutely amazing how many English speakers enjoy imitating accents and discussing them.
Compared to English speakers Russians know nothing.
Also sociolinguistics mostly developed in English speaking countries.
Meanwhile the traditional dialectology is maybe marginalized or at least treats “dialects” an “accents” differently.
What about:
1 .a word “accent” is used where Russian speakers say “dialect” and takes many of connotations and denotations that “dialect” could have otherwise.
2. English speakers do use the word “dialect” (and do not normally use “accent”) when discussing phonology of Arabic dialects. But they discuss English more often.
3. you also have sociolinguistics and its own vocabulary.
Can it be so that as result English speakers feel that the word is more useful as a term of derision? E.g. in Russian “accent” is used only in “Chinese accent”, “she speaks with an accent” etc. Rather neutral, you can like someone’s accent, but still English learners often ask questions like “how I can get rid of my accent?” and often ESL teachers answer: “why would you want that?”.
In Russian the word is perceived as literary but not scientific, a human experience (of an individual speaker) of hearing traces of one’s L1 in her L2 (an individual speaker again).
Russian words mentioned by J1M:
góvor, lit. “a speak”. A colloquial word for manner of speaking.
naréchije [on]-[speak-speech-word(s)-text-verb]-[ity/ness]
bookish Old Russian for “message, text”, in translations matches Greek words starting from ἐπι-.
The meaning “langauge, kind of speech” since about the time as dialekt: 17th century.
The meaning “adverb” (a calque from adverbium/ἐπίρρημα) since the same time.
Both were borrowed by dialectology, maybe be personally because of Dahl, the former for small dialects, the latter for groups.
In my own usage “accent” (with regard to variation in English) refers to phonology pretty much alone, whereas “dialect” would include variant lexicon, morphology and syntax. Most contemporary UK English* “dialects” are not really that much different from the “standard” now, except in phonology. There’s nothing much left of things like Joseph Wright’s native Windhill dialect.
While my usage has doubtless been corrupted by associating with linguists, I think this is a fairly mainstream use of “accent” as opposed to “dlalect” hereabouts.
* Welsh is a different matter, of course …
@DM / DE:
in my experience, in general u.s. usage (about english), the only differences between lects that are acknowledged as valid variation are phonological and lexical ones. so “accent” is the usual word even where there are other kinds of differences. someone with impeccably californian phonology can get talked about as having a “new york accent” if they use yiddish-influenced syntax, or as having a “southern accent” if they use phrasings like “might should”. and on the flip side, i have friends from the georgia/florida border and from western north carolina who never get talked about as having “a southern accent”, despite quite noticeable syntactical, lexical, and especially usage features to their idiolects that are quite different from nyc english – because their phonology isn’t markedly regional.
english lects with distinct features of other kinds are generally not understood/described as variants, but as “bad grammar” (or “bad english”, or various other phrasings of the same thing). that’s part of why “dialect” seems so unhelpful to me: it usually functions (outside of specifically linguistic contexts) as a class-marked way of saying “bad english”.
It seems t me that someone should have referenced Monty Python by now.
Dialects? We used t’ dream of ‘avin’ dialects!
We ‘ad t’ mek do wi’ a few isolated lexemes!
But we were ‘appy.
‘Course we couldn’t say so …
My problem is specifically that
(1) it seems, for many English speakers this word is above all derogatory.
(2) meanwhile other than in the technical sense it is rare!!! Many Englishs speakers do not use it. I saw a speaker asking others about this word.
I do not see it in fiction. I tried COCA – COCA offers exmaples like:
And also “a Lisp/Scheme dialect (with full continuations…”.
I tried BNC – and it is much more diverse, but the users are neutral or positive towards “dialect
I might have posted about this before.
A few years ago I heard an interview on Australian radio where the Australian interviewer and the Chinese interviewee were speaking at cross purposes for the entire interview because the Australian was talking about ‘accents’ and the Chinese interviewee about ‘dialects’. I should probably rewrite the article for clarity, but here it is:
An interview about Chinese accents: How cross-cultural differences led to a conversation conducted totally at cross-purposes
that’s part of why “dialect” seems so unhelpful to me: it usually functions (outside of specifically linguistic contexts) as a class-marked way of saying “bad english”.
But the problem here is not the word (which is rare!) but the snobbery itself.
I am starting to feel that people (e.g. Bathrobe) discourage positive and neutral use of the word (“ridding ourselves” – Bathrobe means linguists) not because the word has negative connotations, but because it means a “bad” thing: variation in English grammar.
If this is the motivation, well, no: linguists should not stop applying to variation in other languages’ grammars the same term as for variation in English grammar (especially because linguistics is international) – linguists should stop thinking that variation in English grammar is bad.
I am starting to feel that people (e.g. Bathrobe) discourage positive and neutral use of the word (“ridding ourselves” – Bathrobe means linguists) not because the word has negative connotations, but because it means a “bad” thing: variation in English grammar.
I don’t know where you got that idea from. Where did I say that?
“Dialect” is not rare at all (not sure of your source here), and the only reason I would want to get rid of “dialect” is because of the negative baggage and misleading meaning it carries.
Bathrobe can (and doubtless will) speak for himself, but I am quite sure he does not think that variation in English grammar is a bad thing.
I think he is maintaining that the word “dialect” has become difficult to use because (a) the technical linguistic sense diverges too much from established popular usage and (b) it unhelpfully lumps together quite distinct sources of significant variation, such as geography and social class. (Though it seems to me that “regional dialect” and “local language” between them do the job of “topolect” perfectly well, without running the risk of potentially playing along with the PRC’s politically motivated counterfactual implications. I’m all for calling a spade a bloody shovel, myself.)
[EDIT: Rendered utterly redundant by Bathrobe ipsissimus. I let the comment stand for Posterity.]
” the technical linguistic sense diverges too much from established popular usage ”
@David, does it?
Where I can find examples of “established popular usage”? BNC’s examples are neutral or positive, and do not diverge form the linguistic sense at all!
@Bathrobe, I think this “Perhaps we should be ridding ourselves of the word “dialect” altogether.”
is addressed to people who use the word in a neutral or positive way.
It is addressed to “people who use the word in a neutral or positive way” precisely because that is not how it is generally used in English. The word “dialect” has negative connotations. A more neutral word (like “topolect”, maybe) should perhaps replace this loaded word “dialect”. That’s the opposite of what you seem to be understanding.
Most contemporary UK English* “dialects” are not really that much different from the “standard” now, except in phonology.
Norfolk dialect seems to have maintained its distinctive grammar right into the 21C. (It’s curious that the English of Norfolk, England, of Norfolk, Virginia, and of Norfolk Island are all … curious. Equally curious is that Norfolk/Pitcairn is structurally an Atlantic creole despite being spoken in the Pacific.)
“Dialect” is not rare at all (not sure of your source here)
The word is extremely common in specialist literature. It is also extremely common in discussion of certain langauges.
But the proposal is exactly to abandon this usage, based on another usage. I think it is obvious that if I search for “dialect” in Google I will see almost exclusively linguistics?
“because that is not how it is generally used in English. The word “dialect” has negative connotations”
In what corpus I can find this negative “general” usage? Fiction? BNC? COCA?
“it unhelpfully lumps together quite distinct sources of significant variation, such as geography and social class.”
@David Eddyshaw, so does a word “human”. It unhelpfully lumps together Russians and children. I agree that sometimes is iseful to distinguish those. I just mean, sometimes it is useful not to distinguish.
Dialects? We used t’ dream of ’avin’ dialects!
We ’ad t’ mek do wi’ a few isolated lexemes!
But we were ’appy.
’Course we couldn’t say so…
This is perfect. With your permission, I will use it in every lecture on dialectology from now on.
I think it is obvious that if I search for “dialect” in Google I will see almost exclusively linguistics?
I don’t know about Google, but “dialect” is not a specialised usage in everyday English. “Dialect” actually has an Old-Worldy feel about it. My feeling is that it’s more used for traditional dialects in places like the British Isles than for language varieties in colonised territories like the US, Canada, or Australia, for instance.
In what corpus I can find this negative “general” usage? Fiction? BNC? COCA?
“Dialect” has similar negative connotations to “non-standard”. I refer you to this article: Definition and Examples of Language Varieties, which contains the following quote: “Many linguists now prefer the term variety or lect to avoid the sometimes pejorative connotations that the term ‘dialect’ has.”
Or this article, What is a dialect?, which states that “Speakers of any given language sometimes get offended when their particular language style is called a dialect”.
Or this article, The Problem of Language Identification, which notes that “For many, the term dialect is a pejorative term that identifies a variety as being in some way deficient or inadequate”.
The Wikipedia article on “Dialect” also notes that “in some contexts, the term “dialect” refers specifically to varieties with low social status”.
At any rate, I was merely expressing support for rozele’s idea that “topolect” might be a useful neutral substitute for “dialect”. I don’t expect it will happen — and I’m not usually keen to replace established usages, whether from a “woke” perspective or from others. But I thought “topolect” might actually be a handy word for the reasons stated.
“regional dialect” and “local language” between them
but it seems to me that the entire point of the terms we’re discussing is to avoid being forced to adjudicate which of those terms – each a label with very particular connotations that have material consequences – to use for which lects. which is important because that runs directly into a problem, since there are no linguistic factors that determine what gets to be a “language”. in a way, “dialect” is perfectly fine! the term that needs discarding is “language”.
Norfolk dialect seems to have maintained its distinctive grammar right into the 21C.
I took a look, and wow. If that little list of minor differences is enough to make a dialect stand out as grammatically distinctive, then I guess I can see why English speakers think of, say, Algerian and Moroccan Arabic as two distinct languages.
Moroccan is “Arabic”, by the way.
I would not say “Moroccan dialect” for the same reason why “waters” is not a thing.
Norfolk dialect seems to have maintained its distinctive grammar right into the 21C.
Yes. A couple of data points: my mother, her sister and mother (born 1896) were evacuated to Norfolk from West London during the blitz. They frequently recounted how gobsmacked they were by the language — none of them having been outside London except for holidays on the South Coast.
In the mid-1970’s I went on a sailing holiday on the Norfolk Broads, hiring a traditional wooden gaff-rigged boat rather than a modern plastic bathtub. The guy at the boatyard had been maintaining those boats for a lifetime. It was almost impossible to make out his instructions for how to manage the sails. (And it wasn’t due to unfamiliar vocabulary: I’d been sailing dinghies since a kid.)
And to reiterate what others are saying to @drasvi: ‘dialect’ is a common enough word in non-specialist parlance (at least in Britain). I think it is losing its negative connotations — indeed for some purposes, people with non-u accents are seen as more trustworthy. (Search Google for “British dialects more trusted”.)
This is an obvious consequence of the long-suffering Brits being lorded-over too long by the old-Etonians and Oxbridgeans ‘old boys network’ distinguished only by their self-regard, duplicity and incompetence.
“waters” is not a thing.
Huh? It’s a calque of Biblical Hebrew מים, in which mass nouns are grammatically plural.
‘Waters of Babylon’ — song by Don Mclean
“How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!” — Lewis Carroll
the term that needs discarding is “language”
Indeed …
The Kusaal for “language” is just pian’ad, literally “words”, which at least seems suitably non-committal as regards all these sociolinguistic difficulties.
(This, despite the fact that the locals have a positively Western European level of essentialism about language, in the sense that virtually all language names are transparently derived from ethnonyms, implying that if you’ve got an ethnic group, then you’ve got your own language pretty much by definition. Mind you, some of these language names have stayed unchanged while the language itself has changed under them: Yat, the language of the Yarse, used to mean Dyula, but now refers to the variant of Mampruli/Dagbani that the Yarse have adopted instead. It basically means “whatever the Yarse actually speak now.” Come to that, Nasaal means “English” or “French” depending on which side of the border you’re on: it’s whatever the local Europeans happen to speak. When Greater Cambria rises once more as a mighty transcontinental empire, Nasaal will mean “Welsh.”)
Yes, of course, it is a discussion about “language”, and of course that is weird.
Language itself is one of basic elements of human life, well known in the Stone Age (possibly known to some animals). Linguists should not define it, it is the same as psychologists telling people what is “love” what is “not love”:/
What we are speaking about is not langauge in the sense “what Masha speaks”, but specifically langauge in names, like “Chinese language”.
Inventors and owners of such concepts are people, say: schoolchildren. And it is clearly a matter of perception (from outside: “Arabs speak Arabic”) and self-perception. It is not science, and should not be “made” a science.
Nationalist ideologies, schools and whatnot intervene in this, the intervention can be destructive (or not) and it is often informed the science of the time. Linguists of course should describe this, they can inform others, but they have no right to approprate the word.
Linguists of course should describe this, they can inform others, but they have no right to “appropriate” the word
Well here again that don’t apply
But I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you.
https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/fragment-agon
That list and the vocabulary list after it explain a whole lot about American peculiarities…
In what ways? The article doesn’t say, and the personal pronouns remind me a lot of Tok Pisin.
@DE, I mean when people in Fingalia oppress speakers of X and are developing the literature of Y and a linguist comes and says:
“Accroding to the scientific definition X is a language and Y is not”, that is not science.
It basically means “Could you oppress speakers of Y and develop the literature of X instead?”
That’s silly. Surely you don’t belong to the school of thought that says all “scientists” are just the ideological arm of political power. When a linguist says “According to the scientific definition X is a language and Y is not”, that is linguistics; you may think linguistics isn’t a science, but that’s a separate issue.
What drasvi is saying in his idiosyncratic way is that, if the Chinese maintain that their language is “the Chinese language”, then we should accept that and not tell them, “No, scientifically speaking, yours is not really a language and you have no right to maintain that it is. In fact you speak a number of very different languages belonging to a single language family”.
The same goes for Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian, or Arabic. The first are considered to be three languages (I am given to understand); the latter is one — despite the fact that the first three are a single language by any “objective” criteria and Arabic is a number of related but “objectively” different languages.
I would maintain that it definitely is the role of linguists to try to untangle the very different ways in which languages are organised socially/politically. It is also the role of linguists to point out that conventional labels/classifications result in great confusion because they are not using the same criteria to define a “language”. Any naive outsider who went in believing the self-labelling would be in for a rude shock. (But I speak Chinese, why don’t these people understand me? I speak Arabic; I can’t understand a word the Moroccans say! I speak Croatian but I can understand Serbian with a few minor hitches!) In such circumstances the only sane responses are either “WTF”, or “let’s try and figure out what is going on here”, or maybe one followed by the other. drasvi’s response is “Yours is not to question why; just accept whatever they tell you”.
In fact, even locals are aware of realities on the ground. Even Chinese and Arabs, despite putting their languages under a single roof, are not naive enough to think that a person speaking one “variety” of their “language” will be able understand a person speaking another. When they speak of “dialects” or 方言 or whatever, they are trying to capture this reality; they are simply using a different kind of terminology to do so. To up and effectively tell Mair to shut his mouth about whether we should consider the different “dialects” separate languages, or whether we should really be calling these very different languages “Chinese”, is naive in the extreme.
It is also naive in the extreme to speak of “Inventors and owners of such concepts are people, say: schoolchildren”. Schoolchildren are taught by the education system, which is set up by the political authorities. Deciding whether something is a “language” or not is often a result of political decisions. New languages can come into existence overnight due to wars and territorial changes. The reaction to the outsider who points out the facts on the ground is also often inherently political. Chinese don’t seem to have had problems with the idea that the Chinese people spoke mutually unintelligible 方言 until Westerners insisted that they spoke different languages, which appeared to the Chinese to be a plot to split China. This led to a recognition that the 方言 were a threat to national unity, resulting ultimately in the current situation where the Chinese government is trying to completely extirpate local languages/dialects and impose a single standardised language, putonghua (Mandarin), on 1.3 billion people.
I mentioned above “objective criteria”. In fact objective criteria turn out to be much more difficult than they appear at first blush. One of the standard examples is that of people in areas of Germany adjoining Holland who natively speak (or spoke) a language that is mutually intelligible with Dutch but have German as their “standard language”. By the criterion of “mutual intelligibility” they are speaking Dutch. It also turns out that “mutual intelligibility” is problematic if applied simplistically. It’s not such a simple task.
But to say that linguists should effectively “keep out” is an extremely naive attitude.
Well put.
1. What drasvi is saying in his idiosyncratic way is that, if the Chinese maintain that their language is “the Chinese language”, then we should accept that and not tell them, “No, scientifically speaking, yours is not really a language and you have no right to maintain that it is. In fact you speak a number of very different languages belonging to a single language family”.
2. drasvi’s response is “Yours is not to question why; just accept whatever they tell you”.
I agree (more or less) with drasvi-1, I disagree with drasvi-2.
Chinese opinions* about the relationship of the Sinitic languages to one another are of great interest from a sociolinguistic point of view on many grounds, and the topic is worthy of study in its own right, interacting as it does with China’s unique cultural history and with modern geopolitics. The issues are subtle and such opinions are surely worthy of respect.
However, such opinions (insofar as they are not based on actual linguistic science) have absolutely no relevance at all to the real-world question of the status of the Sinitic languages as languages or “dialects”, and there is no reason for those not in danger of actual reprisals from the PRC régime to adjust their normal linguistic usages for fear of offending what the PRC decrees to be the Feelings of the Chinese People.
* There’s more than one such opinion. The PRC régime has no title at all to speak for “all Chinese”, any more than Boris Bloody Johnson has any right to pronounce his fatuous opinions on my behalf.
The reason that I keep referring to Ausbau, Abstand, and Dachsprache is because they offer a way forward from the arid discussion of “language” and “dialect”, which is based on a simplistic (European) nation-state view of a prestige standard language surrounded by a bunch of non-standard dialects that vary from it in various ways. It really is too simple a model to be applied to languages like Chinese, Arabic, and even German. Unfortunately the Wikipedia article isn’t very clear.
Abstandsprache: it’s a language because it’s just too different from anything else to be considered a dialect of anything else, regardless of social status. Textbook example: Basque.
Ausbausprache: has been ausgebaut, equipped with architectonical extensions (like technical vocabulary), to the point that it now functions as a literary or official language or suchlike.
Dachsprache: functions as the “roof”, the common written/literary/official language, for a bunch of other varieties that are, socially speaking, its dialects even if they might not be by other criteria.
Not mutually exclusive.
… any more than Boris Bloody Johnson has any right to pronounce his fatuous opinions on my behalf.
Talking of dialect/accent/pronunciations and fatuous opinions, here’s a commentary with a bit of socio-linguistic critique. “rarefied poshness … the kind of chaotic decadence that often comes with plummy vowels and the smell of horses.” “… the snootiness of the class system is starting to fatally weaken their claims to speak for The People.”
Unlike ‘dialect’ wrt varieties of English in Britain, the ‘plummy vowels’ are not specific to any place or topo-. A case in point would be William Hague, leader of the Conservative Party 1997-2001, who managed to be both Yorkshire and plummy. (Baron Hague of Richmond — that’s Richmond North Riding of Yorkshire, not -upon-Thames.) As opposed to Harold Wilson Labour P.M. in the ’60’s and ’70’s who was Yorkshire (Huddersfield, West Riding) but not plummy.
That list of Norfolk oddities includes a whole bunch of things that I remember from my childhood in rural Berkshire/Oxfordshire (we didn’t move but the boundary did). I ent for I am not; similarly you ent, he/she/it ent. He come yesterday for he came yesterday. You never did for you didn’t. What substituting indiscriminately for who/which/what, as in him what done it (could also be ‘him as done it’).
Several of the other items aren’t familiar, but I think many are characteristic of southern rural English in general and not specific to Norfolk.
many are characteristic of southern rural English in general and not specific to Norfolk
Yes, that was my feeling too. In general, it’s a pretty impressionistic list, I think. (Not that I’ve ever actually been to Norfolk …)
” the real-world question of the status ”
facepalm
I assume that both Mandarin and written Arabic would be considered “Dachsprachen”. They are presumably also Ausbausprachen.
Chinese is still tricky, though. Cantonese presumably would not be an Ausbausprache, because written Cantonese (at least the high register) is mostly written Mandarin read with Cantonese readings. However, Cantonese is also a written language (using Cantonese grammar and vocabulary) in the lower register, to be found in certain types of newspaper article, advertisements, and informal prose. I once brought a newspaper back from Malaysia and showed it to a Mandarin-speaking friend, who declared that it certainly wasn’t putonghua. (I think it was Cantonese.)
The face-palmed term “real-world question of the status …. as languages or “dialects” is not some disingenuous nitpick.
Then how about “the status of a language continuum”?
“Status” is applied to various administrative units (like the Jewish Autonomous Region) and to taxonomical ranks. It exactly means that we are not speaking about “a sphere”, “a langauge continuum”, “a chair” or anything REAL.
@de
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KYc8B_Z3E
For me John Bishop’s Norfolk accent sounds very like Dublin. I blame the Danes.
“Status” … exactly means that we are not speaking about … anything REAL.
Well, no. No it doesn’t. At least, not unless you deny reality to all abstractions* (a point of view for which I have considerable philosophical sympathy, as it happens. I invite you to consider the ontological status of “money”, with special attention as to how the concept has no real-world consequences, due to its unreality.)
* Including “English”, “Russian”, “Kusaal”, “Europe”, “colour”, “life”, “patience”, “strength”** …
** As in “Give me …”
@de
I don’t think drasvi is saying status is not real, in the sense you use there. I think he is referring to a “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” idea, where status is bestowed on people, animals, things, ideas, institutions by observers and is therefore not an innate or non-transferrable property.
For me John Bishop’s Norfolk accent sounds very like Dublin.
Sorry, the drollery is going over my head. John Bishop has a Liverpool accent. Ipso facto he sounds very like Dublin.
many are characteristic of southern rural English in general and not specific to Norfolk
The wiki concedes characteristic of East Anglia/NorthEast of London — then somewhat Berkshire/Oxfordshire; but not Surrey/Sussex/Hampshire. So we have a dialect continuum the further away from London (and from the Midlands). At least an accent continuum.
I blame the Danes.
Norfolk centre for the woolen milling industry — Worstead and thereabouts giving its name to Worsted weave; weavers from the ‘County of Flanders’. So blame the Flems, and the French for forcing them out.
(Not that I’ve ever actually been to Norfolk …)
In the ’70’s I holidayed every year in Norfolk; and was at ‘varsity on the Essex/Suffolk border. By then Clacton-on-Sea was almost completely East End accents; you could just detect some East Anglian in Suffolk; but even in Norwich there was a notable Norfolk accent.
@PP:
In that case, the issue is whether scientific methods have a privileged status* in trying to find out How Things Are, or whether Science is basically much the same sort of thing as an aesthetic (or political) opinion, and “your” Science is not at all the same thing as “my” Science, probably because “your” science is patriarchal and imperialist, whereas mine is wholly free of such taints.
(I was going to show off by name-dropping Feyerabend at this point, but I don’t think F actually maintained quite that position.)
* I think there may be a purely linguistic confusion here, too. English (and other modern European languages) very often casts a statement in a form which uses a lot of abstract nouns, whereas even classical Latin would not. (You don’t say “England expects …” in Latin prose: you say “the English expect …”) This has no bearing on the actual meaning. “I’ve lived a happy life” is no more abstract as a proposition in reality than “I’ve been happy since I was born.”
“Have a privileged status” = “be privileged” (itself an abstract concept … like “Science” …)
status …. as languages or “dialects” means little more than whether they are languages or “dialects”. Even the idea of status as “official or social rank” is pretty much missing here. It’s silly to make an issue out of this usage, which is common in formal or written English.
@AntC
I don’t know how I mixed that up. That makes a lot of sense now.
@de, drasvi
Particularly in the late 19 and 20C, certain things were labeled as science where biases were ignored and (often cherrypicked) measurements were claimed to demonstrate things they did not demonstrate. Other scientists were not always inclined to refute these claims. Where “bad” linguistics is used to underpin “bad” public policies, I suppose other linguists have a certain duty to make the public aware that other linguists find no reason to support the policies on linguistic grounds. This would contradict drasvi 1.
I don’t think drasvi is saying status is not real, in the sense you use there. I think he is referring to a “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” idea, where status is bestowed on people, animals, things, ideas, institutions by observers and is therefore not an innate or non-transferrable property.
But that is saying it’s not real. I have zero patience for the postmodern nonsense of “nothing is real, man, it’s all in your attitude.” One can have respect for people’s beliefs without falling into a world of total relativism. Gravity is only real if you think it is! If you believe “Chinese” is a single language, you must be right! Bah.
drasvi, do you really think there is nothing objective or scientific about the concept of “language”? If all the Swiss got together and decided they all spoke a single Swiss language, would you say “OK, you must be right,” and object to people still claiming they spoke French, German, etc.?
I’m sure we could well take the Chinese at their word that they speak a single 話 (or is it a single 語言?), but this may have implications on whether this can be appropriately translated as “language”.
Also, somewhat orthogonally, one of my older colleagues holds (though alas has not published that much on the topic in detail) that the factual difference between a language boundary and a dialect boundary is essentially sociolinguistic, and I tend to agree. At a pinch, the issue is not whether people could understand another variety simply with informal effort (any language is learnable!), but whether they actually will spend this effort, depending on if they believe they can trivially do this. Structural and lexical differences only inform this situation developing and being sustained. Sufficiently high or low difference will eventually force a language boundary or a lack thereof, ruling out cases like a “Swiss language”, but with a substantial gray area where the “type” of the boundary could be bistable or unstable depending on other contingent factors.
The southern Finnish / Karelian boundary seems to me to have done quite a few flip-flops of the kind: a dialect continuum up to ca. 1600, first established as a language boundary after some levelling-out of border dialects, back to a dialect boundary if a prominent one as Savonian and Standard Finnish influence diffuses into southern Karelian, mostly back to a language boundary after WW1 and WW2 as contact stops and attempts at standard Karelian begin development. Also with somewhat different history in the northern contact zone, where people in Viena still often themselves consider their variety of Karelian to be in fact a dialect of Finnish.
Language / dialect status between distant parts of a dialect continuum is, it seems to me, ill-defined: “languageness” / “dialectness” is a local bivalent property, not a global univalent one. A Savonian without knowledge of Standard Finnish would find a dialect from Turku or Rauma to be incomprehensible, but contacts like this were also unlikely to happen at any time.
little list of grammatical differences
Well, post an error and go away for a day, as Stuart found out, and you stir up all kinds of trouble. Sure, it’s not that big, and is certainly retention[*] rather than innovation.
But what I should have linked was not “distinctive grammar” but “maintained”. The Hoi Toider (‘high-tider’) accent (YouTube) and its associated vocabulary, spoken by whites in the coastal islands of North Carolina, is distinctive because it’s isolated from the varieties around it: the varieties that share its “non-American” phonological features are, or were, in England. It has not changed right along with the surrounding communities. The same is true of Norfolk dialect: every feature is found somewhere, somewhen, but they are not found in the standard and most aren’t found in adjacent dialect, and like other dialects of England it is not moribund and replaced by the standard.
[*] Trudgill says that the zero 3sg ending is in fact an innovation, because unlike other zero-3sg dialects, it is not accompanied by hypercorrection of -s in the other persons/numbers when speaking Standard English, and because there is good evidence just when (the 17C) and among which group (the Flemings and other immigrants) the innovation began. His paper.
Perhaps drasvi just has a healthy poststructuralist scepticism about the neutrality of science.
Mair definitely isn’t a neutral observer. He has let his annoyance at Sinocentric thinking (yes, there is such a thing, and it is highly resistant to overt corrosion, although outside influences do enter in disguised form) to become a campaign. His dislike of Chinese claims that Chinese (i.e., Sinitic speakers) all speak the same language, of Chinese characters as a blindfold preventing the Chinese from seeing linguistic realities, Han-centric views of history etc. etc. have translated into an reflexive rejection of a broad range of Chinese cultural assumptions.
Nevertheless, Mair is a healthy influence. He knows his stuff, unlike virtually all the commentators here, and he can see patterns of distortion in Chinese thinking about which a lot of people are simply unable to marshal a reasoned, convincing argument. Most are likely to accept it indulgently it as “just the way they are”. Mair doesn’t. He fights back (perhaps too hard and persistently).
Perhaps drasvi just has a healthy poststructuralist scepticism about the neutrality of science.
If he’s let it get to the point that he doesn’t think there’s any such thing as a language, that Humpty Dumpty was right about using words, then it’s not healthy any more.
@languagehat, no. I disagree from anti-prescriptivist positions.
“… and object to people still claiming they spoke French, German, etc.?” – It is you and DE who object to Chinese people claiming that they speak Chinese. I understand that you are anti-prescriptivist, but nevertheless: it is exactly what you do.
@drasvi
I admire your ideal anti-prescriptive position but suggest you could distinguish “accidental misuse” from “deliberate misuse” of language. When a Chinese person distinguishes their Chinese from their dialect, using those (imprecise) words, this is one thing. When the government enacts laws that (attempt to) discriminate against an ethnicity or religion, and uses imprecise language to make these laws seem reasonable or to provide a misleading summary of them, this is another thing.
@ PlasticPaddy
Chinese don’t usually distinguish their own dialect as a separate language from Mandarin. Whether they spoke Mandarin or Gan, they would consider themselves to be speaking Zhongguohua (中国话) or Zhongwen (中文), or some other generic term for ‘Chinese’.
For their own dialect they might use difang-hua (地方话) ‘local language’, or a specific name (Guangdong-hua 广东话 or Baihua 白话 for Cantonese, Minnanhua 闽南话, Taiwanese 台湾话, or Hoklo for Minnan dialect/Hokkienese, etc.), and even Beijing-hua 北京话 for the Beijing vernacular. They would call Mandarin putonghua (普通话) or guoyü (国语). But all of these could be called ‘Chinese’.
What drasvi is complaining about is the ‘prescriptiveness’ of linguists forcing their own categories on the Chinese — that the name ‘Chinese’ should not be applied to such a whole range of ‘lects’ that linguists don’t see as a single language at all. I think he sees it (he can correct me if I’m wrong) as a bunch of foreign academics trying to tell the Chinese how their language or languages should be categorised and what they should be called.
I can see where he is coming from but I think he is deluded if he looks from afar and sees the poor downtrodden Chinese being oppressed by a bunch of arrogant Western linguists. If he actually lived in China he would realise that there is deep-rooted chauvinism and cultural defensiveness on the Chinese side, too. The fact that the Chinese might adamantly maintain that Chinese is a single language with lots of unintelligible dialects has nothing to do with the linguistic realities (Chinese will routinely tell you that they can’t understand a word of what people from southern parts say). It is a particular strongly held cultural and political ideology — that ‘we are all speaking Chinese even if we can’t understand one another and don’t you try and tell us otherwise’.
When the Chinese force their categories on the rest of the world we get the situation on Wiktionary, where unlike other languages, a whole bunch of different languages are all lumped under the category of ‘Chinese’. I would maintain this is due Wiktionary editors acquiescing in Chinese views. Far from being downtrodden by Western linguists, Chinese has received special treatment due to the adamant cultural and political attitudes of the Chinese.
AntC gave a slightly misleading characterisation when he wrote: “one of the difficulties Mair is trying to address is that there’s only one Sinitic language (Mandarin) that can lay claim to “correct writing and use of characters”. Other Sinitic languages/varieties try to use those characters (supplemented with ad-hoc characters made up in the same style) or have various written forms using Latin or Cyrillic alphabets”. What he wrote is true but it needs more background.
In fact, “dialects” had their own systems of character readings that allowed them to read Classical Chinese. They didn’t have to “try to use those characters (supplemented with ad-hoc characters made up in the same style) or have various written forms using Latin or Cyrillic alphabets”.
The problem is that the only modern, vernacular “dialect” that has a historical written form is Mandarin, which only became the standard written language a century ago. Before that the standard written language was Classical Chinese. It is in trying to write in their modern vernacular form that the “dialects” are forced to use standard Chinese characters, for which they have traditional pronunciations, plus ad-hoc characters to write “dialect” words that don’t have characters in Classical Chinese.
‘Cantonese’ is a place-based term for a language, even though it’s spoken widely through the Chinese diaspora.
Cantonese is spoken across much of Guangdong province, although not in the east, and across Guangxi province. Guangzhou is the prestige variety. Taishan (locally known as Toisan) is a variety of Cantonese that is actually pretty unintelligible to other Cantonese speakers. In other words, Cantonese is not just ‘the topolect spoken in “Canton”‘, it is virtually a language of its own, with a prestige form and various dialects with less prestige. In that sense Cantonese does look more like an independent language than some ‘topolect’.
@Bathrobe, I will quote my comment that I began writing a day or two ago.
–1—
“He knows his stuff, unlike virtually all the commentators here ”
@Bathrobe, before I have time to write more: you misunderstood me. I am against prescriptivism, but I am not making any point about China. I lack the necessary knowlege. Moreover, if you want to teach Russians to respect our diversity, do that.
—-2—-
“…of Chinese characters as a blindfold preventing the Chinese from seeing linguistic realities,”
What a person who knows nothing about China can learn about them from this thread? “They are wrong”. What they are getting wrong? “Linguistic realities”. That is all such a person will learn. Possibly she will guess that the Chinese do not know that their languages are not mutually intelligible.
@drasvi, this thread has gone on too long for me to review everything, but I don’t think anyone is saying that the Chinese are wrong about the linguistic realities themselves, but about how to talk about these realities. The average Chinese speaker is well aware that the divergent varieties are mutually unintelligible.
The point of contention is in the categories that they use, which differ from how outside linguists use categories to describe these linguistic realities. Moreover, there is a politically motivated push to impose these Chinese categories on English-language discourse about Sinitic varieties.
In technical discourse where the official Chinese position is accommodated, this leads to preposterous situations where a completely different set of rules apply to Sinitic compared with everything else, such as in surveys of Sino-Tibetan languages where all the other branches are split on the basis of mutual intelligibility but Chinese is lumped as a single language.
@bathrobe
Thank you for the patient clarification. I will bow out, as the specific usages in China seem to be diverse and subtle. I was visualising something like the use of the word patois in France or the use of the word español for castellano in Spain, where there are strong positive or negative stigmas and imprecision can provoke sensitivities.
“… and object to people still claiming they spoke French, German, etc.?” – It is you and DE who object to Chinese people claiming that they speak Chinese. I understand that you are anti-prescriptivist, but nevertheless: it is exactly what you do.
You seem to have missed my point, so I will ask my question again, and request that you answer it on its own terms and not immediately jump to Chinese and some imagined idea of “prescriptivism”:
drasvi, do you really think there is nothing objective or scientific about the concept of “language”? If all the Swiss got together and decided they all spoke a single Swiss language, would you say “OK, you must be right,” and object to people still claiming they spoke French, German, etc.?
@languagehat, I repeat: no.
Then if you wouldn’t accept the Swiss insisting they only spoke one language, why are you happy to accept the Chinese doing the same thing?
@langaugehat, it starts looking like a quarrel and I did not mean it to be so. In reality my answers are short just because I do not have time for something more detailed at the moment. We do disagree on something, but it is something technical, even if fundamental. My proposal is: let’s assume good faith and try to figure out what’s going on.
In a world of discrete bounded homogeneous “cultures”, it would be easy: one might say Chinese is a yuyan made up of many fangyan, and neither concept has any perfect translation in English, whose speakers operate with an incommensurable set of categories. In a world of uncontested Chinese or American cultural hegemony, the preferred categories of the hegemon would be universal; perhaps Romance would be a yuyan and Italian a fangyan. In our actual world of contention and disagreement, Chinese people often have strong views on how Chinese should fit into English speakers’ categories, without having the clout to impose a consistent usage of their preferred definitions within English in non-Chinese contexts. (And likewise, mutatis mutandis, for Arabic.)
@langaugehat, it starts looking like a quarrel and I did not mean it to be so.
Good heavens, I’m not trying to start a quarrel, I just want to figure out what you’re saying and where we disagree. I truly don’t understand why you wouldn’t accept the Swiss insisting they only spoke one language, but you accept the Chinese doing the same thing when their languages are as different as those spoken in Switzerland. There are people who do that because they don’t want to offend the Chinese government, but I’m sure you’re not one of them. Because I respect your knowledge and intelligence, I want to understand your position.
In our actual world of contention and disagreement, Chinese people often have strong views on how Chinese should fit into English speakers’ categories, without having the clout to impose a consistent usage of their preferred definitions within English in non-Chinese contexts.
This strikes me as way too hands-off and “objective” (in the now-discredited “both sides have good and bad points, the truth lies somewhere in between” manner of traditional US reporting). The fact is that it’s the Chinese government that insists everyone accept that the Chinese people speak a single language, “Chinese,” and this is closely tied in with their increasing insistence on imposing a single language, Mandarin (or whatever you want to call it), within the country. I object in the strongest terms to both the first (counterfactual) insistence and the second (authoritarian) one. One of the few good things about the Soviet Union was its respect for indigenous languages (yes, I know about the problematic things that went along with that, we’ve discussed it before, that’s not the point here): the Kremlin never tried to make all Soviet citizens speak Russian and never made it the official language of the USSR. The Chinese government is doing exactly that, mutatis mutandis, and all people of good will should strongly oppose it.
you accept the Chinese doing the same thing when their languages are as different as those spoken in Switzerland
Perhaps I’ve lost the thread of the discussion, but surely you’re not saying that any two Chinese fangyan are as different as French and German? Tibetan, sure, let alone Uygur, but are these in the discussion?
It’s my understanding that (say) Mandarin, Yue (Cantonese), and Min are very different indeed, so different that it makes no sense to regard them as a single language. Whether they are “as different as French and German” is hard to decide (how exactly would you measure it?) and irrelevant. They’re related but very different, which is the point.
There seem to be a bunch of related-but-different notions here, although obviously in a given political context there may be a slippery slope leading from one to the next. Nonetheless, the following three claims seem quite distinct to me and it is certainly possible to accept some but not all of them:
1. All Sinitic topolects are merely variant versions of One True Language.
2. That One True Language has a Single Normative Form (which happens to be whichever version of Mandarin the Communists currently endorse), with all other topolects/dialects being substandard deviant forms.
3. It is okay/unremarkable for one topolect/dialect to be conventionally referred to with a name that carries an implicature that it is the national language rather than merely one topolect among many (sort of parallel to the English word “Spanish” meaning “Castilian”, although of course Castilian is these days the national language of many many countries other than Spain, which is the residence of <10% of its native speakers).
@languagehat, I just looked at my rather dry “I repeat: no” (very different from my usual tone) and thought that there is a risk that the argument will continue developing along the usual lines of forum brawls. I have no problem with brawls but they do not lead to understanding. Doing it around a scientific point is silly.
The “it” in “it starts” (I think “it is starting…” would be better English) is actually impersonal.
I just do not have time today for writing anything thoughtful, only occasional comments.
Min split off from other extant Sinitic varieties around two thousand years ago, which means the separation is a bit older than that between French, Italian, and Romansh. But the separation between German and the Romance varieties is at least twice as long. So that might be more comparable to, say, the separation between Tibetic and Sinitic varieties.
Of course, time of separation corresponds only roughly to the distance between the languages (which is impossible to measure objectively according to a standard everyone can agree on), but consider that many pairs of what are commonly accepted to be different languages have no more than roughly a thousand years of separation between them (e.g. Icelandic and Norwegian, Russian and Ukrainian, Turkish and Turkmen). If we require any sort of consistency in our linguistic terminology, it strains credulity to maintain that the different Min varieties (which are not even mutually intelligible with each other) are the same language as Mandarin or Gan.
I wish more people were familiar and comfortable with the concept of a macrolanguage, which groups together varieties that are treated as if they were a single language for extralinguistic reasons. Chinese, along with Arabic, Berber, Kurdish, Hmong, Malagasy etc., is a classic example of a macrolanguage. I don’t really object to these being talked about as if they were single languages in contexts where the internal complexity can be ignored (e.g. if we want an announcement translated in ‘Malagasy’, we know that Standard Malagasy is meant), as long as it is recognized that this isn’t the case from a purely linguistic standpoint.
What Jongseong said about both points. I don’t deny that the Beijing government is using the word “language” in a way that’s different from how linguists use it, and that this usage is politically tendentious in a coercive way. But a French-German macrolanguage is just unimaginable (as opposed to a language gaining a hegemonic intercommunicative position in a country, which I’ve always heard is exactly the case with French in Switzerland).
What the Chinese government is doing right now is a crime against humanity (whose linguistic aspects are the least of it by far.) The attitude that “Chinese is one language” is shared by the government and most of its domestic enemies alike, representing a older and deeper nationalist (even pre-nationalist?) consensus. Among other things, it predates any general acceptance in Western academic circles of the idea that languages are to bedefined by mutual intelligibility, which in any case has yet to prevail in popular usage even in English. Obviously Chinese is not a mutually comprehensible unit, and no serious scientist in any cultural context could pretend it is. But if China set the tone for culture worldwide the way America does, its linguists could and probably would easily impose a different phylogenetically valid definition for “language” according to which the Chinese government is right about Chinese being one language and, say, Scandinavians are wrong in thinking they speak more than one language.
In Western minds there’s also the tendency to conflate “language” and “writing system”. By that logic, standard Italian, e.g., is a “language”, and the not-usually-written lects of Italy are “dialects”. “Chinese” encompasses all that is usually written by the Chinese writing system. The languages of New Guinea, without an indigenous written form, are “dialects”. Etc.
I’m not sure if it’s exactly related, but if I tell people about one language I have done work with, by far the commonest first question I’m asked is, “Is it a spoken language, or a written language?”
A lot of the insistence on a single Chinese language to me seems to revolve around the common writing system (which, not being phonetic, cannot drift out of sync the way e.g. written Romance varieties have). Has the insistence on “one Chinese” been ever extended to cover also Sino-Korean, Sino-Japanese, Sino-Vietnamese? Or is this ruled out already by ethnic non-identity?
There might be also a parallel in this to the common folk-nationalist notion that Ancient and modern Koine Greek are “the same language”. (Maybe e.g. Hebrew, Georgian or Armenian get the same treatment to an extent, too.) But if we equated various languages with their ancestors in this sense, then simple transitivity of identity would mean that all varieties with the same attested ancestor are also “the same”.
(I also seem to have lost an earlier reply similar to Lameen’s first one today to the spam filter, I think.)
Is Mandarin a Dachsprache for Min and Cantonese? Not rhetorical, I don’t know but I would like to.
There is no common Scandinavian Dachsprache — not even in the narrow continental sense. The continental ones could have had one maybe, but they don’t. It might still be a good idea.
If we require any sort of consistency in our linguistic terminology, it strains credulity to maintain that the different Min varieties (which are not even mutually intelligible with each other) are the same language as Mandarin or Gan.
Exactly. I don’t care what words you use as long as you acknowledge that basic fact. If you want to call the Chinese macrolanguage (a useful term) a “Dachsprache” or indeed a “glob,” that’s fine with me. I care about two things: 1) not pretending the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese is comparable to the difference between (say) Boston English and Atlanta English, and 2) opposing the Chinese government’s brutal, inhuman, and repressive behavior in terms of all the languages (and, needless to say, the people who speak them) subject to its surveillance and control. Any opinion that seems to me to give aid and comfort, unwittingly or not, to the latter will be judged harshly by me.
“ I don’t care what words you use as long as you acknowledge that basic fact. ”
@LH this – and everything you wrote in this comment – is also my position.
P.S. except that I do not think that a word “language” is “linguistic terminology” – as I said above.
I just want to figure out what you’re saying and where we disagree
Same here. It became clear that something had gone off the rails when drasvi thought I wanted to get rid of the word “dialect” because I don’t like variation in English grammar. Since this is the opposite of what I think, something had gone wrong somewhere. This was followed by assertions that “dialect” is a specialised term in English with negligible everyday usage and no negative connotations, and an expression of opposition to seeing Chinese “dialects” as separate languages because it smacks of “prescriptivism” by linguists. Along with puzzling headsmacks over a perfectly normal usage of the word “status”.
When drasvi recently wrote “if you want to teach Russians to respect our diversity, do that”, I was mystified.
In the same comment: “What they are getting wrong? “Linguistic realities”. That is all such a person will learn. Possibly she will guess that the Chinese do not know that their languages are not mutually intelligible.” Given that I repeated a number of times that Chinese do know their languages are not mutually intelligible, I can’t fathom where this is coming from. It does appear to involve a “scientific point”, but until drasvi tells us it’s difficult to know what it is.
I will refrain from further comment on drasvi’s comments until he has time to write a thoughtful comment.
With regard to Lameen and Jongsong Park’s comments, I agree that one problem is the tendency to see everything through a Western lens — or perhaps a post-Westphalian Western lens. If Western concepts of language and dialect hadn’t taken hold, the way things are seen and classified might be very different. We might indeed have time for concepts like ‘macrolanguage’.
Incidentally, problems of language and dialect can also reportedly be found in Tibetan, where I understand that “dialects” like Amdo are completely different from the Lhasa written standard.
Similar problems exist in Mongolian. For Mongolian, part of the problem is not merely deep differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, but also familiarity (something that has been touched on here and there in relation to Czech, Slovak, and Polish). When people have a chance to get familiar with divergent “dialects”, mutual intelligibility is still possible. In Inner Mongolia, people in the west have great difficulty understanding people in the east, but with familiarity mutual intelligibility develops. This is aided by the use of the old supra-dialectal script. In Mongolia itself, which is heavily dominated by Khalkha standardisation set in stone by the relatively phonetic Cyrillic script, there is virtually no exposure to eastern Inner Mongolian “dialects” and the goodwill that would result in greater acceptance and understanding is almost entirely absent. The eastern “dialects” are almost completely unintelligible to Mongolians and are regarded very poorly.
“and an expression of opposition to seeing Chinese “dialects” as separate languages because it smacks of “prescriptivism” by linguists. ”
@Bathrobe, I never expressed this.
This thread made me wonder how English dictionaries label borrowings from various kinds of “Chinese”. Let’s start with the OED. There were a few cases in the Second Edition where the source was simply called Cantonese, in effect treating it as a language on the same level as French and Italian. For example:
But in most cases, the OED1 and 2 said either just “Chinese” or “Chinese (variety name)”, e.g.
And that is apparently the style adopted by the Third Edition. Examples:
I agree with Language Hat: in a scholarly dictionary, they should at the very least say “Chinese (Mandarin)”, not just “Chinese”, when they mean Mandarin. But as far as I can tell, they only do this when comparing Mandarin to other kinds of Chinese, e.g.
And I’d rather see “A borrowing from Cantonese/Hokkien/etc.” (or “Hokkien Chinese”, if “Hokkien” is too obscure) instead of “A borrowing from Chinese”.
The American Heritage Dictionary does better on both counts, generally giving the source language as Mandarin, Cantonese, Amoy, etc. and not “Chinese”. They even sometimes give further etymology:
Too bad the OED doesn’t take that approach.
Thoughtfully I can say this:
(1) I speak Novgorod dialect
(2) I speak Russian language
(3) I speak Slavic group
(4) I speak IE family.
In modern English language a phrase “Xish language” possible where “I speak Xish” is possible.
In modern English a phrase “I speak Xish” “I want to learn Xish” is impossible where “Xish” is a “group”.
Thus a conversation:
“I want to learn Arabic” “MSA or a dialect?” “Both, but I am not sure which one it is better to start from”
Is impossible if Arabic is a group.
@ drasvi
@Bathrobe, I never expressed this.
My apologies, you didn’t express this. I can understand how it feels to be accused of saying something you never said. I look forward to a more complete comment from you. Until now your comments have been quite fragmentary and could be read in a number of ways.
Is impossible if Arabic is a group.
That is why I introduced the concept of Dachsprache (or ‘macrolanguage’, to use Jeongsong Park’s suggestion). You have to learn both. One is the elaborated written/formal language; the other is the local spoken language that is completely different from it. A more sensible question would be, “Do you want to learn Iraqi Arabic or Moroccan Arabic?”
Perhaps that was the case in the early 20th century. Nowadays, if anything has that position, it’s English…
That surprises me actually.
Standard Mandarin is the Dachsprache for all varieties of the entire Sinitic family, except Dungan.
Written Tibetan is something similar to Written Mongolian, i.e. there’s a single written standard with an orthography that reflects the language of the long-lost empire. The basic difference is that it’s a thousand years older, so Tibetan is more diverse than Mongolian.
There is an orthography for the modern Lhasa dialect; it’s Pinyin-based, toneless, and probably hardly used in practice.
I should clarify that I don’t think of macrolanguage as interchangeable with Dachsprache, since the former simply means a collection of languages treated as a single whole without necessarily implying the existence of a standard version.
When drasvi introduces the distinction of whether we can speak X, for me that’s a good indicator that something can be considered a macrolanguage, since a single label is applied in common usage as if it referred to a single language. So we don’t say someone speaks Semitic, but we do say that Jesus spoke Aramaic although the label encompasses a number of very different varieties diachronically and synchronically.
Different historical stages of a language can also be grouped together this way. If I want to study Greek, you might ask whether I want to study Ancient Greek or Modern Greek. So Greek would be a macrolanguage label consisting only of different historical stages of the same language (ignoring divergent varieties like Tsakonian for the sake of this example).
Introducing the concept of macrolanguage makes it easier to deal with these examples where common usage doesn’t align with linguistic definitions of what a language should be.
Different historical stages of a language can also be grouped together this way.
So if I want to study English, you might ask if I want to study Old English or Modern? For 99.9999999% the answer would be Modern English, but based on what you said, Old or Middle English wouldn’t lie outside the scope of ‘studying English’.
(Needless to say, anything can become ridiculous when pushed to the extreme. “You want to study Chinese? Mandarin or Cantonese?” “Actually, Dungan”. Saying you are planning to study Chinese when you intend to study Dungan is a good conversation starter but is rather disingenuous. Although, as DM said above, Dungan doesn’t actually lie under the putonghua Dachsprache so it might be a particularly bad example.)
“Macrolanguage” is indeed a handy word, and the point that people actually speak (some instance of) a macrolonguage is very helpful too.
“Macrolanguage” also has the advantage for nitpicky linguistic purists that the “macro” element already comes with an air of spuriousness and lack of rigour (as in “macrofamily”) and can thus be used even by us ultras with a clear conscience.
Eh bien. “Chinese” is a macrolanguage (and thus eminently suitable as the language of a macronation.)
“You want to study Chinese? Mandarin or Cantonese?” “Actually, Dungan”.
I would enjoy starting my acquitance with Chinese from some ‘exotic’ variety. Which does not mean that I would avoid Mandarin, Cantonese and other languages represented in media. The logic is: (1) even if it is one of Yi or Hani languages, learning those and avoiding Mandarin would be difficult. (2) Yes, family. Сan one be curious about Arabic and not curious about Hebrew? (3) I honestly do not know if “exoticity” is a silly motivation or not, but it is some motivation, why not take it into account.
Greece’s labyrinth of language: A study in the early modern discovery of dialect diversity
Raf Van Rooy
Synopsis
Fascinated with the heritage of ancient Greece, early modern intellectuals cultivated a deep interest in its language, the primary gateway to this long-lost culture, rehabilitated during the Renaissance. Inspired by the humanist battle cry “To the sources!” scholars took a detailed look at the Greek source texts in the original language and its different dialects. In so doing, they saw themselves confronted with major linguistic questions: Is there any order in this immense diversity? Can the Ancient Greek dialects be classified into larger groups? Is there a hierarchy among the dialects? Which dialect is the oldest? Where should problematic varieties such as Homeric and Biblical Greek be placed? How are the differences between the Greek dialects to be described, charted, and explained? What is the connection between the diversity of the Greek tongue and the Greek homeland? And, last but not least, are Greek dialects similar to the dialects of the vernacular tongues? Why (not)? This book discusses and analyzes the often surprising and sometimes contradictory early modern answers to these questions.
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/253
Open access
What language is used for lawmaking in Taiwan? I’m aware that Taipei must have political reasons to use a different standard from the mainland, but that would make the case for Putonghua as the only Dachsprache for Sinitic even stronger if they actually use it.
Anyway, WP-en sv Ausbau strategically does not even mention the Chinese situation, but upholds Da/No/Sw as an example of (a) pluricentric standard(s) leaving open the question if they are built on separate languages or on a dialect continuum. (If you ask me, that question was much more relevant 100 years ago, and may still be for Swedish and some kinds of Norwegian — them thar mountains can hide a multitude of variation — but in Danish even the regiolects are rapidly equalizing to the standard which is very far from any variety of Swedish. The continuum took a hit 500 years ago with the establishment of separate central administrations, and universal schooling 200 years ago was its death knell).
Where to place the several Norwegian standard languages in this I don’t know, but it might be more defensible to claim that Bokmål/Riksmål was another Ausbau language (with Danish) for a single dialect continuum. Then again, with kids growing up learning only the respective standards, there is not much left of the continuum.
I honestly do not know if “exoticity” is a silly motivation or not, but it is some motivation, why not take it into account.
Not silly at all! I think being drawn to the exotic is a basic human thing, and it’s certainly gotten me interested in languages (Wakhi, for example, though I never actually learned it).
We travel not for trafficking alone:
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We take the golden road to Samarkand.
https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~tf/poem36.html
What language is used for lawmaking in Taiwan?
國語 guóyǔ, essentially the same as putonghua, although it uses the traditional characters — simplified characters are anathema. It has been “Taiwanised”, meaning pronunciation tends to be southern rather than northern. It does diverge from the Mainland in various aspects of terminology, it shows some influence from Japanese and Minnan (Taiwanese), it possibly diverges somewhat in the classical proverbs preferred, and it was not so much affected by the earthiness that Mao introduced into the language. But it’s basically Mandarin. The reason is that the Kuomintang (KMT) came to Taiwan as the “government of China”. They thus had Mandarin as their standard language and suppressed the locals (including the local languages) as best they could. (There is a documented history of this.)
The whole standardization-of-Mandarin-as-the-dominant-tongue project started off as an ROC project, even before the KMT were running the ROC – it wasn’t in any way an innovation of the Communists, although the Communists eventually went their own way on orthography. So the KMT occupation of Taiwan unsurprisingly involved the occupiers imposing their preferred language on the locals just as the Japanese occupiers had done before that. NB that even though the KMT used Nanking as their capital, the earlier ROC regime had already used Peking/Peiping pronunciation (with some semi-artificial learned modifications) rather than Nanking pronunciation as the basis of the normative/prescriptive standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_National_Pronunciation
@DE, yes, the most useful languages in modern times are Khoi-San languages. You can’t learn them without visiting Kalahari…
Ah yes, the pronunciation only Y. R. Chao was actually capable of using, and even he wasn’t fluent in it.
@drasvi:
Indeed, indeed. A comment after my own heart.
Nɛ fʋ bʋriasʋŋ!
by the way. (Can’t do Khoisan, but I thought I’d show willing, at least.)
And indeed, Nɛ ya bʋriasʋŋ, zupibig dima!
For me “Wakhi” is strognly associated with the picture illustrating the article “Wakhi people” in WP, a happy girl with a lamb.
P.S. all the time I am tempted to read Wakhi/Wakhan (Wakhan corridor) as vakx- and call the girl vakxanka, and only now I realized where I took that word from (вакханка: a maenad, bacchante). P.P.S. and now I remembered вакханалия (bacchanalia)
Khoisan languages are especially useful because they are apparently the closest we can get to the lost glories of Atlantean.
“After the submergence of the Atlantean continent… the language became poor: nowadays we cannot even pronounce 100 consonants, while the ancients perfectly pronounced 300 consonants and 51 vowels.”
Lameen, Where on earth did you find that one? Pretty special (even if my mother warned me against anyone named Samael.)
Greece’s labyrinth of language was published in 2020. While LH is reluctant to foray into Greek linguistic nationalism (once bitten twice shy), it looks well worth reading. On my to read list.
On the use of Mandarin as the official language of Taiwan: many translations from foreign languages are done on Taiwan, which are then published on the Mainland in simplified characters. (Examples I happen have to hand are The Hobbit and The Devotion of Suspect X, but there are countless other examples of this. Taiwanese translations are extremely common in China.)
While LH is reluctant to foray into Greek linguistic nationalism (once bitten twice shy), it looks well worth reading. On my to read list.
No no, I downloaded it and am looking forward to it!
“All made in Taiwan!”
The second line begins with “Undoubtedly”.
Huh? No it doesn’t; here’s the whole paragraph:
Sorry, the second line of the page. It’s evidently a substitute for an argument, and I found that particularly funny.
Related: https://twitter.com/TerribleMaps/status/1270497410150739968