What’s the diff erence between dialects and languages?
G. Tucker Childs
Is it better to speak a language than a dialect?
Which one do you speak?
Strange as it may seem, there is no generally agreed-upon way to distinguish between a ‘language’ and a ‘dialect’. Th e two words are not objective, scientifi c terms, even among linguists. Th e lay com-munity is no diff erent, and people oft en use the terms to mean diff erent things. As used by many people, ‘language’ is what ‘we’
speak and ‘dialect’ is the linguistic variety spoken by someone else, usually someone thought of as inferior. Th ere is no linguistically objective diff erence between the two. In other contexts, ‘language’
can mean the generally accepted ‘standard’ or government and radio-broadcast language of a country, while ‘dialects’ are homelier versions that vary from region to region and may not be pronounced in the same way as by radio announcers. Language varieties tend
What’s the difference between dialects and languages? 17
to be labeled ‘dialects’ rather than ‘languages’ for non-linguistic reasons, usually political or ideological. Oft entimes they are not written, or they are spoken by people who don’t run the country.
Th ey are generally regarded as being not so ‘good’ as the standard language and consequently have little prestige. In short, the distinc-tion is subjective. It depends on who you are and the perspective from which you judge the varieties.
From a linguistic perspective, no dialect is inherently better than another and thus no dialect is more deserving of the title ‘lan-guage’ than any other dialect. A language can be seen as a group of related dialects. For example, the dominant position of the Parisian dialect in France is largely an accident of history. When the Count of Paris was elected king of France in the tenth century, the language of his court became the ‘standard’. If things had gone diff erently, the dialect of Marseille or Dijon might have become the national language of France today.
Dialects can be socially determined, as Eliza Doolittle learned in My Fair Lady. In this play and fi lm, as will be remembered, a snobbish phonetics professor (based on the real-life phonetician Daniel Jones; Rex Harrison in the movie version was coached by the real-life phonetician Peter Ladefoged) agrees to a wager that he can take a fl ower girl and make her presentable in high society. He succeeds, primarily by changing her speech.
Similarly, dialects can be politically determined. Th e linguist Max Weinreich is oft en quoted as saying, ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.’ His point was that politics oft en decide what will be called a ‘dialect’ and what will be called a ‘language’.
Powerful or historically signifi cant groups have ‘languages’; their smaller or weaker counterparts have ‘dialects’.
Th e status of a language can be arbitrarily determined by a person or a government, typically a person or entity endowed with the power to do so. In southern Africa an early twentieth-century missionary created a language now known as ‘Tsonga’ by declaring
three separate languages to be dialects of a single tongue. Conversely, the government of South Africa created two languages by arbitrary declaration—Zulu and Xhosa—even though there is no clear lin-guistic boundary between them. In many parts of the world dialects form what is called a ‘dialect continuum’, where no two adjacent dialects are wildly diff erent, but at the ends of the continuum the dialects are mutually unintelligible.
Dialect diff erences are oft en relatively minor—sometimes just a matter of pronunciation (‘You say tomayto, I say tomahto’) or slight diff erences in vocabulary (Americans say ‘elevator’, Britons say
‘lift ’). Such diff erences are crucial to understanding George Bernard Shaw’s famous quip that America and Britain are ‘two countries separated by a common language.’ But dialects can also diff er so greatly from one another that they are incomprehensible. German speakers from Cologne and German speakers from rural Bavaria can barely understand one another, if at all. Although the Swiss speak German as one of their national languages, few Germans can understand them when they speak their local dialects.
One of the tests people use to diff erentiate ‘language’ from
‘dialect’ is mutual intelligibility. Many would say that people speak the same language, meaning dialects of the same language, if they understand each other without too much diffi culty. If they don’t understand one another, they are considered to be speaking diff erent languages. Th at seems like a good rule. So why are Cologne German and Bavarian German, which are not mutually intelligible, not con-sidered separate languages? Or why are Swedish and Norwegian considered separate languages, when Swedes and Norwegians have no trouble understanding one another?
Such questions become even more unanswerable when speak-ers of Dialect A just don’t want to undspeak-erstand speakspeak-ers of Dialect B, and sometimes vice versa. One or both groups insist that they speak separate tongues, even though they—judging by objective linguistic criteria—are speaking mutually intelligible dialects of the same language.
What’s the difference between dialects and languages? 19
It is thus easy to conclude from all this that the terms ‘dialect’
and ‘language’ are politically and socially loaded. You might want to ask yourself whether you speak a language or a dialect. It’s a trick question, of course, because ultimately, all languages are dialects.
You speak both at the same time.
About the author
G. Tucker Childs is a professor in the Applied Linguistics Depart-ment at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches courses in phonetics, phonology, language variation, pidgins and creoles, African American English, and sociolinguistics. He and several of his students have begun researching the dialects of Portland in their ‘Portland Dialect Study’ (http://www.pds.pdx.edu). Dr. Childs also has interests in African languages, including the pidgins and new urban varieties spoken on the continent. His most recent book in that area is An Introduction to African Languages (Benjamins, 2003), and in 2004 he began a project documenting the moribund Mani language of Guinea and Sierra Leone (see: http://www.hrelp.org). He has taught at universities in the United States, Canada, Europe and Africa, and has been a visiting researcher at the interdisciplinary Langage, langues et cultures d’Afrique noire (LLACAN) unit of France’s National Council for Scientifi c Research (CNRS) in Paris.
Suggestions for further reading
In this book: dialects are discussed in chapters 18 (English in Britain, America, and elsewhere), 26 (U.S. Southern English), and 41 (Are dialects dying?).
Elsewhere:
Crystal, David. Th e Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge University Press, second edition 1997). A fascinating and accessible introduction to language and linguistics with numerous illustrations and quotable facts.
Joseph, John E., and Talbot J. Taylor, eds. Ideologies of Language (Routledge, 1990). A collection of articles illustrating how power and ideology control the status of such languages as Afrikaans and French.
Trudgill, Peter. Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society (Penguin Books, Ltd., 2000). A sociolinguistically informed introduc-tion to languages and dialects written for those with little knowledge of linguistics.
Web site:
http://www.ethnologue.com/
Online version of Gordon, Raymond G., Jr., ed. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Fift eenth edition (SIL International, 2005). A useful reference cataloguing and classifying all known languages of the world, with some information on dialects.