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FINAL ASSIGNMENT OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS

The Relationship between Dialect and


Language

BY:
EKA PUTRI AYUNDA
67393/05

NR4AK

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
FACULTY OF LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND ART
PADANG STATE UNIVERSITY
2009
TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. INRTODUCTION

II. DIALECT OR LANGUAGE

A. "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

B. Political factors

C. Historical linguistics

D. Interlinguistics

III. CONCEPTS IN DIALECTOLOGY

A. Mutual intelligibility

B. Diglossia

C. Dialect continuum

D. Diasystem

E. Pluricentrism

F. The Ausbausprache – Abstandsprache - Dachsprache framework

IV. CONCLUSION
The Relationship between Dialect and Language

I. INTRODUCTION

A dialect is a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of


the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a
dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class. Sometimes in stories
authors use dialects to make a character stand out.
A dialect that is associated with a particular social class can be termed a
sociolect.Other speech varieties include: standard languages, which are standardized for
public performance (for example, a written standard); jargons, which are characterized by
differences in lexicon (vocabulary); slang; patois; pidgins or argots. The particular speech
patterns used by an individual are termed an idiolect.
A dialect is distinguished by its vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation
(phonology, including prosody). Where a distinction can be made only in terms of
pronunciation, the term accent is appropriate, not dialect (although in common usage,
"dialect" and "accent" are usually synonymous).
There are two kinds of dialect. They are standard dialect and nonstandard dialect.
A standard dialect (also known as a standardized dialect or standard language) is a
dialect that is supported by institutions. Such institutional support may include
government recognition or designation; presentation as being the "correct" form of a
language in schools; published grammars, dictionaries, and textbooks that set forth a
"correct" spoken and written form; and an extensive formal literature that employs that
dialect (prose, poetry, non-fiction, etc.).
There may be multiple standard dialects associated with a single language. For
example, Standard American English, Standard British English, Standard Indian English,
Standard Australian English, and Standard Philippine English may all be said to be
standard dialects of the English language.
A nonstandard dialect, like a standard dialect, has a complete vocabulary,
grammar, and syntax, but is not the beneficiary of institutional support. An example of a
nonstandard English dialect is Southern English. The Dialect Test was designed by
Joseph Wright to compare different English dialects with each other.

II. DIALECT OR LANGUAGE


There are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing languages from
dialects, although a number of paradigms exist, which render sometimes contradictory
results. The exact distinction is therefore a subjective one, dependent on the user's frame
of reference.
Language varieties are often called dialects rather than languages:
 solely because they are not (or not recognized as) literary languages,
 because the speakers of the given language do not have a state of their own,
 because they are not used in press or literature, or very little.
 or because their language lacks prestige.
The term idiom is used by some linguists instead of language or dialect when there is
no need to commit oneself to any decision on the status with respect to this distinction.

A. "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"


A language is a dialect with an army and navy"; in Yivo-bleter 25.1, 1945, p. 13).
The origin of this statement is, however, uncertain — Weinreich explicitly says that he
did not coin it. It illustrates the fact that the political status of the speakers of a variety
influences its perceived status as language or dialect. Most governments establish a
standard variety of their language (or languages) to be taught in schools and used in
official documents, courts and so on; often it is also promoted for use in the media.

B. Political Factor
Depending on political realities and ideologies, the classification of speech
varieties as dialects or languages and their relationship to other varieties of speech can be
controversial and the verdicts inconsistent. English and Serbo-Croatian illustrate the
point. English and Serbo-Croatian each have two major variants (British and American
English, and Serbian and Croatian, respectively), along with numerous lesser varieties.
For political reasons, analyzing these varieties as "languages" or "dialects" yields
inconsistent results: British and American English, spoken by close political and military
allies, are almost universally regarded as dialects of a single language, whereas the
standard languages of Serbia and Croatia, which differ from each other to a similar extent
as the dialects of English, are being treated by many linguists from the region as distinct
languages, largely because the two countries oscillate from being brotherly to being bitter
enemies. (The Serbo-Croatian language article deals with this topic much more fully.)
Similar examples abound. Macedonian, although mutually intelligible with
Bulgarian, certain dialects of Serbian and to a lesser extent the rest of the South Slavic
dialect continuum is considered by Bulgarian linguists to be a Bulgarian dialect, in
contrast with the contemporary international view, and the view in the Republic of
Macedonia which regards it as a language in its own right. Nevertheless, before the
establishment of a literary standard of Macedonian in 1944, in most sources in and out of
Bulgaria before the Second World War, the southern Slavonic dialect continuum covering
the area of today's Republic of Macedonia were referred to as Bulgarian dialects.
In the 19th Century, the Tsarist Government of Russia claimed that Ukrainian was
merely a dialect of Russian and not a language in its own right. Since Soviet times, when
Ukrainians were recognised as a separate nationality deserving of its own Soviet
Republic, such linguistic-political claims had disappeared from circulation.
In Lebanon, the right-wing Guardians of the Cedars, a fiercely nationalistic (mainly
Christian) political party which opposes the country's ties to the Arab world, is agitating
for "Lebanese" to be recognized as a distinct language from Arabic and not merely a
dialect, and has even advocated replacing the Arabic alphabet with a revival of the
ancient Phoenician alphabet - which missed a number of characters to write typical
Arabic phonemes present in Lebanese, and lost by Phoenician (and Hebrew) in the
second millennium BC.
This is, however, very much a minority position - in Lebanon itself as in the Arab
World as a whole. The Varieties of Arabic are considerably different from each other -
especially those spoken in North Africa (Maghreb) from those of the Middle East (the
Mashriq in the broad definition including Egypt and Sudan) - and had there been the
political will in the different Arab countries to cut themselves off from each other, the
case could have been made to declare these varieties as separate languages. However, in
adherence to the ideas of Arab Nationalism, the Arab countries prefer to give preference
to the Literary Arabic which is common to all of them, conduct much of their political,
cultural and religious life in it, and refrain from declaring each country's specific variety
to be a separate language.
Interestingly, such moves may even appear at a local, rather than a federal level. The US
state of Illinois declared "American" to be the state's official language in 1923, although
linguists and politicians throughout much of the rest of the country considered American
simply to be a dialect.
There have been cases of a variety of speech being deliberately altered to serve
political purposes. One example is Moldovan. In 1996, the Moldovan parliament, citing
fears of "Romanian expansionism," rejected a proposal from President Mircea Snegur to
change the name of the language to Romanian, and in 2003 a Moldovan-Romanian
dictionary was published, purporting to show that the two countries speak different
languages. Linguists of the Romanian Academy reacted by declaring that all the
Moldovan words were also Romanian words; while in Moldova, the head of the
Academy of Sciences of Moldova, described the dictionary as a politically motivated
"absurdity".
In the Philippines, the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (Commission on the Filipino
Language) declared all the indigenous languages in the Philippines dialects, despite the
great differences between them, as well as the existence of significant bodies of literature
in each of the major "dialects" and daily newspapers in some.
The significance of the political factors in any attempt at answering the question
"what is a language?" is great enough to cast doubt on whether any strictly linguistic
definition, without a socio-cultural approach, is possible. This is illustrated by the
frequency with which the army-navy aphorism discussed in the preceding section is cited.

C. Historical linguistics
Many historical linguists view any speech form as a dialect of the older medium
of communication from which it developed. This point of view sees the modern Romance
languages as dialects of Latin, modern Greek as a dialect of Ancient Greek, Tok Pisin as a
dialect of English, and Scandinavian languages as dialects of Old Norse. This paradigm is
not entirely problem-free. It sees genetic relationships as paramount; the "dialects" of a
"language" (which itself may be a "dialect" of a yet older tongue) may or may not be
mutually intelligible. Moreover, a parent language may spawn several "dialects" which
themselves subdivide any number of times, with some "branches" of the tree changing
more rapidly than others.
This can give rise to the situation where two dialects (defined according to this
paradigm) with a somewhat distant genetic relationship are mutually more readily
comprehensible than more closely related dialects. This pattern is clearly present among
the modern Romance tongues, with Italian and Spanish having a high degree of mutual
comprehensibility, which neither language shares with French, despite both languages
being genetically closer to French than to each other. French has undergone more rapid
change than have Spanish and Italian.

D. Interlinguistics
One language, Interlingua, was developed so that the languages of Western
civilization would act as its dialects. Drawing from such concepts as the international
scientific vocabulary and Standard Average European, linguists developed a theory that
the modern Western languages were actually dialects of a hidden or latent language.
Researchers at the International Auxiliary Language Association extracted words and
affixes that they considered to be part of Interlingua's vocabulary. In theory, speakers of
the Western languages would understand written or spoken Interlingua immediately,
without prior study, since their own languages were its dialects. This has often turned out
to be true, especially, but not solely, for speakers of the Romance languages and educated
speakers of English. Interlingua has also been found to assist in the learning of other
languages. In one study, Swedish high school students learning Interlingua were able to
translate passages from Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian that students of those languages
found too difficult to understand. It should be noted, however, that the vocabulary of
Interlingua extends beyond the Western language families.
III. CONCEPTS IN DIALECTOLOGY
A. Mutual Intelligibility
Some have attempted to distinguish dialects from languages by saying that
dialects of the same language are understandable to each other. The untenable nature of
blunt application of this criterion is demonstrated by the case of Italian and Spanish cited
above. While clever native speakers of the two can converse at length with very good
mutual understanding, few people would want to classify Italian and Spanish as dialects
of the same language in any sense other than historical.

B. Diglossia
Another problem occurs in the case of diglossia, used to describe a situation
where, in a given society, there are two closely-related languages, one of high-prestige,
which is generally used by the government and in formal texts, and one of low-prestige,
which is usually the spoken vernacular tongue. An example of this is Sanskrit, which was
considered the proper way to speak in northern India, but only accessible by the upper
class, and Prakrit which was the common (and informal or vernacular) speech at the time.
Another example of diglossia are the ancient Egyptian languages Demotic and Hieratic.

C. Dialect Continuum
A dialect continuum is a network of dialects in which geographically adjacent
dialects are mutually comprehensible, but with comprehensibility steadily decreasing as
distance between the dialects increases. An example is the Dutch-German dialect
continuum, a vast network of dialects with two recognized literary standards. Although
mutual intelligibility between standard Dutch and standard German is very limited, a
chain of dialects connects them. Due to several centuries of influence by standard
languages (especially in Northern Germany, where even today the original dialects
struggle to survive) there are now many breaks in intelligibility between geographically
adjacent dialects along the continuum, but in the past these breaks were virtually
nonexistent. The Romance languages—Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Occitan/Provençal,
French, Sardinian, Romanian, Romansh, Friulian, other Italian dialects, and others—form
another well-known continuum, with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility.
D. Diasystem
A diasystem refers to a single genetic language which has two or more standard
forms. An example is Hindi-Urdu or Hindustani, which encompasses two main standard
varieties, Urdu and Hindi. Another example is Norwegian, with Bokmål having
developed closely with Danish and Swedish, and Nynorsk as a partly reconstructed
language based on old dialects. Both are recognized as official languages in Norway.
In a formal sense, the diasystem of a set of dialects can be understood as the
underlying language for which each dialect has a typical realisation (language of
metaphonemes). An example can be taken with Occitan (a strongly dialectilized language
of Southern France) where 'cavaL' (late latin caballu, 'horse') is the diasystem form for
the following realizations.

E. Pluricentrism
A pluricentric language has more than one standard version: English and
Portuguese are two examples of these languages.

F. The Ausbausprache — Abstandsprache — Dachsprache framework


One analytical paradigm developed by linguists is known as the Ausbausprache -
Abstandsprache - Dachsprache framework. It has proved popular among linguists in
Continental Europe, but is not so well known in English-speaking countries, especially
among people who are not trained linguists. Although only one of many possible
paradigms, it has the advantage of being constructed by trained linguists for the particular
purpose of analyzing and categorizing varieties of speech, and has the additional merit of
replacing such loaded words as "language" and "dialect" with the German terms of
Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache, and Dachsprache, words that are not (yet) loaded with
political, cultural, or emotional connotations.

IV. CONCLUSION
Variety of a language spoken by a group of people and having features of
vocabulary, grammar, and/or pronunciation that distinguish it from other varieties of the
same language. Dialects usually develop as a result of geographic, social, political, or
economic barriers between groups of people who speak the same language. When
dialects diverge to the point that they are mutually incomprehensible, they become
languages in their own right. This was the case with Latin, various dialects of which
evolved into the different Romance languages.
Variety of a language used by a group of speakers within a particular speech
community. Every individual speaks a variety of his language, termed an idiolect.
Dialects are groups of idiolects with a common core of similarities in pronunciation,
grammar, and vocabulary. Dialects exist as a continuum in which adjacent dialects are
mutually intelligible, yet with increasing isolation between noncontiguous dialects,
differences may accumulate to the point of mutual unintelligibility. For example, in the
Dutch-German speech community there is a continuous area of intelligibility from
Flanders to Schleswig and to Styria, but with Flemish and Styrian dialects mutually
unintelligible. Adjacent dialects usually differ more in pronunciation than in grammar or
vocabulary.
When a dialect is spoken by a large group of speakers of a language, it often
acquires prestige, which leads to the development of a standard language. Some countries
have an official standard, such as that promoted by the French Academy. The first
linguistic dialectology focused on historical dialects, written texts serving as the basis for
establishing the dialects of a language through the methods of comparative linguistics.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gopsill, F. P. 1990. International languages: A matter for Interlingua. Sheffield: British


Interlingua Society

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Jwcrawford/american.htm

Wardhaugh, Ronald. 1988. An Introduction to sociolinguistics. New York: Page Bros


Great Britian

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