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A dialect is a variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standardized varieties as well as vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardized varieties, such as those used in developing countries or isolated areas.
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The non-standard dialects of a language with a writing system will operate at different degrees of distance from the standardized written form.
The distinction between the "standard" dialect and the "nonstandard" (vernacular) dialects of the same language is often arbitrary and based on social, political, cultural, or historical considerations or prevalence and prominence. In a similar way, the definitions of the terms "language" and "dialect" may overlap and are often subject to debate, with the differentiation between the two classifications often grounded in arbitrary or sociopolitical motives, and the term "dialect" is sometimes restricted to mean "non-standard variety", particularly in non-specialist settings and non-English linguistic traditions.
A geographical/regional dialect may be termed a regiolectWolfram, Walt and Schilling, Natalie. 2016. American English: Dialects and Variation. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, p. 184. (alternative terms include 'regionalect', 'geolect', and 'topolect'). According to this definition, any variety of a given language can be classified as "a dialect", including any standardized varieties. In this case, the distinction between the "standard language" (i.e. the "standard" dialect of a particular language) and the "nonstandard" (vernacular) dialects of the same language is often arbitrary and based on social, political, cultural, or historical considerations or prevalence and prominence. In a similar way, the definitions of the terms "language" and "dialect" may overlap and are often subject to debate, with the differentiation between the two classifications often grounded in arbitrary or sociopolitical motives. The term "dialect" is however sometimes restricted to mean "non-standard variety", particularly in non-specialist settings and non-English linguistic traditions. Conversely, some dialectology have reserved the term "dialect" for forms that they believed (sometimes wrongly) to be purer forms of the older languages, as in how early dialectologists of English did not consider the Brummie dialect of Birmingham or the Scouse of Liverpool to be real dialects, as they had arisen fairly recently in time and partly as a result of influences from Irish migrants.
Others have argued that mutual intelligibility occurs in varying degrees, and the potential difficulty in distinguishing between intelligibility and prior familiarity with the other variety. However, recent research suggests that there is some empirical evidence in favor of using some form of the intelligibility criterion to distinguish between languages and dialects, though mutuality may not be as relevant as initially thought. The requirement for mutuality is abandoned by the Language Survey Reference Guide of SIL International, publishers of the Ethnologue and the registration authority for the ISO 639-3 standard for . They define a dialect cluster as a central variety together with all those varieties whose speakers understand the central variety at a specified threshold level or higher. If the threshold level is high, usually between 70% and 85%, the cluster is designated as a language. (1995). 9780883126097, SIL International. ISBN 9780883126097
In contrast, speakers in the Netherlands of Low Saxon varieties similar to Westphalian would instead consult a dictionary of Standard Dutch, and hence is categorized as a dialect of Dutch instead. Similarly, although Yiddish is classified by linguists as a language in the High German group of languages and has some degree of mutual intelligibility with German, a Yiddish speaker would consult a Yiddish dictionary rather than a German dictionary in such a case, and is classified as its own language.
Within this framework, W. A. Stewart defined a language as an autonomous variety in addition to all the varieties that are heteronomous with respect to it, noting that an essentially equivalent definition had been stated by Charles A. Ferguson and John J. Gumperz in 1960. p. 535. p. 5. A heteronomous variety may be considered a dialect of a language defined in this way. In these terms, Danish language and Norwegian, though mutually intelligible to a large degree, are considered separate languages. In the framework of Heinz Kloss, these are described as languages by ausbau (development) rather than by abstand (separation).
In the Language Survey Reference Guide issued by SIL International, who produce Ethnologue, a dialect cluster is defined as a central variety together with a collection of varieties whose speakers can understand the central variety at a specified threshold level (usually between 70% and 85%) or higher. It is not required that peripheral varieties be understood by speakers of the central variety or of other peripheral varieties. A minimal set of central varieties providing coverage of a dialect continuum may be selected algorithmically from intelligibility data.
The status of "language" is not solely determined by linguistic criteria, but it is also the result of a historical and political development. Romansh language came to be a written language, and therefore it is recognized as a language, even though it is very close to the Lombardic alpine dialects and classical Latin. An opposite example is Chinese language, whose variations such as Mandarin Chinese and Yue Chinese are often called dialects and not languages in China, despite their mutual unintelligibility.
National boundaries sometimes make the distinction between "language" and "dialect" an issue of political importance. A group speaking a separate "language" may be seen as having a greater claim to being a separate "people", and thus to be more deserving of its own independent state, while a group speaking a "dialect" may be seen as a sub-group, part of a bigger people, which must content itself with regional autonomy.Muljačić, Ž. (1997). The relationships between the dialect and the standard language. In M. Maiden, M. Maiden, & M. Parry (Eds.), The Dialects of Italy (1st ed.). essay, Routledge.
The Yiddish language linguist Max Weinreich published the expression, A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot ("אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמײ און פֿלאָט": "A language is a dialect with an army and navy") in YIVO Bleter 25.1, 1945, p. 13. 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 is cited.
The terms "language" and "dialect" are not necessarily mutually exclusive, although they are often perceived to be. Thus there is nothing contradictory in the statement "the language of the Pennsylvania Dutch is a dialect of German".
There are various terms that linguists may use to avoid taking a position on whether the speech of a community is an independent language in its own right or a dialect of another language. Perhaps the most common is "variety"; "lect" is another. A more general term is " languoid", which does not distinguish between dialects, languages, and groups of languages, whether genealogically related or not. "Languoid" at Glottopedia.com
Despite this, these "dialects" may often be historically cognate and share genetic roots in the same Language family as the dominant national language and may even, to a varying degree, share some mutual intelligibility with the latter. In this sense, unlike in the first usage, the national language would not itself be considered a "dialect", as it is the dominant language in a particular state, be it in terms of linguistic prestige, social or political (e.g. official) status, predominance or prevalence, or all of the above. The term "dialect" used this way implies a political connotation, being mostly used to refer to low-prestige languages (regardless of their actual degree of distance from the national language), languages lacking institutional support, or those perceived as "unsuitable for writing". The designation "dialect" is also used popularly to refer to the unwritten or non-codified languages of developing countries or isolated areas, where the term "vernacular" would be preferred by linguists.
Spoken dialects of the Arabic Language share the same writing system and share Modern Standard Arabic as their common prestige dialect used in writing.
The extent to which the dialects are spoken varies according to a number of factors: In Northern Germany, dialects are less common than in the South. In cities, dialects are less common than in the countryside. In a public environment, dialects are less common than in a familiar environment.
The situation in Switzerland and Liechtenstein is different from the rest of the German-speaking countries. The Swiss German dialects are the default everyday language in virtually every situation, whereas standard German is only spoken in education, partially in media, and with foreigners not possessing knowledge of Swiss German. Most Swiss German speakers perceive standard German to be a foreign language.
The Low German and Low Franconian varieties spoken in Germany are often counted among the German dialects. This reflects the modern situation where they are Dachsprache by standard German. This is different from the situation in the Middle Ages when Low German had strong tendencies towards an ausbau language.
The Frisian languages spoken in Germany and the Netherlands are excluded from the German dialects.
During the Risorgimento, Italian still existed mainly as a literary language, and only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak Italian. Proponents of Italian nationalism, like the Lombard Alessandro Manzoni, stressed the importance of establishing a uniform national language in order to better create an Italian national identity.An often quoted paradigm of Italian nationalism is the ode on the Piedmontese revolution of 1821 ( Marzo 1821), wherein the Italian people are portrayed by Manzoni as "one by military prowess, by language, by religion, by history, by blood, and by sentiment". With the unification of Italy in the 1860s, Italian became the official national language of the new Italian state, while the other ones came to be institutionally regarded as "dialects" subordinate to Italian, and negatively associated with a lack of education.
In the early 20th century, the conscription of Italian men from all throughout Italy during World War I is credited with having facilitated the diffusion of Italian among the less educated conscripted soldiers, as these men, who had been speaking various regional languages up until then, found themselves forced to communicate with each other in a common tongue while serving in the Italian military. With the popular spread of Italian out of the intellectual circles, because of the mass-media and the establishment of public education, Italians from all regions were increasingly exposed to Italian. While dialect levelling has increased the number of Italian speakers and decreased the number of speakers of other languages native to Italy, Italians in different regions have developed variations of standard Italian specific to their region. These variations of standard Italian, known as "regional Italian", would thus more appropriately be called dialects in accordance with the first linguistic definition of the term, as they are in fact derived from Italian,; ; with some degree of influence from the local or regional native languages and accents.
The most widely spoken languages of Italy, which are not to be confused with regional Italian, fall within a family of which even Italian is part, the Italo-Dalmatian group. This wide category includes:
Aside from the Italo-Dalmatian languages, the second most widespread family in Italy is the Gallo-Italic group, spanning throughout much of Northern Italy's languages and dialects (such as Piedmontese, Emilian-Romagnol, Ligurian, Lombard language, Venetian, Sicily's and Basilicata's Gallo-Italic in southern Italy, etc.).
Finally, other languages from a number of different families follow the last two major groups: the Gallo-Romance languages (French language, Occitan language and its Vivaro-Alpine dialect, Franco-Provençal); the Rhaeto-Romance languages (Friulian and Ladin language); the Ibero-Romance languages (Sardinia's Algherese); the Germanic Cimbrian, Southern Bavarian, Walser German and the Mòcheno language; the Albanian Arbëresh language; the Hellenic Griko language and Calabrian Greek; the Serbo-Croatian Slavomolisano dialect; and the various , including the Gail Valley dialect and Istrian dialect. The language indigenous to Sardinia, while being Romance in nature, is considered to be a Southern Romance of its own, separate from the other Neo-Latin groups; it is often subdivided into the Centro-Southern and Centro-Northern dialects.
Though mostly mutually unintelligible, the exact degree to which all the Italian languages are mutually unintelligible varies, often correlating with geographical distance or geographical barriers between the languages; some regional Italian languages that are closer in geographical proximity to each other or closer to each other on the dialect continuum are more or less mutually intelligible. For instance, a speaker of purely Eastern Lombard, a language in Northern Italy's Lombardy that includes the Bergamasque dialect, would have severely limited mutual intelligibility with a purely Italian speaker and would be nearly completely unintelligible to a Sicilian-speaking individual. Due to Eastern Lombard's status as a Gallo-Italic language, an Eastern Lombard speaker may, in fact, have more mutual intelligibility with an Occitan, Catalan language, or French speaker than with an Italian or Sicilian speaker. Meanwhile, a Sicilian-speaking person would have a greater degree of mutual intelligibility with a speaker of the more closely related Neapolitan language, but far less mutual intelligibility with a person speaking Sicilian Gallo-Italic, a language that developed in isolated Lombard emigrant communities on the same island as the Sicilian language.
Today, the majority of Italian nationals are able to speak Italian, though many Italians still speak their regional language regularly or as their primary day-to-day language, especially at home with family or when communicating with Italians from the same town or region.
Macedonian, which is largely mutually intelligible with Bulgarian and certain dialects of Serbo-Croatian (Torlakian), is considered by Bulgarian linguists to be a Bulgarian dialect, while in North Macedonia, it is regarded as a language in its own right. 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 South Slavic dialect continuum covering the area of today's North Macedonia were referred to as Bulgarian dialects. Sociolinguists agree that the question of whether Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian or a language is a political one and cannot be resolved on a purely linguistic basis.
The Malay language is pluricentric and a macrolanguage, i.e., several varieties of it are standardized as the national language (bahasa kebangsaan or bahasa nasional) of several nation states with various official names: in Malaysia, it is designated as either bahasa Malaysia ("Malaysian Malay") or also bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"); in Singapore and Brunei, it is called bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"); in Indonesia, an autonomous normative variety called bahasa Indonesia ("Indonesian language") is designated the bahasa persatuan/pemersatu ("unifying language" or lingua franca) whereas the term "Malay" (bahasa Melayu) is domestically restricted to vernacular varieties of Malay indigenous to areas of Central to Southern Sumatra and West Kalimantan.
Following the Spring of Nations in Europe and efforts of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, across the so-called "Southwestern Krai" of Russian Empire started to spread cultural societies of Hromada and their Sunday schools. Themselves "hromadas" acted in same manner as Orthodox fraternities of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth back in 15th century. Around that time in Ukraine becoming popular political movements Narodnichestvo (Narodniks) and Khlopomanstvo.
From the Ming dynasty onward, Beijing has been the capital of China and the dialect spoken in Beijing has had the most prestige among other varieties. With the founding of the Republic of China, Standard Mandarin was designated as the official language, based on the spoken language of Beijing. Since then, other spoken varieties are regarded as fangyan (regional speech). Cantonese is still the most commonly-used language in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau and among some overseas Chinese communities, whereas Hokkien has been accepted in Taiwan as an important local language alongside Mandarin. Then starting in the 1950s, the written Chinese also diverged when the People's Republic of China introduced simplified characters, which are now used throughout the country. Traditional characters are still the norm in Taiwan and some other overseas communities.
The two languages in their colloquially spoken form are mutually intelligible, but in written form, Hindi uses the Devanagari script while Urdu uses the Perso-Arabic script. For formal vocabulary, the two languages diverge, with Hindi drawing more from Sanskrit and Urdu more from Persian language or Arabic.
In addition, several other dialects or languages are classified under Hindi that did not descend from it. Standard Hindi and Urdu are based on Khari Boli, the dialect spoken around Delhi. Other dialects with high mutual intelligibility spoken in surrounding areas include Haryanvi and languages from Western Uttar Pradesh, like Braj Bhasha. But many languages less similar to Standard Hindi do not have official status under the 8th Schedule to the Constitution of India and are instead classified as dialects of Hindi. This includes Bhojpuri, spoken in Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which does not have official status in either state or in the 8th Schedule, despite being spoken by over 50 million people. But over time, more languages have been recognized as distinct from Hindi. Maithili was made a scheduled language of India in 2003, and Chhattisgarhi was made official in Chhattisgarh.
Modern Italian is heavily based on the Florentine dialect of Tuscan dialect. The Tuscan-based language that would eventually become modern Italian had been used in poetry and literature since at least the 12th century, and it first spread outside the Tuscan linguistic borders through the works of the so-called tre corone ("three crowns"): Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio. Florentine thus gradually rose to prominence as the volgare of the literate and upper class in Italy, and it spread throughout the peninsula and Sicily as the lingua franca among the Italian educated class as well as Italian travelling merchants. The economic prowess and cultural and artistic importance of Tuscany in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance further encouraged the diffusion of the Florentine-Tuscan Italian throughout Italy and among the educated and powerful, though local and regional languages remained the main languages of the common people.
The Balkans
The classification of speech varieties as dialects or languages and their relationship to other varieties of speech can be controversial and the verdicts inconsistent. Serbo-Croatian illustrates this point. Serbo-Croatian has two major formal variants (Serbian language and Croatian). Both are based on the Shtokavian dialect and therefore mutually intelligible with differences found mostly in their respective local vocabularies and minor grammatical differences. Certain dialects of Serbia ( Torlakian) and Croatia ( Kajkavian and Chakavian), however, are not mutually intelligible even though they are usually subsumed under Serbo-Croatian. How these dialects should be classified in relation to Shtokavian remains a matter of dispute.
Lebanon
In Lebanon, a part of the Christian population considers "Lebanese" to be in some sense a distinct language from Arabic language and not merely a dialect thereof. During the civil war, Christians often used Lebanese Arabic officially, and sporadically used the Latin script to write Lebanese, thus further distinguishing it from Arabic. All Lebanese laws are written in the standard literary form of Arabic, though parliamentary debate may be conducted in Lebanese Arabic.
Malay
Malay language has a long history as a lingua franca (Indonesian and Malay language: basantara) in the Malay Archipelago which currently includes Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam, Singapore, East Timor, and the southern part of Thailand. This geographical variation, which then spread widely even to South Africa, finally led to the formation of a Malay language cluster which spread and had differences due to geographical conditions.Ikram, A. 2008. Bahasa Melayu penyebar budaya. Naskah-naskah sebagai saksi persebaran bahasa. Jurnal ATL (in Indonesian). 1. Accessed from the Malayu Online page on 2009-05-06.
North Africa
In Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, the translated as literally meaning Dialect in Arabic (spoken North African languages) are sometimes considered more different from other Arabic dialects. Officially, North African countries prefer to give preference to the Literary Arabic and conduct much of their political and religious life in it (adherence to Islam), and refrain from declaring each country's specific variety to be a separate language, because Literary Arabic is the liturgical language of Islam and the language of the Islamic sacred book, the Qur'an. Although, especially since the 1960s, the Darijas are occupying an increasing use and influence in the cultural life of these countries. Examples of cultural elements where Darijas' use became dominant include: theatre, film, music, television, advertisement, social media, folk-tale books and companies' names.
Ukraine
The Modern Ukrainian language has been in common use since the late 17th century, associated with the establishment of the Cossack Hetmanate. In the 19th century, the Government of the Russian Empire claimed that Ukrainian (or Little Russian, per official name) was merely a dialect of Russian language (or Polonized dialect) and not a language on its own (same concept as for Belarusian language). That concepted was enrooted soon after the partitions of Poland. According to these claims, the differences were few and caused by the conquest of western Ukraine by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. However, in reality the dialects in Ukraine were developing independently from the dialects in the modern Russia for several centuries, and as a result they differed substantially.
Moldova
There have been cases of a variety of speech being deliberately reclassified 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, Ion Bărbuţă, described the dictionary as a politically motivated "absurdity". On 22 March 2023, the president of Moldova, Maia Sandu, promulgated a law passed by Parliament that named the national language as Romanian in all legislative texts and the constitution.
Greater China
Unlike languages that use alphabets to indicate their pronunciation, Chinese characters have developed from logograms that do not always give hints to their pronunciation. Although the written characters have remained relatively consistent for the last two thousand years, the pronunciation and grammar in different regions have developed to an extent that the varieties of the spoken language are often mutually unintelligible. As a series of migration to the south throughout the history, the regional languages of the south, including Gan Chinese, Xiang Chinese, Wu Chinese, Min Chinese, Yue Chinese and Hakka Chinese often show traces of Old Chinese or Middle Chinese.
Hindi and Urdu
Hindi is one of the official languages of India, alongside English language, and an official language in nine states (including Gujarat, where Gujarati is the most spoken language). Urdu is the national and official language of Pakistan, as well as being an additional official language in 5 states of India (3 of the 8 Hindi speaking states plus Andhra Pradesh and Telangana). While it is the second language for most Pakistanis (outside of muhajirs who immigrated during partition and their descendants) in favor of languages like Punjabi language and Sindhi language, it is the first language of most Indian Muslims in North India and the Deccan Plateau.
See also
Selected list of articles on dialects
Notes
External links
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