What is a variety? slide#2

Variety is when people who speak the same language speak it differently.

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A specific variation within a language is called a dialect.

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Let’s first discuss the difference between language and dialect.

LANGUAGE

A language should be the larger linguistic family that can contain several dialects and can be considered the standard form of the language.

DIALECT

A dialect should be: A way of speaking a language that is used only in a particular area or by a particular group and characterized by systemic features, such as phonology, lexicon, or grammar, that distinguishes it from other varieties of the same language.

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PROBLEMS DEFINING LANGUAGE AND DIALECT

However, problems arise when we start to try to differentiate dialects from languages.

First off, the term dialect in popular usage often carries a connotation of substandard. That is, it is somehow not as good as the standard language. The term itself is equally applicable to all varieties of a language—including the dialect that might become the standard. REMEMBER: EVERY DIALECT IS EQUAL

Linguists usually approach dialects as descriptively neutral terms, seeing them as regionally or socially distinct varieties of a language that are mutually intelligible with other varieties.

**PUT ON BOARD:

MUTUAL INTELLIGIBILITY Means speakers of two or more different languages or dialects can converse with each other and understand each other’s meanings.

Now, most speakers can give a name to whatever it is they speak. While people do usually know what language they speak, they may not always claim to be fully qualified speakers of that language.

They may experience difficulty in deciding whether what they speak should be called a language proper or merely a dialect of some language. Such indecision is not surprising, exactly how do you decide what is a language and what is a dialect of a language?

Let’s look at some of the problems first.

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There is often what are called asymmetries in intelligibility, that is one group can understand another group but not the other way around.

For example:

Danish speakers can understand Swedish, but Swedish speakers cannot understand Danish speakers.

For example:

Portuguese speakers from Brazil can understand Spanish, but Spanish speakers cannot understand Portuguese speakers from Brazil.

Slide #7

Similarly nonlinguistic criteria such as political, historical, or geographic differences may play a role.

For example:

Mandarin Chinese speakers and Cantonese Chinese speakers are NOT AT ALL understandable to each other. They cannot have a conversation. Yet, they are considered dialects of the same language. Why not two different languages?—because it might politically divide China to admit the difference.

Another example:

Serbian and Croatian are very much mutually intelligible languages. A speaker of Serbian could hold a conversation with a Croatian speaker and vice versa. However, they are referred to as separate languages because the two peoples want to remain politically separate—they don’t want to admit a shared language.

Swedish and Norwegian are also mutually intelligible—but considered two distinct languages.

And finally, the same is true for Czech and Slovak.

What about English?

1. For example:

A speaker of Cockney, a London variety of English, may find it extremely difficult to communicated with a person from the Ozark Mountains in the United States. Therefore, do they speak separate languages?

2. What about English speakers from New Zealand and the Southern United States.

3. What about a speaker of African-American Vernacular English, also sometimes called Black English Vernacular and the kind of English you hear in some rap songs, how well would he converse with an English speaker from the Scottish Highlands?

4. For that matter, is one English spoken in Britain and another, different dialect, spoken in America? The famous American journalist H.L. Menken thought there was as early as the 1930’s. How much more different have American and British English become in the past nearly 100 years? I have included an article by him in your readings.

How do the different varieties of English spoken in Jamaica relate to other varieties of English in Canada? Would two English speakers from these diverse places understand one another?

It’s even fun to picture these different speakers of English trying to speak to one another because the English they speak is so different, but all of these questions are real examples of how linguists try to understand variation and make sense of differences within a language.

Perhaps some of the difficulties we have with trying to decide what constitutes a language and a dialect of a language arise from trying to subsume various different types of systems of communication under that one label.

Another approach would be to admit that there are different types of language. We can differentiate these types of language following a certain set of criteria proposed by the linguist R. T Bell in his book Bell, R.T. (1976). Sociolinguistics: Goals, Approaches and Problems. London: Batsford.

We can also speak of a language being more developed using these criteria, in terms of fitting into more of the criteria’s categories. A dialect would then be a sub-variety of a language fitting one of these categories.

To use the criteria, you take a given variety of a language and compare it to the seven categories. The more categories the variety fits the more developed it is and the more likely it is that it probably should be considered a language.