Is "Dutch" 16 different languages?

Lhhlanguage   Fri Jan 29, 2010 7:33 pm GMT
Chris said:

"People STILL classify languages as dialects or seperate languages purely for POLITICAL reasons which is LINGUISTICALLY WRONG!! Hopefully in the future we can move away from Politics and look at the language as it is. It should be 100% linguistically and nothing else!!"

In theory this is a great idea. In practice, however, it's not possible to create a set of purely linguistic criteria to distinguish languages from dialects which isn't itself highly subjective. How, for example, does one define "mutual intelligibility"? What if speakers of one language/dialect can understand 50% of what speakers of another say? Are the two varieties of speech mutually intelligible, and therefore dialects, or not, and therefore separate languages? It would be very misleading to say they are mutually intelligible in the sense that, say, American and standard British English are. But it would be equally misleading to say they are mutually unintelligible in sense that English and Japanese are. So what are they, dialects or languages? It ultimately comes down to a subjective judgement call.

Furthermore, while using purely "linguistic" criteria to distinguish dialects from languages would produce clear results in some controversial cases (Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, would clearly be different languages), in many other cases--including many about which this issue is very contentious, for example English and Scots--the issue would remain unclear, because they are neither similar enough nor different enough for a criteria like "mutual intelligibility" to be objectively applied. Different people will give different answers, depending on how they define the criteria.

While the idea of politics deciding what's a language and what's a dialect doesn't seem very appealing, I think that in many cases it works as well as any supposedly objective, "linguistic" method would.
So   Fri Jan 29, 2010 7:46 pm GMT
<<While the idea of politics deciding what's a language and what's a dialect doesn't seem very appealing, I think that in many cases it works as well as any supposedly objective, "linguistic" method would.>>
Perhaps it was happened with "Dutch". Low German dialect became a language.
Ora poois   Fri Jan 29, 2010 7:47 pm GMT
"How, for example, does one define "mutual intelligibility"? What if speakers of one language/dialect can understand 50% of what speakers of another say?"

No,cuz spanish understand 50% portuguese and portuguese understand 58% spanish and they are not mutual intelligible.
Lhhlanguage   Fri Jan 29, 2010 8:08 pm GMT
Ora poois:

You seem to have missed the whole point of my post.
burnlaurmel   Sat Jan 30, 2010 6:09 am GMT
Lhhlanguage:

Isn't even a fuzzy linguistic definition better than saying forget it, we can't do it, and tossing it over to the politicians, the lowest form of life on Earth?

"How, for example, does one define "mutual intelligibility"? What if speakers of one language/dialect can understand 50% of what speakers of another say? Are the two varieties of speech mutually intelligible, and therefore dialects, or not, and therefore separate languages?"

I would say, for sure, 50% intelligible to me is a separate language. That would be about the same as Spanish and Portuguese (54%) or English and Scots (42%). I listen to Scots, and AFAICT, that's just a foreign language, straight up. I can't understand them. If you can't understand the person, they're speaking a foreign language. To me, that's just a basic principle.

"It ultimately comes down to a subjective judgement call."

You could always just draw a line somewhere and call it the dividing line. It's not perfect, but it's better than giving it to corrupt and often evil scum called politicians. Also, the way politicians do it is often just out and out fascist. The politicians who deny regional languages and call them all dialects are more or less just fascists. That's a fascist like way of thinking. So, linguists are supposed to toss this issue over to a bunch of fascists, who use their arbitrary distinctions to crush and exterminate local languages? Why accommodate them?

Anyway, Ethnologue divides at around 90%, and so does Lindsay. Below 90% and supposedly it gets hard to talk about complicated and technical stuff. You can always discuss the weather. Below 80% and you throw a major crimp into communication. So 80% or 90% should be ok.

"for example English and Scots--the issue would remain unclear"

The only test showed 42%. I'm amazed it's that high. Ethnologue says Scots is a separate language. I agree! I can't understand them!

"Different people will give different answers, depending on how they define the criteria."

Yes, you get different answers, but then you can just a make an intelligibility test and see what you get. Linguists have been testing intelligibility for over 50 years and they have managed to get pretty good at it. The instruments are always being improved, and they check for reliability, validity, etc. The results are regarded well, and if some people don't agree, well, just go make your own study and try to replicate. That's science.
Stremglav   Sat Jan 30, 2010 9:04 pm GMT
"Different people will give different answers, depending on how they define the criteria."


But it doesn't matter, because if done properly the criteria should be transferable. The two scales would just be like Celsius and Fahrenheit, so you can just switch between scales. Nobody cares whether the person personally considers it a dialect, what matters is that you should be able to see how RELATIVELY similar they are, and once you've defined what's a dialect on your scale (0C, 15C, 20C) then it should be applicable objectively to all languages. Not a different scale for each language.
burnlaurmel   Sun Jan 31, 2010 1:57 am GMT
Lindsay puts the criteria at 90% intelligibility. Above that, he says people say things like "Oh we can understand them perfectly." At worst, "We can more or less understand them." Once you start getting down below 90%, people start saying, "We can't understand them very well." "We can't understand ALL of that language." "That's really hard to understand." Down towards 40% or so and people start saying, "I can barely understand a word of that."

Anyway, his criteria is 90%. Should be applicable across the board.

Also, when you get intelligibility reports, just go through a number of them and average them out. A few people say we understand them, a bunch of others say, "Um, not really!" Go with majority rules. If it's hard to figure it all out, you can always make an intelligibility study and go with that.

At 90%, it gets hard to talk about stuff like complex issues and technical things. Or you can put it at 80%. Below, 80%, and it starts to throw a serious crimp into communication.

Anyway, set a standard, go with that one, and then apply it across the board to all lects in question, in order to be fair and scientific. Average responses and take the majority rule. It's all pretty fuzzy, but the language/dialect thing has forever been fuzzy anyway, and this is at least going towards a more science-based approach.
maine   Sun Jan 31, 2010 5:09 pm GMT
<<The term Low German was more widely used in the past, but this is no longer considered politically correct as people in the Netherlands generally do not like to be associated as being German. As Low Saxon-Low Franconian, the name avoids sovereign national associations with either the Netherlands or Germany.

The concept Low German was first pioneered by German linguists, who found that German dialects in the North of Germany were quite different from dialects in the South of the country (see High German consonant shift), as they continued their research, they found that dialects of Dutch, and the Dutch language had a large number of things in common with the dialects in Northern Germany, and subsequently placed them in the Low German group.Later 2 subgroups of Low German (which was now the supposed ancestor of the 2 subgroups) were created: Low Saxon, mainly Low German dialects in Germany, and Low Franconian, mainly Low German dialects in the Netherlands and Flanders.To this day no evidence is found on Low Saxon and Low Franconian ever having a common ancestor, and in linguistics the term Low German is mainly used to indentify West Germanic language who have not experienced the High German consonant shift, or the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law.>>
http://en.allexperts.com/e/l/lo/low_saxon-low_franconian_languages.htm