What is language, anyway?
Hello! This month brings the first entry in a (hopefully) short series about what language is. (I don’t have an answer, sorry.) I will also talk a little bit about media I have enjoyed recently (which I hope to include regularly).
News
Progress continues on the book. I have a new part-time freelance gig that takes about half my week, so progress is slower than I’d like, but I like having income to pay my bills.
What’s the difference between a dialect and an accent?
I was talking with friends online about my experiences as an English speaker learning Norwegian. Norwegian has two different written standards, Bokmål (book-language, which is the one foreigners learn and is more commonly used) and Nynorsk (new Norwegian). But spoken Norwegian has a whole lot of dialects – and they’re called dialects, not accents – you speak Bergen dialect or Oslo dialect or Trondheim dialect. Not like English, where you have a Boston or Chicago or Texas or Yorkshire accent.
When I watch Norwegian shows on Netflix (subtitled in English), I can hear differences in the way different people talk. The bokmål word for I is jeg, pronounced like eye with a y at the beginning. But in some places it’s eg and in others ek and in still others just e. (The Wikipedia page has a whole section on differences in vocabulary; take a look if you’re interested.)
So, anyway, a friend asked what the difference between a dialect and an accent is, and I answered that linguists don’t like answering that question. It’s really difficult, and it requires us to define language and how that differs from a dialect, and considering that “what is language?” is still an unanswered question in the field, we’ll deflect and give a vague answer.
What is language?
It seems like such an easy question to answer, right? There’s a definition in the dictionary and everything! We’re using language right now! I turned to my trusty textbooks, and neither of them had a definition of language. The Cambridge Survey (vol. 1) has a chapter on the philosophy of language, which discusses the major theories and theoretical perspectives of what language is, but nothing like you’d find in Merriam-Webster, and definitely not something that I can summarize in a few sentences.
Allan Bell’s Guidebook to Sociolinguistics also doesn’t answer the question, which he poses on page 2. The closest he comes is bolding the term communicative competence, which is the ability to make oneself understood to another person. He gets into a discussion of language as a behavior in society. He writes that language is social, dialogue, profusion, and ideology, and I’ll be touching on at least half of these today.
For the sake of clarity, I’ll give you the rough definition of language I’m using for this newsletter. Language is a codified form of communication with a set of rules that allow speakers to manipulate vocabulary and express meaning in a way that others can understand. These rules are an important feature of language and are what distinguishes it from communication. Facial expressions and hand gestures, for example, are communication, but they are not language per se. The existence of rules is also what distinguishes pantomimic gestures from sign language.
Language exists to communicate with others; thus it is social. Speakers of a language have a broad agreement of what words mean and how they can be put together to create a dialogue. These things change over time, which is really cool, and this is only one fraction of the subfield of sociolinguistics.
So, we have a working definition of language for the purposes of this newsletter, but it only refers to the general human capability for language. This leads us to our next question: What is a language?
As the quip commonly attributed to Max Weinreich goes, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” It seems pretty glib, but it’s actually pretty accurate once you dig into it.
Dialect vs. language
Dialect is not a neutral term in general parlance. You speak proper English, or you speak an “incorrect” dialect. Sociolinguists tend to prefer terms like variety to avoid the negative associations. I’ll use both here.
The simplified distinction between two different languages is that they are not mutually intelligible. A monolingual speaker of (US) English will have significant difficulty speaking with a monolingual speaker of Polish, for example. These are, then, easily defined as two different languages.
The same monolingual speaker of US English will have minimal difficulty speaking with a monolingual speaker of UK English or Australian English or Canadian English, accents and vocabulary differences notwithstanding. These four Englishes are dialects or varieties of English. But of which English? Which variety of English is the one, true English? (I’m not going to answer that.)
Let’s take our monolingual Polish speaker again and put them in Prague. They’ll probably be able to communicate, perhaps with some difficulty, but far more easily than with the Anglophone. (There’s a series of videos on YouTube of speakers of Slavic languages speaking their native languages together, and it’s pretty cool how much they can understand.)
Staying in the Slavic language family, Serbian and Croatian are very similar, but because of historical reasons, it’s generally not done to say they’re the same language or that one is a dialect of the other.
The Slavic languages are part of a dialect continuum (two, actually, North and South), just like Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are part of the Northern Germanic dialect continuum. I spent a day in Copenhagen and a weekend in Malmö, Sweden, and with about a year and a half of Duolingo Norwegian and my understanding of language change from grad school, I could puzzle my way through the train and bus and grocery stores.
Within a dialect continuum, the languages are mutually intelligible and would probably be called dialects if there weren’t national borders in the way.
An army and a navy
This is where Weinreich’s quip becomes less glib. An army and a navy are typical symbols of a nation, of institutional power. Thus a dialect becomes a language when the people who speak it have institutional power and/or a national government.
When a particular dialect (variety) is spoken by a particular set of people who have institutional power, this dialect (variety) becomes the standard. When the same language is spoken in different countries (like English in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada…), we talk about a national standard variety. In the US, the standard variety of English is essentially that of white Anglo-Saxons: the ones who had the power to codify their way of speaking as the “correct” one. But there are a lot of varieties of English in the US, some of which are fairly similar to the standard, and some of which are very different from the standard.
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is noticeably different from the standard, and even now, people call it “incorrect” or other insulting terms, even though it’s got all the features of language variety, including rules. Bill Labov did most of his research in the 1960s and 70s on AAVE to prove to his fellow White people that Black English is a language and shouldn’t be considered “substandard.” (Many of his PhD students were Black and went on to be influential researchers of Black language in the US, including John R. Rickford and Anne Charity Hudley. There weren’t a whole lot of non-White university professors in the 1960s, after all.)
So, the difference between a language and a dialect is by and large political, but also often enough for historical reasons.
Next time
I haven’t gotten to the difference between an accent and a dialect yet (or is there one at all?), so I’ll be talking about that next time. I also want to talk a little about the difference between writing and language, and between what linguists mean by grammar and what your 8th grade teacher meant by it, but those will be separate topics for later.
Media I have enjoyed
CJ Cherryh’s latest entry in the Foreigner series, Defiance, has come out. It doesn’t have as much specifically about language or linguistic worldbuilding as earlier books, but when you’re in book 22, you expect that your readers have gotten it by now. The politics focus on rail lines and various things Ilisidi negotiated in the past, and the first several chapters are Bren dealing with train logistics. The overcrowding up on the space station has hit crisis levels, and they urgently need to move some of the people from Reunion to the planet, but there’s a major crisis going on in the aishidi’tat (when isn’t there?). I’m awaiting the next one, though I also hope that Cherryh wraps things up in this trilogy.
In the wake of Andre Braugher’s sudden passing, I was finally motivated to watch the 1992-99 TV series Homicide: Life on the Street, where he plays Det. Frank Pembleton for the first six seasons. (Season 7 is … kinda bad.) It’s set in Baltimore, MD, and I grew up about 50 miles west of Bawlmer (and they actually go to my hometown in one episode! For about 5 minutes.) A lot of the actors don’t have Maryland accents, let alone Baltimore ones, but it was the early 90s; nobody really cared about accent coaching.
There was one absolute tell that either the person who wrote the dialogue or the actor who said it is from California, however, and nobody involved noticed. In one episode, Bayliss says he drove on “the 795,” and ain’t no one from Maryland use “the” for a highway with a number. That’s 100% a California thing. We’ll say the Beltway, the (BW) Parkway, or the Baltimore Beltway, but when we’re talking about roads by their number, it’s 495 or 795, with or without the I in front of it. (I don’t think I’ve ever heard the Parkway referred to by number, and I would have to look it up on a map to see if it has one.)
That’s it for now.
Thanks for reading, and until next time!
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