What is the difference between dialects & languages?

Every academic field is confronted with terminology that is used and understood without problems by outsiders but which are extremely difficult to define within that field. One example is languages and dialects. These words have a very tangible feeling to them for many non-linguists. You can try it out for yourselves: What do the words language and dialect mean to you?

Within linguistics, however, these words are anything but unambiguous. “Define a language” has become a meme among linguists. For example, I am unable to say how many languages belong the North Halmahera language family, which I study. In this blog post, I will try to explain the reasons for this. Before we start: The question “what is a language” is independent of the question “what is language in general?” I will not deal with the latter one.

The German version of this post focuses more on the situation in Germany. If you read German, I recommand reading it first.

Languages and Dialects in everyday life

The words language and dialect feel quite natural in everyday life. We talk about wanting to learn a new language, that we cannot understand a certain dialect or that a specific language sounds beautiful to us. But a closer look makes the simplicity disappear. Sometimes we cannot agree whether a variety is a language or a dialect. For example, Low German (or Plattdeutsch) is a prototypical dialect of German for some people. On the other hand, Germany has recognized it as a minority language. Speakers of German and Yiddish can usually understand each other quite well but nobody would call Yiddish a German dialect nowadays. Likewise, people from Norway and Denmark can communicate with each other quite easily and still their ways of speaking are considered separate languages. Some varieties spoken at the Dutch-German border are considered German or Dutch dialects, depending on which side of the border they are spoken. I am sure you can think of similar cases in your country or language community.

Languages and dialects in historical linguistics

In the course of the history of linguistics, the term dialect has been defined in multiple ways and different subfields of linguistics define the term differently. In historical linguistics, the subfield of linguistics that researchers the development of languages, for a long time (and to some extent still today) all varieties that have developed from an original language were called dialects. Let’s take Germanic, the branch of the Indo-European language family that includes German, English, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, and so on as an example. According to this definition, we can call all these varieties Germanic dialects. In the same way, there was an “Proto-German” from which in the course of time several varieties developed, which could be called German dialects. Bavarian, Swabian, Cologne and also Yiddish would then be German dialects. And Norwegian and Danish would be North Germanic dialects. I say “would be” because this definition is not commonly used in linguistics anymore. But it lives on in traditional classifications. I suspect, for example, that it is one of the reasons why we usually speak of Arabic dialects, even in linguistics, even though these varieties are quite distinct. They all developed from a “Proto-Arabic” language and at the time they classified as “dialects” the definition was en vogue.

Linguistic distance

Another possible definition of languages is the classification of varieties according to shared developments. Language is constantly changing and when a language splits into several varieties, these varieties henceforth develop differently. Languages have a linguistic distance (German Abstand) to each other. Because of such differences, German, Dutch, English and Yiddish, for example, are counted among the West Germanic languages, but Norwegian and Danish are counted among the North Germanic languages. High and Low German are distinguished by the High German sound shift, in which the pronunciation of several sounds changed in High German. “High German” in linguistics therefore refers to all varieties that participated in this sound shift.

There are no clear criteria for such linguistic divisions. We cannot simply say “these two varieties differ in 5 features, therefore they are different languages”. For that, we first would have to agree on how exactly to define differences and how to weight them. If we were to consider only the High German sound shift, then the linguistic gap between Low German and Dutch is smaller than the gap between Low German and High German.

Mutual intelligibility

Therefore, linguists tried to find other definitions of language, dialect and Abstand between languages. Linguists working in language description relatively quickly come to the point where they have to determine which varieties fall under their object of study. Let’s imagine that a linguist goes somewhere to describe a language, for example to Halmahera… There she is confronted with a multitude of people who all speak quite similar, yet different varieties. She now has to decide which of these varieties she wants to describe, because there is neither time nor money to go to every single village. One possibility is for her to say that she only wants to describe one particular language. So she starts in one village and examines its language. At some point she asks the inhabitants what the people in the neighboring village speak. The inhabitants will probably answer that the way of speaking of the people there is similar to their own, but also somewhat different. The linguist must now decide whether the variety of the neighboring village also falls under the language she wants to research. A frequently used criterion is mutual intelligibility, i.e., whether the people in the two villages can understand each other. Varieties that are mutually intelligible are, according to this definition, considered as one language with several local dialects.

However, this sounds way easier than it is in real life. I have said previously that speakers of Yiddish and German can understand each other quite well. There is also a lot of historical evidence for this. My favorite example comes from the book Job by Joseph Roth, published in 1930, in which the Russian-born Jew Mendel meets a German doctor in the USA. That the doctor is German is quite convenient, because Mendel does not know English, but Yiddish and the doctor “could make himself understand with Mendel” (my (literal) translation).

Yiddish and German, however, are not always mutually intelligible. When it comes to the area of religion, Yiddish has incorporated many Hebrew words that non-Jewish German speakers do not know. This makes understanding more difficult. There are other factors that facilitate or impede understanding between similar varieties. For example, how much experience the people communicating have with the other variety and, most importantly, whether they want to understand each other. Mutual intelligibility is so difficult to measure that it is often not applicable at all. Think about varieties that are usually considered as dialects of a language you speak. Can you understand them all? Speakers of German from Germany famously cannot understand people speaking Swiss German but they can understand Standard German because it is used in Switzerland as an official language.

Even the Arabic “dialects” are only partially mutually intelligible. This becomes obvious in this video of an interview with Dutch-Moroccan soccer player Nordin Amrabat. Amrabat speaks Moroccan Arabic but does not understand the interviewer’s questions in Saudi-Arabian Arabic. He needs a translator.

On the other hand, as mentioned above, some “languages” are usually mutually intelligible, for example Norwegian and Danish. If you don’t believe me, you can watch this interview with Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau: the interviewer speaks Norwegian, he answers in Danish.

Despite the many problems, mutual intelligibility is still frequently used as a criterium to distinguish different languages.

Languages as social constructs

Why do we call some mutually intelligible varieties languages and others dialects? In their introduction to dialectology (i.e., the field of linguistics researching dialects), linguists Chambers and Trudgill (2004: 4) write that “language is not a particularly linguistic notion at all.” Languages and dialects are primarily social constructs. This does not mean that they do not exist, but that the classification depends on our perception of their position in the social fabric.

In the previous section we talked about linguistic Abstand (distance) between languages, used to define so-called Abstandssprache (‘distance language’). Opposite to these are so-called Ausbausprachen (‘extension languages’): languages that are considered languages because of their social and political positioning. Maybe you know the quote “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” It was made popular by linguist Max Weinreich in the 1940s and goes in a similar direction: some varieties have so much political power that they are considered languages. In linguistics, they are said to be autonomous. At the same time, there are a number of less powerful varieties that are dependent (heteronomous) on these languages and considered dialects. How does this happen?

In Europe and other parts of the world, it is closely connected to the nation-building efforts since the 18^th century. Even before that, printing had led to the emergence and spread of unified written languages. Bible translations such as the Luther-Bibel in Germany are well-known examples. Now, however, it was a question of using such varieties as a sign of identification within the emerging nation. In Indonesia, a local variety of Malay way purposefully chosen to serve as the official language of the new Republic of Indonesia. Indonesian and the variety of Malay that functions as the official language of Malaysia are still very similar but the independent political developments has led to the two languages becoming more distinct from each other. In Scandinavia, the standard languages of the different states are considered independent languages even thought the similarities between them are obvious. And speakers of different Arabic varieties still look for Modern Standard Arabic as the language of education and administration and hence regard their local varieties as dialects belonging to this standard. Also think about politicians who evoke the national language as a means to connect the citizens of the country despite cultural differences.

Raising one variety to the level of a standard and national language is often accompanied by the devaluation of the other varieties, i.e. the dialects. They do not conform to the new norm, and speakers may even be accused of wanting to distance themselves from the new nation and its standard language. This attitude has encouraged people to stop the transmission of their dialect or local language to their children in favor of the national language.

Demarcation of languages based on social factors also works without a standard language and a nation state. As mentioned above, the way of speaking is an important sign of identity for many people. For varieties that do not belong to a standard, social identity can be transferred onto language. For example, all members of a certain ethnic group may see themselves as speakers of a common language with different varieties (or dialects), while the varieties of a neighboring ethnic group do not belong to this language. This is again completely independent of linguistic distance and mutual intelligibility. An example is are the North Halmahera languages Ternate and Tidore. The two varieties are extremely similar, but one is spoken on the island of Ternate and the other on the island of Tidore. Both islands were once seats of powerful sultanates and in constant conflict with each other. Because of this political demarcation, speakers consider their respective ways of speaking to be different languages.

Conclusion

There is no simple definition of languages and dialects, nor is there one correct definition. A multitude of linguistic, but above all social and political factors play a role in the classification of varieties into languages and dialects. These factors can overlap but often are mutually exclusive. Linguists are therefore trying to develop new terminologies that are less socially and politically connoted, for example “variety”.

Literature

Chambers, J. K. & Peter Trudgill. 2004. Dialectology (Cambridge textbooks in linguistics). 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gooskens, C. & S. Kürschner. 2009. Cross-border intelligibility – on the intelligibility of Low German among speakers of Danish and Dutch. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik–Beihefte. 138. 273-195.

Haugen, Einar. 1966. Dialect, Language, Nation. American Anthropologist 68(4). 922–935.

Joseph, John E., Gijsbert Rutten & Rik Vosters. 2020. Dialect, language, nation: 50 years on. Language Policy 19(2). 161–182. doi:10.1007/s10993-020-09549-x .

Tamburelli, Marco. 2021. Taking taxonomy seriously in linguistics: Intelligibility as a criterion of demarcation between languages and dialects. Lingua 256. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2021.103068 .

Kloss, H. 1967. ‘Abstand languages’ and ‘Ausbau languages’. Anthropological linguistics, 9 (7), 29-41.

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