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.Oxford Living Dictionaries – English. Retrieved 18 January 2019. The dialects of the same language are mainly distinguished from each other by differences in linguistic features such as phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary.
The term "dialect" is most often used to refer to regional dialects—i.e., linguistic varieties that are spoken in a particular geographical region, distinguished from those of other regions. Varieties associated with groups defined in other ways may be referred to as "dialects", or with more specialized terms such as sociolect (the dialect of a social class) and ethnolect (the dialect of an ethnic group). An idiolect is the unique variety of language used by a particular individual.
The non-standard dialects of a language with a writing system will operate at different degrees of distance from the standardized written form. An oral dialect or idiolect may be portrayed in written form with eye dialect.
Standard and nonstandard dialects A standard dialect, also known as a "standardized language", is supported by institutions. Such institutional support may include any or all of the following: government recognition or designation; formal presentation in schooling as the "correct" form of a language; informal monitoring of everyday usage; published grammars, dictionaries, and textbooks that set forth a normative spoken and written form; and an extensive formal literature (be it prose, poetry, non-fiction, etc.) that uses it. An example of a standardized language is the French language which is supported by the institution. A nonstandard dialect also has a complete grammar and vocabulary, but is usually not the beneficiary of institutional support and has undergone little to no codification.
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.
Einar Haugen outlined a four-step process through which dialects can be "promoted" to the status of independent languages: Haugen, Einar (1966): "Dialect, Language, Nation," in: American Anthropologist 68/4, pp. 922–935.
Selection of an existing dialect (often that of the elite) to become the standard variety, Codification of that variety, e.g., through dictionaries and grammars, Elaboration of the variety to be used in the broadest possible range of contexts, particularly official ones, Acceptance by the population, e.g., learning in schools and use in formal contexts.
Dialect as linguistic variety of a language
The term dialect is applied mostly to speech patterns that are unique to an area, which is sometimes called a regiolect,Wolfram, Walt and Schilling, Natalie. 2016. American English: Dialects and Variation. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, p. 184. but a dialect may also be defined in other ways such as social class, a sociolect, or ethnicity, a ethnolect.
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 dialectologists 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 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.
Difference between dialects and languages
There is no universally accepted criterion for determining whether two varieties are two different languages or two dialects of the same language.Cysouw, Michael; Good, Jeff. (2013). "Languoid, Doculect, and Glossonym: Formalizing the Notion 'Language'." Language Documentation and Conservation. 7. 331–359. . A number of rough measures exist, sometimes leading to contradictory results. The distinction between dialect and language is therefore subjective and depends upon the user's preferred frame of reference. For example, there has been discussion about whether or not the Limón Creole English should be considered "a kind" of English or a different language. This creole is spoken in the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica (Central America) by descendants of Jamaican people. The position that Costa Rican linguists support often depends upon which university they represent. Another example is Scanian, which even, for a time, had its own ISO code.
Eugenio Coșeriu distinguishes between "historic languages" and three kinds of dialects. A historic language is recognized as such by its speakers as well as speakers of other languages, generally through a specific name, such as "English" or "the English language." It has a historic tradition of being spoken and is distinguished from other historic languages. It is important to note that it is not language-internal characteristics that define a historic language, but rather social, political, cultural, etc. factors. Language varieties that have not established themselves as historic languages fall into three categories. Primary dialects existed before the constitution of a historic language. Coșeriu lists the example of Asturian and Navarro-Aragonese, which existed alongside the Castilian dialect that was elevated to the status of the "Spanish language." Secondary dialects developed through the geographic differentiation of an established historic language, e.g., American varieties of Spanish or Andalusian Spanish. Tertiary dialects are geographic realizations of the exemplary standard language. In the case of Spanish, this would include, for example, Andalusian forms of standard Spanish.Coseriu, Eugenio (1988): "'Historische Sprache' und 'Dialekt'”, in: Albrecht, Jörn (ed.): Energeia und Ergon. Studia in honorem Eugenio Coseriu, Vol. 1. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, pp. 49–61.
Linguistic distance
An important criterion for categorizing varieties of language is linguistic distance. For a variety to be considered a dialect, the linguistic distance between the two varieties must be low. Linguistic distance between spoken or written forms of language increases as the differences between the forms are characterized. For example, two languages with completely different syntactical structures would have a high linguistic distance, while a language with very few differences from another may be considered a dialect or a sibling of that language. Linguistic distance may be used to determine language families and language siblings. For example, languages with little linguistic distance, like Dutch and German, are considered siblings. Dutch and German are siblings in the West-Germanic language group. Some language siblings are closer to each other in terms of linguistic distance than to other linguistic siblings. French and Spanish, siblings in the Romance Branch of the Indo-European group, are closer to each other than they are to any of the languages of the West-Germanic group. When languages are close in terms of linguistic distance, they resemble one another, hence why dialects are not considered linguistically distant to their parent language.
Mutual intelligibility One criterion, which is often considered to be purely linguistic, is that of mutual intelligibility: two varieties are said to be dialects of the same language if being a speaker of one variety entails sufficient knowledge to understand and be understood by a speaker of the other variety; otherwise, they are said to be different languages. However, this definition has often been criticized, especially in the case of a dialect continuum (or dialect chain), which contains a sequence of varieties, where each is mutually intelligible with the next, but may not be mutually intelligible with distant varieties.
Others have argued that mutual intelligibility occurs in varying degrees, and that it may be difficult to distinguish between true mutual 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 language codes. 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.
Sociolinguistic definitions
Another occasionally used criterion for discriminating dialects from languages is the sociolinguistic notion of linguistic authority. According to this definition, two varieties are considered dialects of the same language if (under at least some circumstances) they would defer to the same authority regarding some questions about their language. For instance, to learn the name of a new invention, or an obscure foreign species of plant, speakers of Westphalian and East Franconian German might each consult a German dictionary or ask a German-speaking expert in the subject. Thus these varieties are said to be dependent on, or heteronomous with respect to, Standard German, which is said to be autonomous.
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 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).
Dialect and language clusters