Dialect or Language?

Distinguishing between dialects and distinct languages is a good example of global–local tensions. Migration, increased interaction, and other globalization processes have resulted in strengthening of standard languages and suppression of dialects. On the other hand, desire for more local cultural identity has resulted in the emergence of distinct languages that were once considered dialects.

Dialects Become Languages

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between a language and a dialect. Many linguists consider mutual intelligibility to be the most important characteristic that distinguishes two different languages from two dialects of a single language. Mutual intelligibility refers to the ability of people speaking in two ways to readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. In principle, two dialects of a language are mutually intelligible, whereas two different languages are not. However, in reality, two distinct languages are actually sometimes intelligible; examples include Czech and Slovak and Afrikaans and Dutch. The Romance branch offers several examples of the challenges in distinguishing between dialect and language.

Catalán-Valencian-Balear

Catalán was once regarded as a dialect of Spanish, but linguists now agree that it is a separate Romance language (Figure 5-34). Like other Romance languages, Catalán can be traced to Vulgar Latin, and it developed as a separate language after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Catalãn

Protest sign in Catalonian and flag of Catalonia. Use your translation app to see what the sign says.

Catalán is the official language of Andorra, a tiny country of 77,000 inhabitants situated in the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France. Catalán is also spoken by 4 million people in eastern Spain and is the official language of Spain’s highly autonomous Catalonia province, centered on the city of Barcelona.

With the status of Catalán settled as a separate language, linguists are identifying its principal dialects. Linguists agree that Balear is a dialect of Catalán that is spoken in the Balearic Islands, which include Ibiza and Majorca.

More controversial is the status of Valencian, which is spoken mostly in and around the city of Valencia. Most linguists consider Valencian a dialect of Catalán. However, many in Valencia, including the Valencian Language Institute, consider Valencian a separate language, because it contains words derived from people who lived in the region before the Roman conquest. Ethnologue now calls the language Catalán-Valencian-Balear.

Galician

Whether Galician, which is spoken in northwestern Spain and northeastern Portugal, is a dialect of Portuguese or a distinct language is debated among speakers of Galician. The Academy of Galician Language considers it a separate language and a symbol of cultural independence.

The Galician Association of the Language prefers to consider it a dialect because as a separate language, it would be relegated to a minor and obscure status, whereas as a dialect of Portuguese, it can help influence one of the world’s most widely used languages.

Moldovan

The Republic of Moldova’s official language is Romanian. After the country’s independence in 1991, the government changed the name of the language to Moldovan, and most respondents to the country’s census call their language Moldovan. However, Moldova’s highest court ruled in 2013 that the official name must be Romanian, because that is the way it was written in the country’s 1991 Declaration of Independence.

Italy’s Languages

Several languages in Italy that have been traditionally considered dialects of Italian are now viewed by Ethnologue as sufficiently different to merit classification as languages distinct from Italian. These include (with the number of speakers in parentheses) Lombard (3.9 million), Napoletano-Calebrese (5.7 million), Piemontese (1.6 million), Sicilian (4.7 million), and Venetian (3.9 million). These languages do not have official national status but are recognized by regional governments within Italy. See Figure 5-13 for the distribution of these languages within Italy.

Occitan

Occitan is spoken by about 2 million people in southern France and adjacent countries. The name derives from the French region of Aquitaine, which in French has a similar pronunciation to Occitan. The French government has established bilingual elementary and high schools called calandretas in the Occitan region. These schools teach both French and Occitan, according to a curriculum established by the Ministry of National Education, Higher Education and Research. Still, many people living in southern France want to see more efforts by the government of France to encourage the use of Occitan.

Standardizing Languages

Governments have long promoted the designation of a single dialect as the official or standard language in order to promote cultural unity. Here are several Romance language examples.

French

The standard form of French derives from Francien, which was once a dialect of the Île-de-France region of the country. Francien became the standard form of French because the region included Paris, which became the capital and largest city of France. Francien French became the country’s official language in the sixteenth century, and local dialects tended to disappear as a result of the capital’s longtime dominance over French political, economic, and social life.

Spanish

The Portuguese and Spanish languages spoken in the Western Hemisphere differ from their European versions, as is the case with U.S. and British English. To unify Spanish, the members of the Spanish Royal Academy meet every week in a mansion in Madrid to clarify rules for the vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation of the Spanish language around the world. The academy’s official dictionary, published in 1992, has added hundreds of “Spanish” words that originated either in the regional dialects of Spain or the indigenous languages of Latin America.

Portuguese

To unify Portuguese, Brazil, Portugal, and several Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa agreed in 1994 to standardize the way their common language is written. Many people in Portugal are upset that the new standard language more closely resembles the Brazilian version. For example, the standardized version eliminates some of the accent marks—such as tildes (as in São Paulo), cedillas (as in Alcobaça), circumflexes (as in Estância), and hyphens. In addition, the agreement recognizes as standard thousands of words that Brazilians have added to the language, such as words for flowers, animals, and other features of the natural environment found in Brazil but not in Portugal.

The standardization of Spanish and Portuguese is a reflection of the level of interaction that is possible in the modern world between groups of people who live tens of thousands of kilometers apart. Books and television programs produced in one country diffuse rapidly to other countries where the same language is used.

Pause & Reflect 5.3.4

Does your Internet search engine show tildes, cedillas, and circumflexes?

Gender Differences in Languages

Languages vary in their ability to absorb and to reflect a cultural change, such as gender equality. Languages vary by gender in two principal ways:

• The grammar of the language may distinguish between masculine and feminine.

• Men and women use different words and converse differently.

Languages are divided about evenly between those that distinguish between masculine and feminine and those that do not (Figure 5-35). Of the 20 most widely used languages, 12 make gender distinctions, and 8 do not. Nouns and verbs may carry distinctive forms or endings depending on gender, such as adding “ova” to designate feminine names in Russian. Others use distinctive articles, such as the French “la” in front of a feminine noun and “le” in front of a masculine one.

Gender-Specific German Language

In 2018, a retired German woman sued her bank because it addressed all correspondence only to Kontoinhaber (male account holder) and not to Kontoinhaberin (female account holder).

Austronesian, Turkic, and Uralic are considered genderless language families. All the widely spoken languages in the Indo-European family other than English distinguish between masculine and feminine nouns and verbs. The gender-specific exception in English is singular pronouns (he/she and his/hers). Careful construction of sentences can avoid the handful of gender-specific pronouns in English, but gender neutrality is not possible in many other languages.

Though the English language is largely gender neutral, men and women have been found to speak the language differently. An analysis of around 10 million messages written by more than 52,000 consenting Facebook users found that women used language that was warmer than language used by men. Women mentioned friends, family and social life more often, whereas men swore more, used angrier and argumentative language, and discussed objects more than people. On average, women used language that was characteristic of compassion and politeness while men’s language was more hostile and impersonal.

In a paper titled “Women are Warmer but No Less Assertive Than Men: Gender and Language on Facebook,” a team of psychologists and computer scientists from Stony Brook University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Melbourne in Australia were able to predict the gender of the Facebook writer 90 percent of the time. Women were more likely to use such words as wonderful, happy, birthday, daughter, baby, excited, and thankful. Words more likely to be used by men included freedom, liberty, win, lose, battle, and enemy.