Comment by BjoernKW | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BjoernKW | Hacker News Reader

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A language is a dialect with an army.

The commonly accepted - but rather tenuous - criterion for distinguishing between language and dialect is speakers of different dialects being mutually intelligible to each other when making the effort.

That can be said for Scouse, Southern American, Geordie, Cockney and Hiberno‐English, even though understanding speakers of those dialects talking among each other often is difficult for an outsider.

Unlike these varieties, AAVE technically isn't a dialect but a an ethnolect and sociolect, so race definitely is a factor here. Maybe, AAVE can some day become a generally accepted dialect that's not dependent on speaker ethnicity. However, I think it's more likely that AAVE influences other - considered more standard - varieties of English. In fact that's likely already happening to some extent through culture, music in particular, and of course people just talking to each other and taking up linguistic quirks and habits from each other.

> mutually intelligible to each other when making the effort.

By that definition, Norwegian and Swedish is the same language. Danish is intelligible too, if written, not spoken.

Interesting. I'd call this language Scandic (IC), with the sub locale codes ic_SV, ic_NO and ic_DK.

My understanding is that if you have a country, you get to have a language (such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourgish_language)

Therefore the argument 'How come X is a language while Y is not' doesn't make sense if X has their own country and Y does not.

The thing about a language being "a dialect with an army" is a bit tongue in cheek. Of course we'd like more consistent ways to distinguish languages that don't depend on politics. When there's a continuum (like the Scandinavian languages) and it's hard to decide where to draw the arbitrary line, national borders are a pretty convenient place to settle on. But that's not so fundamental that it "doesn't make sense" to ask why we distinguish languages.

It's easy to imagine Norwegian and Swedish being considered the same language if they were the same country. It'd be a language with multiple written forms, but Norwegian already has two of those anyway.

But you can only get so far by simplifying the issue to say that language borders are national borders. That erases a lot of the linguistic complexity of Europe, it defies reality in Africa and South Asia, and it just wouldn't make sense at all in North America. (What's the Canadian language, besides a joke on South Park?)

Look at Arabic; one "language" despite being barely mutually intelligible between, say, Iraq and Morocco.

Good point - but people explain that it is due to political reasons [1].

Ie same way that people in Luxemburg want to point out that they have their own language different from German, rulers of Morocco (who are Arabs - majority of Morocco's population native language is Berber) want to stress that they share same language & culture with rest of the Arab world.

In other words - if you are a country, you have the option to have your own language (even if it's mutually intelligible with a major other language). If you are just a part of a country, that option seems off the table (ie you need a non-mutually intelligible language to make that claim).

[1] http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/why-hindi-urdu-is-one-langu...

> The commonly accepted - but rather tenuous - criterion for distinguishing distinction between language and dialect is speakers of different dialects being mutually intelligible to each other when making the effort.

What's interesting is that I've seen Spanish and Portuguese speakers do this (enough to have a conversation, though I can't say how well that went). On the other hand, there are certain Chinese dialects (though maybe not considered dialect by linguistics) where the speaker of one finds it just about impossible to understand what the speaker of the other is saying.

I don't think anyone calls Chinese languages "dialects" if they've ever heard more than one. There are some Canton dialects, but Wu is its own thing.

Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are mutually intelligible and the Roman empire's legacy lives on through them. My wife is a native Spanish speaker and she has no problem with all 3 in general. It's worth noting she wasn't impoverished, it requires a high level of education to achieve this. There are many Spanish speakers (because it's a massive part of the world) who don't truly know their own language and cannot do this.

As a relatively fluent Spanish speaker who can't really understand Portuguese and finds Italian completely unintelligible, I think you're using 'mutually intelligible' pretty loosely here.

I'm also relatively fluent and I'm the same way as you. You need to be Cervantes-level fluent, like my wife who was not only native born in a Spanish speaking country but educated in private schools and then college educated there as well. I also think some people may naturally be slightly more in tune with linguistics in general.

Spanish speakers are a huge group and many simply don't know their own language. It's like going to Alabama and expecting to find Shakespeare.

I'll grant you that mutual intelligibility is difficult to define but I'm using it in the sense that my wife is conversational with folks from Portugal and Italy when we travel there. That's a decent standard.

...in which we learn that one who fails to be educated in the appropriate schools can be fluent in their own language. And I'm left wondering if some people know what "language" is.

But then I am a poor benighted bastard living in Alabama.

I should've used Texas in my example. Apologies to the good people of Alabama.

Possibly.

Of course, I lived in Texas until about 8 years ago, when I moved to AL.

How do you distinguish between being a "superbly" educated Spanish speaker and speaking a little Italian and Portuguese?

I learned some Spanish in latin america by immersion. I can make sense of written Italian and Portugese. However in Spain I can't understand anything spoken.

Saying that someone doesn't know their own language is tricky. First, for a huge amount of people in South America, Spanish isn't the language of their past. Second, defining "knowing" in this binary way is also problematic. It's a continuum, where each express along this continuum what they need (or desire) to move through their day. So I don't disagree that someone, though a native speaker of Spanish, may not be able to understand Italian, but I don't think it's right to say that they don't know the language.

Edit: typo

I mean it in the sense of mother-tongue. It's like knowing Latin (to truly understand you own language) rather than struggling with complex sentences in native language. I've seen people who can hardly express themselves in their one and only language (Spanish and English in the cases I've seen).

That's a little bit of a stretch. Being a native speaker of Catalan and Spanish and having never studied Italian, I can tell you that if I listen to a conversation in Italian I don't understand more that 60-90 percent of what is being said. Portuguese is harder to grasp than Italian and much harder to speak. When I was in Italy I was amazed that I could speak simple sentences in made-up Italian that turned out to be correct Italian.

Exactly.

I didn't present numbers because those are hard to prove but I agree with your assessment. Anytime you're over 60% (at least 1-way which is what you were describing, your personal comprehension, not the Italian's), you're in great shape. 60-90% (a low estimate because it's one side) is getting into dialect territory. Simple statements and conversations are not a problem and that's definitely mutual intelligibility. Yes it is a bit of a stretch, but everything in one way or another is a stretch. As a general judgment call I think it stands. My point was, as a native English speaker and conversational speaker of Castellano myself- my English enables me to understand exactly zero other languages. Mutual intelligibility is indeed real in the Latin world. There's little to no mutual intelligibility with English, except maybe to Frisian, I've never heard it in person. But there is definitely mutual intelligibility between the former Roman Empire except France and Romania. I do understand some Italian. Absolutely nothing compared to you or my wife. My wife has the roughly 60-90% comprehension ability you do with Italian.

On the 'mutual' side of mutual intelligibility, from what I've seen educated Portuguese and Italian speakers understand her even better than she understands them. At least, again, an educated speaker who doesn't get confused with their own language first.

There are many Spanish speakers ... who don't truly know their own language

Of course there are not. They may not know whatever it is you are talking about, but it's tautologically true that a group of people communicating with a given language know the language they are using to communicate (the language that they would likely refer to as "their own language"). I guess no one will care if you don't want to call that language Spanish (they won't heed your opinion, they just won't care).

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