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Comment by mghackerlady | Hacker News Reader

Is there an internationally agreed upon standard for designating AAV? I suppose it's a large and influential enough dialect it wouldn't hurt to have one

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The main people who'd want such a thing would be linguists, so that they can label samples.

The non-prestige dialects of a language don't usually attract official interest, not least because officially the people who understand that dialect could also understand a prestige variant. Scousers may not talk like King Charles among themselves, but if he speaks they're not confused about what the King is saying even if they wouldn't use those words or say them that way.

This might get sketchier for Chinese topolects where the official government policy is that China has a single language, "Standard Chinese" but, those topolects sure do seem like different languages if you didn't know about the policy. However AAV is nowhere close to that, I can't imagine that anybody who uses AAV normally watches "Last Week Tonight" and goes "That guy is speaking a completely unrecognisable language, are there subtitles?".

In fairness, I think that's partly because AAV doesn't have the political and national identity that some other similar dialects have. I (as a lay person with no training in linguistics) feel like AAV and Scots are similar in terms of how far away from English they are, and many people would describe Scots as its own language, distinct from English.

I completely disagree. At least in the US, AAV seems to be a major cultural thing for the people who speak it

But I think that national identity doesn't exist in the same way, do you know what I mean? Like, being Black/African American in the US is an important part of a person's identity, but it doesn't necessarily have the trappings of nationhood in the same way that Scottish identity does. That's not to say that the identity is any weaker, just that it manifests itself differently.

This means that AAV is culturally important, but there's not necessarily the same sense of "this is a separate language" that there is with Scots, even though in many ways it has all the same claims of being one.

I suppose, though I feel like the tie to nationalism=language is weak at best

I don't think it's nationalism per se, more just a national identity. You see independence movements across Europe (Catalan, Wales, Cornwall, some of these have more realistic prospects than others) that tightly bind the idea of nationhood to a collective language - we are all one people because we all speak the same language. And similarly, when larger countries want to suppress these independence movements, cracking down on their ability to learn or even speak that language is often a key tool used to do that.

Right, I think the major thing that both of you are unwittingly dancing around is the extent to which AAV is generally "popular," almost subconsciously. Especially in the US, but I'd argue the whole world.

It would be exceedingly difficult to strongly distinguish it from "Gen Whatever Slang" or "US Slang" or a lot of "LGTBQ Slang" etc etc. The list goes on.

Not really, no. AAV isn't just a form of slang, it has distinct and measurable grammatical differences from standard American English, such as its own verb tense, or a requirement for negative concord. You can measure these sorts of features quite clearly, and they are distinct from slang.

Scots is complicated because there was an entirely distinct language "Gaelic" which just isn't even close to English at all, spoken in that geographic area historically. Now, today there aren't very many people who live there who would even claim to actually speak Gaelic, but the influence of that language seeped into the dialect spoken there, so while the random bloke you meet in Scotland may not speak any Gaelic, if you (maybe as an academic study) know Gaelic some of the vocabulary of their speech is obviously from Gaelic, not English.

Linguists would tell you that Scots is a sibling to English rather than just a dialect of English, having both descended from Middle English and that the dialect of English people in Scotland speak is instead "Scottish English". In practice of course humans don't language tag their speech (indeed they rarely even language tag written text) so it's murky. Maybe one word in ten that a Scottish bloke just said to confuse a tourist was technically Scots not Scottish English and perhaps some of it was even Gaelic. The important thing was that they confused the tourist as desired, for which frankly even an inside joke would work.

Sociolects are fun. In one of my friend circles the word "fish" is understood to mean the controller for a video game, I don't know why exactly, but if you said to one of us "Pass the fish" they'd hand you a controller without even seeming puzzled, that's just obviously what you'd call it. But in another circle it means nothing and you'd be greeted with confusion.

You misunderstand the region. Gaelic arrived in Scotland as a medieval import from Ireland, and it never extended far enough south to affect Scots overall. The literature on English historical linguistics emphasizes far more the impact of Old Norse on Scots, as the Scots-speaking region was Norse-ruled for some time.

Oh, OK, TIL

I have an amateur interest in linguistics, that's partially why I asked.

>That guy is speaking a completely unrecognisable language, are there subtitles?

Interestingly enough, I remember reading somewhere that you could be legally entitled to an interpreter in a court setting (take that with a grain of salt, I forget where I read it)

Not to my knowledge, and I imagine even trying to do this would stir up.. a lot.

The more I think about it, the more difficult it seems. Not that it shouldn't be done, but wow.

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