LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

in chapters 8 and 9, recent research has coined many new terms to describe what has traditionally been called multilingualism – ‘(trans)languaging,’ ‘metrolingualism,’ ‘heteroglossia.’ These terms reflect the idea that languages are ideological constructs; while we (usually) have names for different ways of speaking and can describe their features, in practice linguistic boundaries may be fluid. Not only do many people mix languages, but in some contexts, language users do not recognize the linguistic elements they use as part of different codes but simply as a normal way of speaking (Jaspers and Madsen 2019). Further, as we will discuss below, dialect continuums also challenge the perspective of languages as discrete, bounded entities.

      The idea of languages as distinct codes is very deeply ingrained in society (and in linguistics!), and it is consequently often a very jarring concept to grasp. Throughout this text, we will continue to point out how ideologies about language lead us to think in ways which are not supported by empirical linguistic data. While we will continue to use the terms ‘language’ and ‘code,’ we recognize that these are words which refer to static systems, while linguistic communication is dynamic and flexible.

Language or Dialect?

      For many people there is no confusion at all about what language they speak. For example, they are Chinese, Japanese, or Korean and they speak Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, respectively. In these cases, many people see language and ethnicity or nationality as virtually synonymous (Coulmas 1999). However, for many people, there is no one‐to‐one correlation between these categories; some people are both Chinese and French, or may identify as simply Canadian, not Korean Canadian, regardless of what languages they speak.

      Most people can give a name to their language(s). On occasion, some of these names may appear to be strange to those who take a scientific interest in languages, but we should remember that human naming practices often have a large ‘unscientific’ component to them. Census‐takers in India find themselves confronted with a wide array of language names when they ask people what language or languages they speak. Names are not only ascribed by region, which is what we might expect, but sometimes also by caste, religion, village, and so on (see Mallikarjun 2002). Moreover, they can change from census to census as the political and social climate of the country changes.

      Linguists use the term vernacular to refer to the language a person grows up with and uses in everyday life in ordinary, commonplace, social interactions. We should note that so‐called vernaculars may meet with social disapproval from others who favor another variety, especially if they favor a variety heavily influenced by the written form of the language. Therefore, this term often has pejorative associations when used in public discourse. The vernacular is often contrasted with a standardized language, which we will discuss in depth below.

      Haugen (1966) has pointed out that language and dialect are ambiguous terms. Although ordinary people use these terms quite freely in speech, for them a dialect is almost certainly no more than a local non‐prestigious (therefore powerless) variety of a ‘real’ language. In contrast, scholars may experience considerable difficulty in deciding whether one term should be used rather than the other in certain situations. How, then, do sociolinguists define the difference between a dialect and a language?

      First, we need to look at the history of these terms. As Haugen says, the terms ‘represent a simple dichotomy in a situation that is almost infinitely complex.’ The word ‘language’ is used to refer either to a single linguistic norm or to a group of related norms, and ‘dialect’ is used to refer to one of the norms.

A related set of terms which brings in additional criteria for distinction is the relationship between what the French call un dialecte and un patois. The former is a regional variety of a language that has an associated literary tradition, whereas the latter is a regional variety that lacks such a literary tradition. Therefore, patois tends to be used pejoratively; it is regarded as something less than a dialect because it lacks an associated literature. Even a language like Breton, a Celtic language still spoken in parts of Brittany, is called a patois because it lacks a strong literary tradition and it is not some country’s language. However, dialecte in French, like Dialekt in German, cannot be used in connection with the standardized language, that is, no speaker of French considers Standard French to be a dialect of French, and in German to tell someone they speak a Dialekt means that they do not speak Standard German (called Hochdeutsch ‘High German’). In contrast, it is not uncommon to find references to Standard English as being a dialect – admittedly a very important one – of English.

      Haugen points out that, while speakers of English have never seriously adopted patois as a term to be used in the description of language, they have tried to employ both ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ in a number of conflicting senses. ‘Dialect’ is used both for local varieties of English, for example, Yorkshire dialect, for various types of informal speech, or for lects associated with uneducated or rural speakers. The term ‘dialect’ often implies nonstandard or even substandard, and can connote various degrees of inferiority, with that connotation of inferiority carried over to those who speak a dialect. This is part of what we call the standard language ideology, and we will have more to say about it below.

      In the everyday use of the term, ‘language’ is usually used to mean both the superordinate category and the standardized variety; dialects are nonstandard and subordinate to languages. Sociolinguists view this issue somewhat differently; every variety is a dialect, including the standardized variety, and the reason we see some varieties as dialects of the same language is based on sociopolitical, not linguistic, criteria. Although linguistic criteria do play a role in the next topic we will discuss, mutual intelligibility of varieties, as we will see this is not the deciding factor in the language – dialect distinction.

      Mutual intelligibility

      A commonly cited criterion used to determine if two varieties are dialects of the same language or distinct languages is that of mutual intelligibility: if language users can understand each other, they are using dialects of the same language; if they cannot, they are speaking different languages. However, there are several problems with this criterion (Gooskens 2018). First, mutual intelligibility is not an objectively determined fact (Salzman et al. 2012, 170). For example, some speakers of German can understand Dutch, while others may find it incomprehensible. Your ability to understand someone who speaks differently from you may vary according to your experience with different ways of speaking.

Second, mutual intelligibility may depend on the regional variety you speak. Because there are different varieties of German and Dutch, and they exist in what is called a dialect continuum, speakers of some varieties of German can understand varieties of Dutch better than they can understand other varieties of German! Historically, there was a continuum of dialects across the region of northern Germany and the Netherlands which included what we now call the different languages of German and Dutch. The varieties which became standardized as the languages of the Netherlands and Germany, Standard Dutch and Standard German, are no longer mutually intelligible for most speakers. However, in the border area, speakers of the local varieties of Dutch and German still exist within a dialect continuum and remain largely intelligible to one another. People on one side of the border say they speak a variety of Dutch and those on the other side say they speak a variety of German, but linguistically these varieties are very similar. There are important sociopolitical distinctions, however. The residents of the Netherlands look to Standard Dutch for their model; they read and write Dutch and are educated in Dutch. Consequently, if they speak the local variety, they call it a dialect of Dutch. On the other side of the border, German replaces Dutch in all equivalent situations, and the speakers identify the local variety as a dialect of German. The interesting linguistic fact is that there are more similarities between the local varieties spoken on each side of the border than between the Dutch dialect and Standard Dutch and the German dialect and Standard German. Thus, situations

Скачать книгу