What does the metaphor a language is a dialect with an army and a navy mean?
“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” There’s not really a scientific way to split languages apart from each other. In some writing, you might see that people say dialects are just spoken, whereas languages include both written and spoken aspects, but for linguists, they’re pretty much the same.
Who said a language is a dialect with an army and a navy?
The pioneering sociolinguist and Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich had a quote:* A language is a dialect with an army and navy. His point being that the difference between a language and a dialect was ultimately a political distinction and had little to do with linguistics per se.
What can distinguish a language from a dialect?
Difference Between Language and Dialect
- Language is the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way.
- Dialect is a particular form of a language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group.
At what point is a dialect become a language?
Different languages can be mutually understood between speakers and different dialects of the same language could be completely different. According to many linguists, a dialect becomes a language when it is no longer mutually intelligible between the dialect speakers and speakers of the “original” language.
How do dialects develop?
How Do Dialects Develop? Some linguists believe that all languages are descended from one original human language. As such, it’s possible to consider every language on the planet to be a dialect, in some sense, of this initial tongue (you can read more on the origins of language by clicking the link below).
Is there a valid dialect of a language?
And so on and so forth. Being used as the basis for a language’s standardization often lends the chosen dialect a certain cachet. However, in reality that dialect is no more nor less valid than any other dialect of the same language, each of which has developed over time in its own distinctive way.
What is the difference between dialect and variety?
The term dialect, or lect, is sometimes used neutrally in linguistics to cover both official languages and dialects, but there is another term which is also used that I like more: variety. Variety is less socio-politically charged, and I use it all the time to avoid having to make a language/dialect distinction when I talk about linguistics.
What is the difference between a dialect and an accent?
Accents affect the way that a language is pronounced. They can vary hugely within a country but, as a general rule, an accent relates to pronunciation only. When different regions use different words to describe the same thing, they can reasonably be considered to be using different dialects, rather than simply different accents.