Of Dialects, Armies and Navies
Languages, Dialects,
Pidgins and Creoles
One of the
greatest differences between a language and a dialect1 in most
people’s minds is that the former is bigger than the latter both with regard to
the area it covers and the people who speak it. In other words, languages are
perceived to include several dialects. On this view, the English language would
include the varieties spoken in Edinburgh, Newcastle, New York, Atlanta,
Sydney, Wellington, Jamaica, etc.
Language and Dialect
When we use the term the English
language, what
normally comes to mind is Standard English. Standard languages are seen to have greater
prestige than a dialect. Part of this prestige is due to the fact that they
have a written code while a dialect does not. So when we talk about German,
French, Norwegian, Chinese, Russian, etc. we are actually referring to the
standard versions of these languages.
Hudson (1980: 32) sees the standard versions of a
language as rather abnormal in that they are the result of deliberate
intervention by society. Standard languages are quite a modern invention and
historically are often due to the desire to distinguish one region or nation
from another. Dialects, on the other hand, generally develop without conscious
development by the people who speak them. It is clear then that a standard does
not just appear.
The Language of the Rulers
First there is a selection process in which one
particular variety is chosen. In the case of English, a variety spoken by the
monarchy, the nobility and bureaucrats within the triangle formed by London,
Oxford and Cambridge. Normally, a significant proportion of the population
consciously or unconsciously accepts a particular variety as the standard even
though it is not the variety that they speak. It is quite common to hear people
who do not speak Standard English say things like “I can’t speak proper
English”. The selection process might take years and can involve coercion on
the part of powerful members of society. For example, in might not be possible
to get certain jobs if one does not have a standard accent. Some standard
national languages are resisted by part of the population of a nation –normally
because they speak another variety of the same language or a different
language. That is why some people say that a language is a dialect with an army
and a navy.
Printing Press Creates Standards
For a variety to become the standard there is
always a codification process in which the correctforms and meanings of words are recorded in
dictionaries and the morphology and syntax of the language are recorded in
grammars. Caxton, who brought the printing press to England, was influential in
setting a written standard. He was a businessman at heart and standardizing
spelling meant he could sell his books all over the country.
At the same time the language is adapted so it can
function in all the contexts found in a modern society, such as government,
science, law, etc. This has happened quite recently in the case of Catalan, for
example.
Standard Language is Also a Dialect
One of the results of the Standardization process
is that one variety is given precedence over all the others. In effect this
means that varieties that are considered dialects are not as prestigious as the
standard and are not taught, for instance, at school. We should not forget,
however, that even the standard is a dialect albeit one with prestige. For
linguists all varieties of a language are equally important and worthy of
study.
Pidgins and Creoles
Florida Voters Head to Polls for Midterm Elections.
Voters mark their ballots in polling place featuring instructions in English,
Spanish and Creole November 2, 2010 in Miami, Florida.
Pidgins are basically contact languages. They
evolve between people who speak different languages and need some way of
communicating with each other to carry out trade or work. Many English pidgins
were created when slaves were shipped from the west coast of Africa to the
colonies in the West Indies or the United States. Pidgins are languages
stripped of all but the bare necessities (Romaine 1988: 24). In other words,
they are normally very simple from a grammatical point of view.
Several linguists say that part of the evolution of
English itself is due to language contact between the Scandinavian conquerors
from Sweden, Norway and Denmark in the Midlands and North of England2 and
the defeated Anglo-Saxon population. Both communities spoke different dialects
of a common Germanic ancestor language. Basically, the roots of the words were
the same but the endings were different. It has been put forward that this is
the reason why English lost its case endings3 while other
languages like German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, etc. kept them.
Creoles
A pidgin becomes a creole when it is learned as a
first language of a new generation. From a linguistic point of view, creoles
are made up of a superstrate4 language such as English and one
or more substrate languages such as those of Western Africa. The creole is not
limited to certain functions but takes on all the functions needed by the
speech community. Some creoles go through the same standardization process
described above for Standard English and become the vehicle for education, law
and government. This is the case of Afrikaans made up of a Dutch superstrate
and English and Bantu substrates.
In countries in which Standard English exists
alongside the creole, the former might exert pressure on the latter. The
process by which a creole becomes more like the standard superstrate is
called decreolization. In
Jamaica, for example, one kind of creole, the acrolect, has become more and
more like Standard English. Other varieties of creole, called basilects, are
very different from Standard English5. Between these two extremes we
find the mesolects (Bickerton 1975). There is no exact division between these
types but a continuum. Such a situation, in which different varieties of a
language live side by side, is quite normal. For example, many people in
Newcastle are speakers of Standard English while most of the population speaks
what can be a very different variety of English called Geordie. Some English
speakers find Geordie very hard to understand indeed. Many people in England
could be described as bilingual in that they are able to switch from their
local dialect to Standard English and vice-versa without any difficulty6 and
this is also the case in Jamaica and many parts of the English-Speaking world.
References
Bickerton, Derek (1975) Dynamics of a
Creole System. Cambridge
University Press.
Hudson, R. A. (1980) Sociolingistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Romaine, Suzanne 1988. Pidgin and Creole Languages. London: Longman.
Hudson, R. A. (1980) Sociolingistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Romaine, Suzanne 1988. Pidgin and Creole Languages. London: Longman.
Footnotes
1.
Due to the
fact that dialect is often used in a derogatory way, linguists prefer the term
variety.
2.
The area
under the rule of the Norsemen was called the Danelaw.
3.
Case endings
are found at the end of a word and tell us if it is nominative, accusative,
dative, genitive.
4.
Normally the
language of the former colonial power.
5.
To get an
idea of just how different they can be, listen to the two girls in the
recording of Jamaican English.
6.
This is the
case of the young woman in our recording of Newcastle English.
Of dialects, armies and navies
For example, we usually consider Danish
and Norwegian languages. But when we look at them on the page, they look
suspiciously similar. Here's the first bit of the Lord's Prayer in Danish and
then (Bokmål) Norwegian:
“Vor Fader, du som er i himlene!Helliget blive dit navn,
komme dit rige,
ske din vilje
som i himlen således også på jorden;
Fader vår, du som er i himmelen!
Helliget vorde ditt navn;
komme ditt rike;
skje din vilje
som i himmelen, så og på jorden;
Danes and
Norwegians and Swedes can converse comfortably, though they'll occasionally
confuse each other and switch to English or talk around a confusing point. A
lot depends on how quickly they talk, which region they come from, whether the
speakers are of standard Stockholm Swedish and Copenhagen Danish, what they are
talking about, and so forth. But they clearly exist close to one another on a
continuum (so much so that Norwegian nationalists created a second Norwegian
variant, Nynorsk, to distance it from Danish-influenced Bokmål above). We might
call them dialects of each other, but that would be slightly annoying to
Scandinavians; we respectfully refer to languages, whatever the linguistic
reality.
How is Chinese
similar and how is it different? Most English-speakers use "dialect"
to refer to regional variants that are noticeably different in accent,
vocabulary and a bit of grammar, but are mutually comprehensible. But
"comprehension" is a continuum, as mentioned above. It depends on
topic, familiarity, context, the relationship of the two speakers, and many
other factors. Another example: a speaker of Hindi and Urdu might think they
speak the same language when discussing the weather or cricket, but different
languages when discussing philosophy or architecture, since they share a basic
vocabulary and grammar, but diverge (Urdu towards Arabic and Persian and Hindi
to Sanskrit) at higher registers. Script too plays a role. One reason for
calling Hindi and Urdu distinct languages is that they are written differently.
But a good reason for calling them dialects is the plain fact that a
Hindi-speaker and Urdu-speaker can chat on a wide variety of topics before
running into major comprehension trouble.
Chinese is, in a
way, the opposite of Hindi-Urdu: it shares a written tradition, but the spoken
languages, especially at the level of low-register conversation, are far more
different than Hindi and Urdu are. If you take the writing system out of the
picture and focus on speech, it is indisputable that an illiterate peasant
speaking Min and an illiterate peasant speaking Mandarin are going to struggle
rather more than a Dane and a Norwegian.
Compare a Norwegian headline from Aftenposten today
("Here's where you get Europe's worst food"—click through for the
shocking answer.) Below is a Danish translation and an English gloss.
Her får
du Europas verste mat
Her får du Europas værste mad
Here get you Europe's worst meat
Her får du Europas værste mad
Here get you Europe's worst meat
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