I guess where I’m hazy is where the boundaries are between accents, dialects, and separate languages. I always assumed a dialect was sort of where a regional accent and vocabulary started to no longer be as mutually intelligible as just an accent.
The difference between a dialect and a language is an endless source of debate among linguists. There aren’t hard-and-fast rules that apply in every situation. Linguistic debates are awesome…there are even linguists who argue that English is less a proper language than a creole (to quote a dictionary definition, a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language). Or, more colloquially, English is three languages in a trenchcoat.
A favorite example to me is Scots (lowland Scots, not Scots Gaelic), which is often cited as a dialect of English, but I tend to view it as a separate language if only because it’s got a solid literary tradition. The Germans contributing to this thread likely have their own takes on where the dividing line is…how far away from Standardhochdeutsch do you get before it’s technically a legitimately different tongue?
I used to date a woman who was working on her PhD in Linguistics and I picked up some fun factoids. We split ten years ago but it’s been an amateur hobby of mine since.
I don’t know the answer to your question, but let me describe an anecdote. Shortly after we moved to Montreal, my wife was buying some things from a bakery. She speaks (some) Russian and she heard the customer ahead of her speak to the elderly clerk in what was clearly some Slavic language, but not Russian. When it came her turn he asked the clerk (in English) what language that was. He shrugged and said he didn’t know; he just answered in whatever language he was addressed.
Your anecdote reminds me of one that connects with how many languages people know.
My mother is Norwegian. She began, as all kids there do, to learn English in 3rd or 4th grade. She also later took 4 or 5 years of French and German as part of her university prep classes. She was fluent in all 4 languages.
In addition, she traveled with her father on business trips, and picked up a little of some other languages.
We were on vacation in Greece (Crete) when I was a kid. We rented bikes to ride around outside of town one day. When we were pretty far from town, my father’s bike got a flat tire, and there was no repair kit. He began walking his bike back, and my mom, sister, and I biked back. The rental guy wanted to know where my father and the other bike was. Only, he was speaking Greek.
My mother and he tried out all of their languages and didn’t have one in common. But, they started cobbling together words by trial and error – a mishmash of all of their languages, and managed to make themselves understood.
The rental guy did get very distressed when my mom tried “kaputt” to explain, but he relaxed when she clarified by pointing to the tire. I think he thought she was saying my dad died, or the whole bike was destroyed.
Since we’re doing anecdotes, an American (who also speaks fluent Spanish and a bit of German), a Mexican (who only speaks Spanish, but is in English school), a Columbian (who only speaks Spanish and German, but is in English school), a Liechtensteinian (who only spoke German, but is in English school), and a Sicilian (who only speaks Italian but is in English school) all decide to go camping on Happy Isle Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park over a long weekend before a massive storm of historical size wipes out power and communication over the whole region.
It all worked out in the end, but I learned that Sicilian can be pretty compatible with Spanish in situations like that.
A Danish doctor engaged to a Dutch colleague once quipped to me that Dutch sounds to him as if we all have a throat disease, whereas Danish sounds as a gastrointestinal problem.
What struck me most when visiting Scandinavia is in Danish the discrepancy between what is written and what is said is far bigger than in Swedish and even in German. It’s really difficult for an outsider. Kind of similar to French v Spanish.
That’s exactly as I as a German would have put it if I had the wits. Living close to the Netherlands and having visited umpteen times and meeting many Dutch tourists here, I have a much better grasp on Dutch than on Danish, though. That language, spoken, is a mystery to me, though it’s maybe as close to German as Dutch. It sounds like a generic Scandinavian language with English pronunciation, spoken with a towel in your mouth.
The funny thing is that German is stereotypically seen as a harsh language. While Dutch, especially Hollands and to a lesser extent the Lower Saxony dialects as spoken around the borders ,is far harsher than German IMHO. I did have an advantage in Arabic/Hebrew because they have the guttural G/CH in almost the same manner. I like German as a language because it is wonderfully precise. I’m not a particularly good speaker, but I have German relatives and friends, so I get to practice from time to time.
I think the main precision in German is in the pronunciation, almost everything is pronounced as written. The sentence structure and composition, not so much. Mark Twain had a famous essay/lament about the German language that pointed out that we can easily construct a page long sentence where the crucial verb appears as the very last word. And that’s true.
Indeed. But Dutch has the same looseness in structure, so for us it’s less of a challenge I guess. German has a WAY larger vocabulary than Dutch, and some words are quite intranslatable, of which Sehnsucht is one of my favorites. We don’t have a word for that. We know the feeling , but we don’t have a seperate word. And that goes for a lot more.
The standard image in Norway is that the Danes all have a potato stuck in their throat. And compared to the other Scandinavian languages the Danes do seem to have a bunch of unnecessary letters in words compared to how they are pronounced, but I’m not sure they are any worse than English. At least an ultimate -e in Danish has an associated sound. 
There’s a lot of languages that fit that, though. Slavic languages act mostly like that. Hungarian does. Turkish. Finnish. Spanish is pretty close. Stuff like English and French are outliers, I feel. I wonder if there’s a ranking somewhere of languages where pronunciation tightly follows orthography.
It’s not as close, linguistically speaking: Danish is a North Germanic language, while German and Dutch are West Germanic. English is arguably closer to German than Danish is. (I say “arguably” because English has some peculiar grammatical features and a lot of French-derived vocabulary that the other Germanic languages don’t.)
While I’m posting, I am visiting my hometown after living in Canada for a decade, and just today I have had two people fail to understand me because I used regionalisms appropriate to my current residence and not the city where I was born and raised. In both cases, they understood just fine once I repeated myself, but I was surprised that I hadn’t automatically shifted back to default mode.
Not sure if this is what you mean, but one of the things that I found most easy about Welsh was that all the consonants have just one pronunciation. Long and short vowels, for sure, and there’s some dialectical differences in those, but consonants don’t budge. There’s no “k” in the Welsh alphabet, because “c” is always a hard “c.” There’s also no “x” because you can just put a “c” and an “s” together (taxi is “tacsi”). “k” “x” and the other consonants not in the alphabet do occasionally appear in words, but typically only in loanwords, and not always: “kilo” will sometimes be seen written as “cilo” or sometimes with the English spelling. Likewise “folt” for “volt” (the Welsh “f” is pronounced like the English “v”).
Of course, because the Celts are nuts (I say this as one myself) despite there being no “v” or “j” in the Welsh alphabet, the (likely) two most common Welsh last names are Evans and Jones. Because reasons.
I am from a Serbian family and when I moved from Canada to the Czech Republic, it was easier for me to learn Czech than for many people because I already spoke Serbian and both are Slavic languages, though there are many differences (Serbian is a South Slavic language and Czech is a North Slavic language). I didn’t take any formal lessons. My technique was to use Serbian as a template, listen for differences, and once I had some knowledge of Czech, to start speaking, not worrying about mistakes but making an effort to get to use the language. However, I actively thought about how people said things, correcting my speech when I heard that people were saying something differently from me, and looked out for “false friends” (things that sound similar but have different meanings. Example: “bald” in German means “soon”, not “bald”. The real word for “bald” in German is “kalb”).
Though I am not German, I am one of those contributing to the preservation of a German dialect: Saxon. I learned some German while in the Czech Republic, and the first German-speaking place I visited was Dresden (the capital of the state of Saxony) and the area around. I picked up some features of the Saxon accent and eventually, when I decided to improve my spoken German, I decided to standardize my speech according to Saxon, partly because I found it easier to pronounce than standard German (I think Saxon works well for someone who speaks English with a North American accent). I used various Youtube videos to learn Saxon and on the rare occasions when I speak German to someone, I use the Saxon accent.
Nitpick: bald means “kahl” in German, das Kalb is a calf, or in the culinary sense veal.
You’re right. You see how rarely I have a chance to practice my German.
I find that observation interesting, as I didn’t find them particularly more multilingual than other nations around there. If anything, less so, depending on where you were.
My digital camera broke while I was visiting Rome during a semester in Europe. I didn’t have internet access and couldn’t find a local English speaker to help me, but I was able to get directions to a store that sold cameras, and then buy one, from Italian speakers using my high school Spanish.
Later that same semester, a friend and I visited Bucharest and took a bus to Bran Castle, commonly advertised to tourists as “Dracula’s Castle.” We were taking the last bus back to town along with two other girls our age from Japan, who were staying in a different hostel and were trying to communicate to the driver where to drop them off. They spoke English (with the help of a Japanese-English dictionary they’d brought along), I spoke English and Spanish, and fortunately our driver spoke Italian, which was close enough. (Romanian and Spanish are not at all mutually intelligible, though with my high school Spanish and half a semester of French under my belt, I was able to decode a few signs). With a chain of imperfect translations, we all got to where we needed to be.
I’ve never tried to learn Italian, but I feel like the similarities–or the small differences–might trip me up. That semester of French I took on that trip was mostly pretty easy and fun for me, but I struggled with the fact that the French word for “she”–“elle”–is pronounced the same as the Spanish word for “he”–“el.”
Maybe I was lucky, but it could also be a very enthusiastic attitude they had to have a crack at differnt languages, even if they learned them from TV. I’d contrast that to Japan where quite a few people I met had studied English for years and were adept readers and writers but quite reluctant to initiate conversations [but once you got a few beers into them you couldn’t shut them up].