I wouldn’t either - that was part of my point.
I don’t know the extent of the differences between Jamaican speech and more-standard English. It might depend who you ask. 
What everyone else said about Northern Ireland being part of the UK.
Plus, they include Manx in their list of languages, even though Man is not part of the UK; it’s a crown dependency, like the Channel Islands. So if they include Manx, should they not also include French, Jèrriais, Dgèrnésiais and Sercquiais?
You’re right - I totally missed that.
How much of this do you understand? The Jimmy Cliff movie The Harder They Come was subtitled for distribution in the US. In my experience, the true Patois (as distinct from Jamaican-accented English) can be nearly impossible to understand.
A difference from Kreyol, however, is that almost everyone in Jamaica is bilingual in standard English and Creole/Patois, while in Haiti many people only speak Kreyol and can’t speak standard French. When I was in Belize, my hosts would speak standard English to me, but switch to Belizian Creole to speak among themselves.
Comments about my excerpts from Ethnologue list:
The Ethnologue list (which I downloaded last century) may have its flaws. For one thing, only a single primary country is associated with each language. Thus UK doesn’t show Irish Gaelic; Taiwan doesn’t show Chinese; neither Ireland nor USA show English!
The two deaf sign languages shown for UK are “British” and “Old Kentish” sign languages.
The old Ethnologue list shows 6612(*) languages, compared with 7400+ shown in the present Ethnologue. (The present Ethnologue also has a longer 63000+ list with dialects and with entries for each country speaking a language.) Since the old list has a much better format for my hobbyist purposes than the new format, I have no intention to “upgrade.”
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- includes 64 creoles, 7 pidgins and 73 deaf sign languages.
Is there an argument to be made that word processing, and especially spell checking is changing the way that dialects emerge and shift, at least in English speaking world?
If English English and US English are closely placed beads on the long string of world Englishes, they are still defined as distinct things by computer program language selection choices in a way they would probably not have been in the olden pre-digital days, and this also reinforces people using the defined norm (?) of the language rather than going orf and beying waky.
In some respects Australian English sits between the two and it is frustrating when you have to choose either one or the other in language settings and seeing a whole heap of words being underlined regardless of your choice.
Maybe thats where Twitter, texting etc act as our defence against normative dialect policing by Bill Gates and his cronies? A supplementary question - are there dialects emerging in these formats yet?
While it seems incredible on its face, it’s really not. It’s similar to European languages developing into many different mutually unintelligible spoken languages but still sharing the same alphabet. Most modern Chinese dialects are descended from “Middle Chinese,” which was spoken from about 500-1000AD. “Classical” written Chinese dates back to at least the 5th century BC, so it’s unsurprising everyone would just adopt the system already in place.
But European languages that use the same alphabet aren’t mutually intelligible in written documents, which I understand is the case with Chinese languages ? Something written in French can’t automatically be read by someone who only speaks English.
That’s because European languages use phonetic writing, while Chinese uses ideographic writing.
Getting back to the original question, language is a living creation. It is constantly shifting and evolving. Concepts that make sense to one group of people don’t make sense to other groups of people. Languages also don’t have hard boundaries. Why are Classical Latin, French, Romanian and Spanish different languages? They’re all basically Latin dialects that have drifted apart enough and stayed geographically isolated enough that we called them their own thing. The reality is that before the modern mass media, languages evolved fairly rapidly and before the printing press even more rapidly still. It’s entirely possible that if it weren’t for globalization, Americans would find Englishmen to be unintelligible due to our breakup 300 years ago. Even now, many people myself included have difficulty understanding certain forms of Scottish English despite the fact that many of our ancestors spoke Scottish English within the last 200 years. Even within the same country, we have idioms and words that have shifted over time and are strange or indecipherable to people from different parts of that country. If I say ‘red up’ or ‘the devil’s beating his wife’ that might be something you get from context, but you likely wouldn’t understand unless you’re from my part of the world. We even have meaning shifts. One of my favorites is the phrase ‘I don’t care’ in response to a question. In my part of the country, ‘I don’t care.’ is a marginal affirmative. For instance, if someone says, "Would you like to go to the movies?’ and you respond ‘I don’t care.’ You are saying something equivalent to “That is an acceptable thing to do, but if something else comes up that you’d prefer then we can do that instead.” It’s a polite phrase that lets the asker make the decision. The end result is that you would likely go to the movies. My relatives are from near Chicago and “I don’t care” to them is a firm negative-the equivalent of my Appalachian “I don’t care to go.” I lived most of my summers with them in Chicago from 9 years up and in the beginning it caused quite a bit of confusion and at least one screaming argument. They would ask me what I wanted to do and I would keep responding in what they thought was the negative and I was responding in what I thought was the positive. I can remember a breakdown raising of voices over whether or not to go to the beach and I kept yelling “I said ‘I don’t care.’” and they kept saying “I know. What is wrong with you? You never want to do anything!”
As to why these shifts happen, they happen fairly organically. You can see it on a small scale in your own family. You may have a father named William. That is the word that describes him. Maybe though, he has red hair, so he gets called ‘Red’ by an uncle or a brother and it ‘catches on’- which is a term we use to mean that other people begin to understand that the word ‘Red’ refers to William and they begin using it themselves. ‘Red’ may end up getting a vowel shift and becoming ‘Rid’ and then someone starts saying ‘Ridder’ or ‘Ridco.’ So the word ‘William’ referring to your father has now become the word ‘Ridder’ sometimes what happens is that new people introduced to your father may not even know that his ‘real’ name is William. As long as the word is understood and used, it quickly becomes part of language. With nicknames, the process is easy to observe because someone’s name is used among a small number of people and does not have a long history, but larger shifts happen as well, albeit generally more slowly, but not as slowly as you would think.
True, as an English speaker I can’t read French, but certainly I recognize all the letters. It’s just that the Latin alphabet and Chinese characters don’t work the same way.
A Chinese character does not represent a specific sound across all dialects but rather a specific concept. This character “人” means “person.” There can be hundreds of different spoken words for “person,” but everyone recognizes “人” as “person” across all dialects.
I know there’s some variation in French. I’ve seen movies that label whether their French dubbing was done in France or Quebec.
I’ve also seen a video in which a group of Hispanic Americans were talking about the various forms of Spanish that are spoken in Latin America: “This is how a Mexican would say it and this is how a Cuban would say it and this is how a Colombian would say it and this is how a Argentinian would say it.”
I was listening to a lecture on medieval history and speaker was talking about the Carolingean Renaissance. One of the things Charlemagne did during his reign was sponsor scholars and set up schools. And these scholars gathered up old Roman texts and made copies. And they essentially discovered the French language.
The people living in Charlemagne’s Empire had been thinking they were speaking Latin. Oh sure, maybe not Latin the way that the classical Romans had spoken it but still the same language. But when they began reading actual texts from classical Rome, they realized that the language they were reading was different from the language they were speaking. Over the course of a few centuries, a new language had developed without even its own speakers being aware of it.
In fact, almost all written Chinese that you will see is written Mandarin. Occasionally, written material is produced that represents spoken Cantonese or another Chinese language, and it is uses somewhat different character order and other variations from Mandarin.
The written forms of European, African, and Brazilian Portuguese are basically identical.
My experience with Portuguese-speaking friends is that the differences in the spoken language are comparable to American and British English (and maybe a bit more) they communicate just fine.
I asked that exact same question about a year ago which led to a short thread. Consensus: Not a lot of trouble. The differences are because the two have been separated by a fairly wide ocean for a couple hundred years, same as with British vs. American English.
Compounding the issue, a lot of kanjii has changed in the centuries since it has been imported. The same concept compared side by side can be noticeably different, even to a non-speaker like me. This is pointed out in a rather lengthy wiki article on kanji.
While modern Japanese uses a lot of Chinese vocabulary in the form of Kanji, there is no reason to expect, say, a Mandarin speaker to understand written Japanese. The Chinese-style Japanese called kanbun is a bit old-fashioned. (Note that once upon a time it went without saying that a Japanese scholar would be fluent in Classical Chinese.)
Similarly, while Mandarin and Cantonese are different languages, you could write a text in “classical” Chinese and expect educated people to understand it; it’s not magic. Sort of like one European’s native language might be French, and another’s Romanian, but they would both be happy communicating via written Latin (or at least they would have been several hundred years ago; today they would be as likely as not to go to English).
An example of how complicated things can get within one country speaking an Indo-European language* is Norwegian.
There are two main written forms of Norwegian, which are not quite the same thing as the spoken forms of Norwegian.
Why? Blame the Danes. That always works in Norway. Read the Wikipedia article.
It has always struck me as odd that a people’s written language isn’t the same as their spoken one. But it happens.
- Norway also recognizes Sami as an official language.
Another case where written language doesn’t match spoken is sign language. Most deaf people in the US, for instance, speak ASL as their primary spoken language, but use English (or at least, a dialect of English) as their written language. I don’t know if anyone’s ever come up with a written form of ASL, but if so, it’s never caught on. And it wouldn’t be as simple as just pictures of the various signs, because many signs depend on motion for their meaning.
Yes - in some ways Quebec French is perhaps more old-fashioned, in other ways it’s (obviously) more Americanized, and in other ways it’s just not quite the same. Like British English vs American English, it’s merely a case of “you sound funny” and a few unfamiliar words, not a major communication barrier.