Mandarin and Cantonese are clearly different enough to be considered separate languages by any ordinary standard of mutual intelligibility. Calling them merely different dialects may be common because they weren’t thought of separately by Westerners, because they all use more or less the same characters, and because the current government would rather not admit how different the various varieties are. By the usual standards of mutual intelligibility, there are somewhere between ten and forty related but different languages which are referred to as Chinese, and each of those different languages has several dialects.
I think some forms of English might be close to separate languages. I was flying from London to Venice a few years ago. I swear to god I could make out maybe one in five words of the Glaswegian stewardess’s accent.
Different accent, however different, does not equal different language.
I have some Chinese friends who got very heated at the suggestion that Mandarin and Cantonese are not dialects of the same language. There was same head-exploding as I explained all the other separate languages that have more in common with each other than those two do.
Glaswegian is a dialect of Scots, which as mentioned above is sometimes considered a separate language from English. Scots differs not only in accent but also in grammar and vocabulary. And many other English speakers find it almost unintelligible.
Sure. Scots is at least a very distinct dialect, if not a distinct language. But LavenderBlue only mentions the hostess’s accent. And this is consistent with what we’d expect; an air hostess making announcements on a flight from London to Venice is likely not speaking Scots, but British English with a Glaswegian accent. (And possibly also Italian with a Glaswegian accent, which would be interesting to hear!)
My little sister got in trouble for saying that. Her teacher (probably working class, slightly lefty, a bit chauvinistic, zenophobic and anti-american, ie typical of her time and place) was insulted, and required her to say ‘pardon?’.
The OP shouldn’t be asking why the very similar dialects are the same language. It should ask why the Serbo-Croatian/Yugoslav* languages are considered different. As stated, they are a language continuum. I believe that the largest linguistic diversity is found in Croatia or is spoken by Croats. But the majority of Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, and Montenegrins speak the “Štokavian dialect,” while at least 2 other dialects exist in Croatia. That means that two Croatians may have a harder time understanding each other than a Štokavian Croat and a Serb.
Everything else can of course be explained by politics. Or history, as I don’t think Spanish and Portuguese or especially Galician and Portuguese are any more dissimilar than two dialects that are the “same.”
*Slovenian is an independent language, although related, obviously. Macedonian is slightly more distantly related and is basically Bulgarian.
God help me, I can’t help but add a “booyakasha” to the Jamaican Lord’s Prayer and reading it in Ali G’s voice.
Yeah. Norwegians can understand Swedish and Danish much better than the others can.
Swedes always say “I can’t understand a word of what the hell the Danes are saying - but they always understand me just fine! so embarrassing! löl!”
Danes always say “I can’t understand a word of what the hell the Swedes are saying - but they always understand me just fine! so embarrassing! løl!”
Having lived in both countries, I have reached the conclusion that in this case, “one way” intelligibility is a myth - on both sides of the water.
BTW, Swedes and Norwegians generally understand each other just fine, and both agree that Danish sounds fucking retarded. As a spoken language, that is. As a written language, Norwegians generally read Danish better than Swedes do.
Ps. Fuck Iceland.
Actually Italian in a Glaswegian accent will be much more common than you might think, given the number of people of Italian extraction in Scotland, who often still speak Italian due to their extended families back in the “home country”. Almost two percent of Scots are of Italian extraction, many from the 1890s, more after WWI and yet more after WW2 when Scotland was where most Italian POWs were encamped - as Italy was an ally by the end of 1943 they were gradually released, stayed on after the War and brought their families over.
Meanwhile Swiss German is certainly a separate language, although it has no written form so maybe that makes it a dialect? I work for a Swiss company and our colleagues in Munich can no more understand Swiss German than I can with my schoolboy German.
When I spent time in Scotland, I found that if someone walked up to me and started a conversation, I couldn’t tell what the hell they were saying. But… once the context was established, my comprehension went up considerably. That’s a clear indication that what you’re dealing with is mostly an accent, not a dialect or language difference.
As for Serbian and Croatian, few linguists would consider them separate languages. And now that they are separate countries, that’s that. But something not mentioned here so far is that they are written with different alphabets. Croatia is historically Catholic and so uses the Latin alphabet while Serbia is historically Orthodox and uses a version of the Cyrillic alphabet.
Moving onto one-way intelligibility, you have to be careful in that often one language group is exposed to the other’s language much more frequently than vice versa, and that is going to have a significant effect on intelligibility.
And indeed many people do, which is another argument for why they are the same language.
What I mean is, I could list plenty of slang words from my home town, if I wanted to claim it was a different language.
But most people are aware of which words are slang or uncommon, and switch to a core english if need be. And this core english is basically the same thing as “international english”.
Not quite. Glaswegian is a dialect of Scottish English. Scottish English is not the same thing as Scots; Scots has significantly different spelling and vocabulary and slightly different grammar to English, and is usually considered a separate language. (Not posting a link because there’s already one earlier in the thread).
Scottish English is only different to other types of English in pronunciation and occasional words, and I’m surprised anyone found a Glaswegian air hostess difficult to understand. Drunk or old men with particularly strong accents, yeah, they’d be hard, but an air hostess?
True, which explains why Americans tend to have far more problems with British English than British people have with American English.
On topic video: Oh, how hard it is to speak Spanish
Ruken writes:
> I have some Chinese friends who got very heated at the suggestion that Mandarin
> and Cantonese are not dialects of the same language. There was same head-
> exploding as I explained all the other separate languages that have more in
> common with each other than those two do.
That’s what I’ve heard. The official Chinese position is that the various varieties of Chinese are merely dialects of one language. The government wants to maintain this claim because it allows them to ignore some of the diversity in the country. They want people to think of themselves as citizens of a single country and not just of a region of the country. As I said above, by any usual standard, Chinese is at least ten different languages. It’s claimed that the government tries to discourage foreigners from visiting some of the remoter rural areas to keep foreigners from realizing how different the varieties of Chinese spoken there are from the more common varieties. Some people who heard those rural varieties think that forty different Chinese languages may be a better estimate.
The way it was put to me is that anyone can speak Danish drunk, but only Danes can do it sober.
I live in China but don’t speak the language. The Chinese people I work with consider them to be the same language, but Cantonese is more “shang hung chow” and Mandarin more “xiang huang qiow.” My students snicker at me when I say “Mao Tse-Tung” instead of “Mao Zedong.”
I was in Holland a few weeks ago and I swear the language sounds like German with an American accent. The Dutch impacted American English more during colonial times than we generally think.
Are Spanish and Portuguese mutually intelligible? I’ve yet to meet a Brazilian who wasn’t fluent in both. And do Latin American Spanish-speakers giggle at each other’s accents?
What I wonder about is why Old English is still considered English rather than a separate language. I am a native speaker of both English and Spanish, and I am able to make more sense of written Portugese or Italian than Old English, even though Portugese, Spanish, and Italian are all separate languages, but it seems like Old English and modern English are considered the same language.
The written languages are quite similar, but the spoken languages are quite different.
In all of these threads about mutual intelligibility, I always like to bring up this condition:
Are the two people well educated and are they TRYING to make themselves understood to each other? Or, are they poor folk who maybe speak a non-standard dialect and are speaking like they would to their neighbor? Makes a big difference.
In my experience, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian can be very close to mutually intelligible if the people are trying hard to make themselves understood. French, less so. And keep in mind that “Spanish” usually means Castilian. Galician, mentioned above, is spoken in Spain but is very similar to Portuguese.