• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Difference between a language and a dialect

Estro Felino

Believer in free will
Premium Member
Ya, I hear ya.

When we were in Sicily last [2001], people there sometimes laughed even at my wife's Sicilian because she's lived here in the States since the mid-1950's, and many of the "Sicilian" words she learned here were a mixture of Sicilian & English, such as words for car and refrigerator.

It is absolutely understandable.
My grandmother learnt Italian through TV.
 

Estro Felino

Believer in free will
Premium Member
Where does Serbo-Croatian fall into it?

It seems that's what the Bosnians locally speak. Beautiful language.

I agree with that.
Really beautiful.
I have been learning Russian, so I am familiar with Slavic vocabulary but Serbo-Croatian is so nice to hear because they articulate more than Russians.
So the words are more understandable.
 

Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
As far as I can tell, linguistically, there is really no difference between dialects and languages. The distinction is created by political recognition of a particular language variant as standard to a particular region, nation or state. It is also not static, because like all cultural habits, languages change over time, so different variants of languages can drift apart or move closer together depending on circumstances.

I would say the distinction between dialects, jargons and slangs is that dialects tend to be seen as regional variants of a language, while slangs are typically variants based on class or generational distinctions (such as working class slang, youth slang etc.) whereas jargon is typically tied to one's profession or education (e.g. military and academic jargon).

Where I would distinguish between dialects (which after all are languages in their own right) and jargon and slang is that the latter two tend to have a much more fluid relationship to the mainstream they're seen as being part of, as phrases, terms and even grammatic structures can move from jargon the mainstream and vice versa.

But in general, all language exists on a continuum, and the lines are frequently arbitrary and often motivated by ideology, identity politics, and in some cases, just plain bigotry.
 

Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
Where does Serbo-Croatian fall into it?

It seems that's what the Bosnians locally speak. Beautiful language.
BHS/BCS/BKS is a mutually intelligible continuum that can vary a lot or not at all. I've had native speakers tell me that there is effectively no major difference or hurdle between understanding one or the other, while others have insisted that they're all separate languages.

I've heard similar takes on the distinction between Farsi and Dari.
 

Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
Nowadays dialects still exist.
The Italian school does anything to discourage people from preserving them.
A person who speaks dialect in school can never be accepted. The teacher will fail them.
I prefer the German approach, where people from different countries speaking local dialects with various degrees of intelligibility all insist they are speaking the same language, despite all evidence to the contrary.
 

Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
Ya, I hear ya.

When we were in Sicily last [2001], people there sometimes laughed even at my wife's Sicilian because she's lived here in the States since the mid-1950's, and many of the "Sicilian" words she learned here were a mixture of Sicilian & English, such as words for car and refrigerator.
That seems to be a fairly common thing happening to immigrants growing up in the US. I remember reading a Spanish article in the early 2000s that described a similar thing happening to Hispanic communities there.
 

Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
That is a very good question.

I speak German. B2-C1, apparently.
But when I listen to Yddish, or I read it...yes...it is quite understandable. Some sentences are absolutely understandable.

It seems to me...that there is not much Hebrew in it.
It depends a lot of what regional variant of Yiddish we're talking about. German Yiddish obviously has a lot of German in it, Yiddish variants from e.g. the Baltics significantly less so. From a cursory glance it seems to me that the further East you get in terms of geographic origins, the more dominant the Hebrew component in the Yiddish variants becomes.
 

Estro Felino

Believer in free will
Premium Member
I prefer the German approach, where people from different countries speaking local dialects with various degrees of intelligibility all insist they are speaking the same language, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Italy has an approach that doesn't give dignity to dialects.
In Sicily no official document has ever been written in Sicilian.

In South Tyrol (which is a province of Italy) there is the Tyrolean dialect wich I don't understand.
Since I have always learned standard German.

But the official language there is standard German, so the Republic does not allow the German dialect.


Then there are dialects who have won the status of language, like Franco-Provençal in Valle D'Aosta, or the Friulian.
Sardinian has always had the status of language. So it is recognized as official language of Sardinia.
 

Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
Italy has an approach that doesn't give dignity to dialects.
In Sicily no official document has ever been written in Sicilian.

In South Tyrol (which is a province of Italy) there is the Tyrolean dialect wich I don't understand.
Since I have always learned standard German.

But the official language there is standard German, so the Republic does not allow the German dialect.
To be fair, no dialect has official status in any Germanophone country, as far as I know, but the cultural cachet of speaking in dialect can vary a lot between dialects and regions.
 

Estro Felino

Believer in free will
Premium Member
To be fair, no dialect has official status in any Germanophone country, as far as I know, but the cultural cachet of speaking in dialect can vary a lot between dialects and regions.

It is absolutely true as for Germany and Austria (and South Tyrol). But I wonder what the status of the Swiss German is. Because I have always heard that in most Swiss cantons both Standard German and Schwyzerdütsch are official.
 

anna.

but mostly it's the same
It is beautiful that literature can make a foreigner understand the cultural difference between dialect and language in Italy. So well.:)

Neapolitan is the most identitarian dialect in Italy.
The Neapolitans have an incredibly strong identity.
As you could see in the map, Naples was the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
So Neapolitans still consider their city a capital.
They use their dialect anywhere.
They consider it their language.

If I must confess, I am not able of speaking any dialect.
Nevertheless I do understand any dialect of the entire peninsular Italy (from Bologna, Genoa to Sicily).

If someone tells me "translate this into Sicilian", I cannot do that. But I really can understand Sicilian.
It is a weird thing.


Love your post, all of it. : )
 

anna.

but mostly it's the same
Ya, I hear ya.

When we were in Sicily last [2001], people there sometimes laughed even at my wife's Sicilian because she's lived here in the States since the mid-1950's, and many of the "Sicilian" words she learned here were a mixture of Sicilian & English, such as words for car and refrigerator.


That happens sometimes here too, I live quite close to the Mexican border and there's quite a bit of Spanglish going on.
 

anna.

but mostly it's the same
I agree with that.
Really beautiful.
I have been learning Russian, so I am familiar with Slavic vocabulary but Serbo-Croatian is so nice to hear because they articulate more than Russians.
So the words are more understandable.

I wish I had an ear for languages...
 

England my lionheart

Rockerjahili Rebel
Premium Member
And is cockney a dialect of English in London?

Yes it is and to a particular part of London but cockney like some others went further with rhyming slang like “plates of meat” equals feet,”mince pies” equals eyes,further confusing for some is they may only say the first word of the rhyme assuming you can complete the rhyme,not so much in use it was but most in Britain know some,I think Robert de Niro collected cockney rhyme.
 
Top