Dialect

In linguistics, the word geographical dialect, geolect or diatopic variety refers to one of the possible varieties of a language; The term dialect is frequently used to refer to a geographical variant of a language associated with a certain area (hence the word geolect or, in Eugenio Coseriu's terminology, the expressions syntopic variety and spatial norm).^{[citation required]} The number of speakers and the size of the dialect zone can be variable and a dialect can be, in turn, divided into subdialects (or speeches).^{[citation required]}

For the academic and visiting professor at the University of California, Manuel Alvar, considered one of the experts in "linguistic geography", moving away from the association of "political facts with linguistic facts" seeks scientific criteria by which he considers, after a long argument, that, in this regard, it is appropriate to define several concepts that should not be confused. Namely:

1. Language which defines as "the linguistic system of which a spoken community is used and which is characterized by being strongly differentiated, by having a high degree of leveling, as a vehicle of an important literary tradition and, at times, by having imposed on linguistic systems of its own origin".
2. Dialect which defines as "a system of degated signs of a living or disappeared common language, usually with a specific geographical limitation, but without a strong differentiation against others of common origin".
3. Regional speaking which defines "the expressive peculiarities of a particular region when they lack the coherence of the dialect".
4. Speak local which defines as "undifferentiated linguistic structures of traits, but with characteristic nuances within the regional structure to which they belong and whose uses are limited to small geographical constituencies, usually administrative (municipality, parish, valley).

Evolution of the concept

Regardless of the antiquity of the term, its linguistic use begins at the end of the XIX century when historical linguistics gave way to the appearance of dialectology as a linguistic discipline dedicated specifically to the geographical varieties of languages.

Dialects must be understood as historically conditioned geographical variants, that is, the history of linguistic contacts is the factor that determines dialectal differentiation. As causes of dialectal variation, the following are usually indicated:

1. The origin of the inhabitants who, speaking the same language, already presented dialectal differences of origin;
2. The influence of another language on a part of the linguistic domain; and
3. The territorial separation leading to different evolutions.

However, the definition of the concept of dialect is a delicate process in linguistics, because it requires an adequate characterization of the language of the territory, the precision of its historical affiliation and rigorous sociolinguistic analyzes and studies of linguistic attitudes on the part of the speakers. In addition, it also forces us to handle a certain concept of language, with respect to which the first one is defined, something that is not without difficulties either.

As an added element when it comes to hindering the conceptual precision of both terms, historically, the linguistic policy of certain communities has been able to use the word dialect with a pejorative value, in order to privilege as vehicle of official expression to a certain language to the detriment of another or others to which, as a form of disqualification, said term has been applied; In this other sense of the word, dialect would refer to a linguistic system that does not reach the category of language.

The concept of dialect

As in the case of language, the definitions of the term dialect are often not the same among specialists.

However, it is assumed as a basic principle that, linguistically, there is no justification for a distinction between the realities to which both refer; that is, both a dialect and a language are «languages», in the sense of verbal communication systems, so the explanation and justification of both concepts must be done taking extralinguistic criteria into account. A dialect, therefore, would be a regional variety derived from another parent language. Spanish, Galician or Catalan would therefore be dialects of Latin regardless of their categorization as languages. Andalusian or Murcian would be southern dialects of Castilian, insofar as they derive from and are linguistic variants of the Castilian language without actually having the necessary rank to be considered languages independent of Spanish.

Manuel Alvar, however, recognizes as possible this meaning of dialect, which would be that of a linguistic system that does not reach the category of language; To this end, he previously identifies languages with well-differentiated and level systems in their norm of use, and that they have a relevant literary tradition. For the rest, below the dialect would be more specific concepts such as regional speech (expressive peculiarities of an area without the coherence of the dialect) and local speech (a set of features not very differentiated but characteristic of a very specific geographical area).

Historical Aspects

The study of the evolution of languages over time, known as historical linguistics, made it possible to discover that related modern languages come, in turn, from other languages that had also developed from the fragmentation of some oldest language.

In this sense, any language does not cease to be, in itself, a dialect, while all languages come from others, of which they have been or are variants in a given geography. This other meaning of dialect is considered, on occasions, as important as that of «geographical variant»:

There are two main meanings of dialect. One considers it as a language derived from another. Thus, French is a Latin dialect, which in turn is a dialect of the Indo-European; or Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, etc. are Latin dialects, while Latin, Greek, Persian, Sanskrit, etc. are dialects of the Indo-European. This sense usually works in the realm of historicalism and therefore dialect is a technical term of historical-comparative linguistics. The other meaning of the word defines it as a geographical variety within one language.

More specifically a historical language, documented for millennia in general consists of different historical stages, which linguistically differ from each other in phonology, grammar and lexicon. Each of these stages is called the diachronic variety of the language.

Political-social aspects

The history of languages also explains that

For different reasons (politics, social, geographical, cultural), of various dialects arising from the fragmentation of a language there is one that is imposed and which ends up depleting the flourishing of others. While the first is cultivated literaryly and is a vehicle of works of high aesthetic value, there are others who never write, and if they are, they are postponed in the modesty of their localism. While the first suffers from the care and vigilance of a nation, the others grow aggressively.

This historical development is, most of the time, responsible for the ambiguity with which the terms language and dialect are usually used, at least popularly.: there are cases in which a dialect of origin ends up being considered a language due to a political-social decision (such could be the case of Valencian) and, in the same way, a language of origin (Galician, for example), was for centuries (the so-called Dark Séculos) stigmatized with its consideration as a dialect.

In this sense, the aphorism attributed to Max Weinreich that says that «A language is a dialect with an army and a navy», would be a synthetic reflection of that appreciation.

The scientific weakness of a distinction based on such aspects is verified if one considers that political borders do not delimit the lines of language use or its comprehensibility.

English and Serbo-Croatian are good examples of this. These languages have three main variants considered as standards: English from the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia (other variants, such as English from Belize, Nigeria and India are called "indigenous variants"). Serbian and Croatian on the other, along with other not-so-spoken varieties, are mutually intelligible. For political reasons, analyzing these varieties as "languages" or "dialects" produces inconsistent results: British English and American English, spoken by major political and military allies, are almost universally regarded as dialects of English. However, the standard languages of Serbia and Croatia, whose differences are comparable in number to the differences between British English and American English, are considered by many linguists in the region to be distinct languages, arguing among other reasons that they use different alphabets; but in good part it is due to the fact that the relationship between the two countries is conflictive, having in religion (Catholic among Croats, Orthodox among Serbs) a sign of differentiated identity.

There are disagreements about whether the Macedonian language is a language or a dialect, some consider it mutually intelligible with Bulgarian. It is considered a dialect of Bulgarian mainly in Bulgaria and an independent language mainly in North Macedonia itself.

In Lebanon, the Guardians of the Cedars political party, which opposes the country's ties to the Arab world, is agitating for "Lebanese" to be considered a separate language from Arabic, rather than Arabic. a simple dialect, and even claims to replace the Arabic script with a resurrection of the ancient Phoenician alphabet.

In Spain, some Valencian and Balearic organizations consider their respective languages as different from Catalan, despite institutional and academic recognition that both Valencian and Balearic are varieties of Occitano-Romance. The highly political character of these discussions is not new:

The Catalan philologist and linguist Antoni Badia Margarit, rector of the University of Barcelona, left written in his "Catalan Historical Grammar" (1952): "It is not Catalan a Romanesque language that has always been among the languages with its own personality: the contrary, it was considered as a dialectal variety of the Provencal language, and only recently, it has deserved the category of neolatin language independent".

Throughout history, cases of speech variety alterations for political reasons have arisen. In the 19th century, for example, Norwegian nationalists created Nynorsk from a set of selected dialects in the west of the country and less influenced than the eastern dialects by Danish and Swedish during the Danish and Swedish occupation.

The question of prestige

When the dispute occurs between dialects of the same language, the concept of prestige dialect (or prestige variety) arises, which is the one associated in a community that has more than one dialect, with that used by groups of speakers who occupy a socially prestigious position (economic, cultural, social elites). Consequently, from this social condition, the prestigious dialect is usually used in formal situations, such as diplomacy, as it is also, due to its association with the elites, the dialect that exerts the most influence on the definition of the standard language. Said prestigious dialect is usually based on or influenced by recognized written productions within the community, such as the Koran for Arabic or Luther's translation of the Bible for German.

In contrast to this prestige dialect there is the so-called vernacular dialect, which is the language “spoken at home”. Depending on the imprint of public life on private life in a society, this vernacular dialect will be closer or farther from the standard dialect. In Arab countries, in general, the standard dialect is not spoken by almost anyone in the domestic environment. In the Nordic countries the vernacular and the standard are almost identical in the capitals (Oslo or Stockholm) and very different in the province (in Tromsø or Malmö).

Sometimes the dialects spoken by different social strata can differ markedly, and in this case the term sociolect or diastratic variety is used to name each of the dialects used by different classes or social strata.

The ambiguity of the term

This conceptual vagueness, at least in a non-specialized field, also has part of its origin in the fact that, etymologically, the word dialect does not maintain any link with geographical issues:

Unqualified, the notion is neutral and generic, equivalent to variety, to standard [...] This explains that in recent years it has begun to replace its sense of geographical variety with the most explicit notion of geolecto.

The historical explanation, which in itself reflects the difficulty of the terminological problem, is that the Greek language of antiquity was, in fact, a group of different local varieties (jonic, doric and attic) that evolved divergently from the same original common language, having each of them its own literary tradition and its own cultural contexts of use: the hystograph for historiography, the doric for choral works. Over time, the Greek of the great metropolis, Athens, became the koiné or "common" language, that is, in the standard of the spoken language, as a synthesis of the different varieties that ended up converged in the dialect of the most important administrative and cultural center. Thus, this situation became a model for the ambiguous use of the terms tongue and dialect: tongue such as language norm or group of related norms and dialect like each of these rules independently.

Consequently, today the word dialect can be found applied to any variety of language. In French, for example, a distinction is made between dialecte and patois, the former in the sense of regional variety associated with a literary tradition and the latter that variety of that type, but without a literary tradition, with a habitual use of a pejorative type, that is, with an inherent value of inferiority. Otherwise, standard French is not seen as a dialect of French, which it is in English. However, in this language, the meanings of the word dialect are diversified: dialect serves both to refer to the local varieties of English, as well as to the different types of informal, lower-class or rural speech. On other occasions, it can even refer to a non-standard variety or, sometimes, substandard, with inferior values. In this sense, language and dialect can be almost interchangeable.

This popular use of the terms also sometimes has the endorsement of the use by linguists who, wishing to underline the relationships between all the varieties of a language, use the term dialect to refer to both geographical or spatial dialects, as well as social or other dialects (so-called sociolects). However, general works on dialectology exclusively address dialect as a geographical variant, following the opinion of Eugenio Coseriu and other linguists who reserve this term only for that variety, by highlighting the relevance of the geographical varieties of a language compared to other types of varieties (social and communicative), since a dialect understood in this way constitutes a linguistic system complete (from the grammatical point of view), as opposed to the partiality or non-systematicity of the levels and registers of a language.

In any case, and although the legitimacy of the concept of dialect has even been denied due to the difficulty of marking the boundaries of use, it is generally considered that the link to a specific geography is a factor that allows differentiating varieties within a language, so the term dialect is the one that is usually used in linguistics for such a concept.

The perception of the speakers

Simultaneous to this factor, the concept of dialect involves a factor of «awareness», in the sense that speakers tend to have a more or less clear perception of the variety they use; This perception of the speakers, together with certain linguistic characteristics, allows sociolinguistics to identify dialects as linguistic realities distinguishable from others. Consequently, it is necessary to remember that

a dialect exists when the speakers are considered members of a dialectal-speaking community confined to a particular territory, that is, when they consider that their variety is sufficiently differentiated from others and when they interpret and value in a similar way the sociolinguistic variation.

The pejorative assessment

Finally, in common language the term often appears connoted with pejorative values.

According to this conception, there are languages and dialects. The latter [would] be "inferiors" to the languages. The criteria used by non-linguists to establish the border line are very diverse and almost always, scientifically, unmanageable. Among others, the greatest or lesser number of speakers, the geographical extension, wealth, poverty or absence of literary tradition [... ]

These are, in any case, extralinguistic features that can explain the social, cultural or political importance that can be given to dialects, but not features that allow one to question the character of full linguistic systems of the same or that can substitute the linguistic evidence that places them as a variety of another language or not.

Criteria used to distinguish dialects

Since any dialect is always a dialect of a language, it is necessary to manage some kind of criteria to assign the dialects to the languages that correspond to them, something that is not always easy. Historically, the following criteria have been used to decide whether two language systems are dialects of the same language:

1. that, even if different, be mutually intelligible without needing prior learning;
2. forming part of a politically unified territory;
3. that possess a common writing system and share a literary tradition.

The first of these criteria claims to have an objective linguistic basis, however, since intelligibility is a matter of degrees, it does not allow an adequate classification of dialects in all cases. By contrast, the second criterion is political rather than linguistic, while the third refers to accidental cultural and historical factors that need not reflect linguistic criteria.

Thus, there are no universally accepted scientific criteria to distinguish «languages» from dialects, although there are several criteria that sometimes present contradictory results.

In informal use

The exact difference is therefore subjective and extralinguistic, depending on the contextual framework of the user. In informal use, dialects and languages are spoken of according to sociopolitical contexts. Some varieties of language are often called dialects for one of these reasons:

• Lack of written tradition. They do not have recognized written tradition or literature (although as far as we know all human groups have possessed oral literature).
• Political factors:
  • Speakers do not have their own state or nation. This criterion of extra-linguistic character has been ironically summed up saying that “a “language” is a “dialect” with an army and a navy”, a phrase originally coined by Max Weinreich.
  • Other times the term dialect is intentionally used to not recognize political, linguistic rights or lower the status of a certain community or the variety it speaks.
• Lack of prestige. The variety lacks prestige or recognition, either because it is spoken by a small number of people, or with a low income level or are members of pre-state cultures considered "inferiors" or "primitives". However, all the natural languages used in communication are practically identical in complexity and with exclusively linguistic criteria, it cannot be said that there are "incorrect" or "primitive" languages, in no way.
• Lack of autonomy. It is not considered to exist or there are sufficient differences grammatical with respect to another variety recognized as dominant. There is also a tendency to classify varieties as a dialect that differ from a standardized variety almost exclusively in phonetic or vocabulary traits.

The mutual intelligibility criterion is also not a good guide to predict when a variety will be qualified as a dialect or a language. What is commonly called the Chinese language has several major dialects, such as Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese, which are not mutually intelligible, but are still called dialects of the same language; in this case it is argued that the writing system is common. By contrast, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are considered independent languages and not dialects, even though their speakers communicate with each other with little difficulty. To this we must add that many Native American languages are not considered languages, but rather dialects, due to traditional discrimination, in which European forms are considered languages and American dialects. However, Nahuatl is a language, while Nahuatl from Cholula, Nahuatl from southern Veracruz or Nahuatl from northern Puebla are some of its dialectal variants. The same can be applied to other American languages such as Quechua, Yucatec Maya, Aymara or Otomi.

Modern sociolinguistics considers that the state of the language is not only determined by linguistic criteria, but is also the result of historical and political development. Romansh was recognized as a language by developing its own script, despite being very close to the Alpine dialects of Lombard. A contrary case is that of the Chinese language, whose variants are generally considered dialects and not languages, despite the fact that the speakers cannot understand each other, because they share a common script.