A language is a dialect with an army and navy

Is English a language? Do “languages” actually exist outside of being political tools?

A language is a dialect with an army and navy
– Max Weinreich

While, to most people, the phrase “English is a language” seems quite straightforward and obvious, it is not as clear as it may appear at first. The claim that English is a language depends on both the definition of “a language” and the definition of English itself. Most people would probably broadly define a language as a vocabulary of words and a rule-set to govern them, which is accepted, spoken and written by at least several people, and which is significantly different to other tongues. However, even within this very basic definition, there are problems.

To begin with, the vocabulary of one language may cross over with another, yet both are accepted as separate languages. Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, languages which are almost entirely mutually intelligible, are regarded as being separate. English itself contains so many loan-words and borrowings that certain elements may be mutually intelligible by speakers of other languages; for example, in the Angeln area of northern Germany, it is not uncommon to hear people reamarking “die veather ist cold” and enquiring “what ist die clock?” when they wish to know the time; the dialect of German spoken there is not dissimilar to Old English (Bryson, 1990, 38). Additionally, it is difficult to know at what point someone is really “speaking English”. A Frenchman can fairly confidently travel all around France, and to former French colonies in Africa, and expect to understand the majority of speakers. In India, where English is an official language, many people believe they are speaking the English language. If the Indian variety and the variety spoken in, for example, Edinburgh, are often completely unintelligible, which is the “true” English? This is just one of the difficulties concerning the classification of English as a language.

It may be preferable to refer to Norwegian, Danish and Swedish as dialects of Scandinavian; however, this is unlikely to happen, because language is used as a tool of identity. In places such as Denmark, where the language is not widely spoken outside that country, it is a question of national pride and identity. In replying to a survey questionnaire, one Norwegian wrote: “Danish is not a language, but a throat disease”. Janet Holmes notes that the results of the survey placed Swedish as the “best” language and Danish as the “worst”; however, she believes this simply reflected the political mood of the time, when Sweden was politically most powerful, while Denmark, “the former ruling power” was at a low (Holmes, 1992, 345). This exposes the fact that “language” and “dialect” are often little more than socio-political phenomena. Similarly, those in countries where English is not prevalent - such as Japan - or where English is the language of authority, such as India, wish to be seen to be speaking and writing “English”, not simply their local variety. English, largely due to the United States, is seen internationally as the language of business, success and prosperity, and therefore the perception that someone can speak English - regardless of whether they speak “standard” English, or something completely different - carries a degree of “higher” status.

Furthermore, identity can define a language where a group wishes to retain its own identity against an incoming threat - for example, Breton and Welsh - two non-national languages - are mutually intelligible, yet are widely held to be two separate languages (Bryson, 1990, 36). Wardhaugh notes that “a demand for “language rights” is often one of the first demands made by a discontented minority anywhere in the world” (Wardhaugh, 1986, 336). Since, by the original definition, English would be a language spoken by people in much of Britain, Ireland, America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, India, and even the Netherlands, it is difficult for the single language “English” to act as an element of any national identity. It has already been successfully put to a European Union commission that Scots is a valid and distinct language, and not simply a variety of English. It is difficult to argue that American English is simply a dialect, when it has far more speakers than British “standard” English; indeed, the term “dialect” is itself very vague. Some sociolinguists have questioned whether language and dialect exist at all. If two speakers of English from two different areas of Britain are conversing, they will veer more towards what we know as Standard English, whilst two speakers from the same geographic region may speak using their local ‘dialect’. The fact that a Cockney speaker from London may be completely unintelligible to an American speaker while a Dane and a Swede may speak without hindrance is a rather serious argument against the classification of English as a single language. Indeed, in Illinois the official language is American and not English. American English differs so significantly from British English that some interesting examples of “translation” have occurred. Early American Westerns in the 1940s and 50s were brought to the British public with subtitles. More recently, the popular “Harry Potter” series has been translated into separate British and American editions -to the extent that the titles differed (The Philosopher’s Stone in the UK and The Sorcerer’s Stone in the USA). Mostly, this translation alters spelling to match the local variety (for example, “moustache” in the UK and “mustache” in the USA), but - more controversially - some changes were made to adjust to local social norms. This might be expected when translating between two “different languages” such as English and Japanese, yet American and British English are not seen by most as separate languages. Fortunately, perhaps, the emergence of transatlantic mass media means that worldwide varieties of English are unlikely to diverge much further than they already are, and will rather be guided by the dominant American and British varieties. As Bryson notes, it is more likely not “that the various strands will drift apart, but that they will become indistinguishable” (Bryson, 1990, 244).

Furthermore, the grammar of English speakers is by no means fixed. We use the fact that different regional and social groups use different variations on the “standard” grammar to assess the social status of people every day, however subconsciously (Trudgill, 1974, 34). For example, while in “standard” English, multiple negation is unacceptable, most people would not have a problem understanding a person who claimed “I never did nothing” as meaning that they “did not do anything”, and not that they “did do something”. It is therefore difficult to claim that English truly exists as a language in anything but a highly abstract form, since every person speaks their own variety based on their social group, the region where their idiolect was formed, the region where they now live, the audience at whom their speech is directed, and a wide variety of other environmental and social factors. The only true defence of a standard English may be in written English, where dialect is normally ignored and only a very small amount of variation occurs. However, even this can be questioned. Poets, such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, use dialect in their work to place particular emphasis on class and race. For example, when Johnson writes “dis is di age af science an teknalagy”, he emphasises his Jamaican dialect of English through the very deliberate phonetic spelling.

It is therefore very difficult to classify English as a true single language, because so many separate and very different varieties now exist. Different dialects of English employ different words, phrases and constructs, showing that one person’s particular version of English is used to identify them socially and geographically. The term “language” is more socio-political than linguistic, as can be seen by the fact that we term Danish and Swedish as “languages” but American English and British English as “dialects”. It could perhaps be said, then, that English stopped being a true language when the first English people left the British Isles and settled elsewhere, beginning a process of separate language development while still referring to it as “English”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Bryson, Bill, Mother Tongue: The English Language, London: Penguin, 1990

Trudgill, Peter, Sociolinguistics: An Introduction, London: Penguin, 1974

Holmes, Janet, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, London: Longman, 1992

Wardhaugh, Ronald, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986

Johnson, L. K., Mi Revalueshanary Fren: Selected Poems, London: Penguin, 2002, found in an extract in New Humanist magazine, Volume 118, Issue 1.

Rowling, J. K., Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, London: Bloomsbury, 1997

Rowling, J. K., Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, New York: Scholastic, 1998

Tonight, I’ll set down and highlight all the examples of useless pretentiousness in your essay.

I suggest you read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” sometime to learn how NOT to write.

I’ve already read it, thanks.

By the way, I find pretty much everything most other people post on this website more pretentious than my own writing. Oh, and the above essay got 68%, which I didn’t think was too bad :stuck_out_tongue:

But, I’m sure you’re the expert. I’ll leave you lads to it.

J Finger,
although I don’t condone what Kurt Weber did, your action of saying that you think most of the posters here are pretencious is childish. It serves no purpose, if you don’t like it leave. If you don’t like and actually care enough to change things, then actually explain your statements so that we can come to understand how it is we are pretencious, and cease being so.

One thing I will tell you is that we all act on our own. Right down to the administrator. So don’t take anything anyone says to be some sort of majority vote on the topic, whether they have been here from the beginning, or if they’re a moderator, etc. This isn’t to be taken that no one cares about anyone else here, it is only meant to say that no matter who is speaking, they are speaking from their own voice. The minute someone begins saying that they are speaking for others, you should treat that with a good dose of skepticism.

In fact, my own opinion is that Kurt is way out of line. I read your essay and agree whole heartedly with much of it. Please don’t let one incident of a person crossing a line let you have your whole experience at ILP tainted. If I did the same, I would have been gone after my first 20 posts.

Respectfully,
~Magius

If offering constructive criticism on one’s writing style is “crossing the line”, then I’m quite proud I did so.

Kurt,
I don’t know where you learned your manners, but…

…in no way fits the description of constructive criticism. Especially when you don’t back up your view. Furthermore, I saw no pretenciousness in J FIngers post. Not only do you call his words pretencious but you go on to tell J Finger to go read something so he learns how NOT to write. This is pretentious of yourself.

Pretentious: Claiming or demanding a position of distinction or merit, especially when unjustified.

Even if were correct, there are much nicer ways of going about telling a person or correcting a person then the one you chose. But listen, I didn’t say what I said to argue. You don’t think you have done anything wrong, fine. I would put in the time and energy into discussing with you the finer details of what you said but I will end up having to deal with more than just yourself if I do. I no longer have the willingness or hope for that anymore.

What’s your take?

I’m reserving judgement until I’ve had the examples of useless pretentiousness pointed out to me. :slight_smile: Until then Kurt’s analysis is useless. I thought the essay was fine, apart from being tinged with a fair amout of logical positivism / talk about talk.

Does anyone know any recordings of the dialect of Angeln, or know of any websites where such samples can be found? Sometime ago I heard two women at a bus stop speaking a language that was almost -but not quite- English, in in the sense that I kept picking out comprehensible phrases from their speech but could not understand all of it. I think this may have been the Angeln dialect, which seems to be closer to English than its supposed closest relative, Frisian. This may be because I speak standard British English and Frisian is closer to Lalland scots or perhaps to the dialect of Suffolk which is nearly extinct. anyway here is an (unfinished) essay on a topic very closely related to the topic of the forum:
More bullshit is talked about language than (almost) anything else so I thought I’d post a few thoughts on the subject.
It is very commonly stated that such- and- such a language is a “mixture” of two or more other languages, for example that English is a mixture of French and German(!) or that Dutch is a mixture of German and English and so forth. Some English and Americans on coming into contact with Dutch for the first time and upon seeing and hearing the obvious similarity between the two tongues ( de man is in het huis, je boek is op de vloer bij je voet, to give two glaringly obvious examples}, and also noting that Dutch resembles German somewhat in its syntax, its formation of compound words and in its use of separable compound verbs then naively assume that it must be a mixture of the two languages, as if languages were fixed categories or things which can mix with each other, instead of its being the result of a process whereby languages change as the result of their own internal tensions and contradictions, this changes being gradually distributed over a certain area. Once upon a time all the Germanic languages (of which English Dutch and German are examples) were one language or closely-related group of dialects which linguists call Proto -Germanic. It has never been written down, but it can be inferred from similarities between the extant Germanic languages that they must have had a common origin and diverged from each other over the centuries in certain specific ways driven by their isolation from one another and by their own internal processes. It is hard to say where one language ends and another begins either synchronically (in the present) or diachronically (over time). Diachronically there are no discreet moments when it can be said that here is old English here is middle English and here is modern English. Synchronically, the West Germanic tongues form a continuum of dialects, with English at one end of the spectrum shading through Frisian, Dutch and Plattdeutsch to High, or standard German. The process is not obvious today, as the North Sea creates an abrupt line of demarcation between English and the continental Germanic tongues, but in the past when Britain was invaded from North Germany by Angles Saxons and Jutes, there cannot have been much difference between the language of the Anglo-Saxons and that of their continental cousins. It is only over the course of centuries that English began to differ markedly from Dutch and German, a process which was accelerated by its isolation on an island. It is said that Frisian could be understood well up till the fifteenth century by people in Kent who were able to communicate with Frisian-speaking sailors who sailed up the Medway. This is not to say that languages do not influence each other, but this is different from saying that a tongue intermediate between two others is a mixture of the other two as if reality consisted only of discreet stationary things rather than of processes, an example of the reification characteristic of bourgeois thought. In fact it is only the establishment of standardised written languages that gives the impression that languages are discreet entities. To quote, a language is only a dialect with an army and a navy. It is as if reality were divided up into a limited number of discreet quanta, snapshots if you will of what is really a continuous flow that stretched from English to German in a continuum of closely-related dialects each shading off imperceptibly into the other over a certain geographical area, such that somebody living at one end of it could not understand a person from the other. So for example, where English has “cold” Dutch has “koud” (with the “l” vocalised to “u”) and German has “kalt”. Or to take another example the pronoun “I” : “I” in English “Ik” in in Dutch and Frisian and “ich” in German. In the past they were all pronounced something like “ik” (related to the Latin “ego”) but in the westernmost dialects of the the British Isles, the k dropped out, on the continent it was retained , and in the easternmost dialects the “k” turned to “ch” in what is called the Second Germanic Sound Shift . Subsequently the English “i” sound that remained was lengthened and turned into the”aj” diphthong we know today.

There is an interesting implication of the OP and Nick+4’s posts. There are two sides to language: the contingent and the ironic. The contingent is the actual mobility of a language and its inexistent ontology. There is no language per se, there is a phenomenological consequence of historical forces at work. The irony is that we use language self-referentially to speak of itself as a thing in stasis, that there is an “English language” instead of a diachronic contingency which cannot discover or encounter itself and only maintains “objectness” in momentary reference.