Dialect - "Dialect" or "language"

"Dialect" or "language"

There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing a language from a dialect. A number of rough measures exist, sometimes leading to contradictory results. Some linguists do not differentiate between languages and dialects, i.e. languages are dialects and vice versa. The distinction is therefore subjective and depends on the user's frame of reference. Note also that the terms are not always treated as mutually exclusive; there is not necessarily anything contradictory in the statement that "the language of the Pennsylvania Dutch is a dialect of German". However, the term dialect always implies a relation between languages: if language X is called a dialect, this implies that the speaker considers X a dialect of some other language Y, which then usually is some standard language.

Language varieties are often called dialects rather than languages:

• if they have no standard or codified form,
• if the speakers of the given language do not have a state of their own,
• if they are rarely or never used in writing (outside reported speech),
• if they lack prestige with respect to some other, often standardised, variety.

Anthropological linguists define dialect as the specific form of a language used by a speech community. In other words, the difference between language and dialect is the difference between the abstract or general and the concrete and particular. From this perspective, everyone speaks a dialect. Those who identify a particular dialect as the "standard" or "proper" version of a language are in fact using these terms to express a social distinction. Often, the standard language is close to the sociolect of the elite class.

The status of language is not solely determined by linguistic criteria, but it is also the result of a historical and political development. Romansh came to be a written language, and therefore it is recognized as a language, even though it is very close to the Lombardic alpine dialects. An opposite example is the case of Chinese, whose variations such as Mandarin and Cantonese are often called dialects and not languages, despite their mutual unintelligibility, because the word for them in Mandarin, 方言 fāngyán, was mistranslated as "dialect" because it meant "regional speech".

See also Mesoamerican languages and Sarkar's criteria on dialects.