...linguistically, it's not entirely meaningless.
Sociolinguistically, it means quite a bit -- "dialect" vs "language" is a very interesting part of sociolinguistics -- who considers their own speech a dialect, and who considers the speech of others as a dialect? Is it correlated at all with cognation percentages or other more concrete measurements of similarity? Are people who speak a "language" likely to have better attitudes about their speech than people who speak a "dialect"? Are people who are branded as speakers of a "dialect" by others, but claim themselves to speak a "language", likely to be more fiercely independent?
Outside of sociolinguistics, "dialect" does have some degree of meaning. It's defined in the strictest sense as "a regional variety of a language". Of course, if one were to try to separate all of the speech varieties of the world into dialects and languages, that division wouldn't much help.
So many people like to try to assign arbitrary divisions based on lexicostatistics. Nationalists will try to set it so that their own variety is a "language"; most linguists would set it somewhere between 70% and 90% cognate. Now, there are "languages" with more than 90% cognation, such as Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian, Bokmål-Danish... and there are "dialects" with less than 70% cognation, such as some of the Sinitic languages, some "dialects" of German, Italian, and French, some Berber "dialects", etc.
Mark
On 06/11/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
We all know that the difference between "dialect" and "language" is a political one, and linguistically meaningless. That Allemannic is *widely considered* a dialect, at least in Germany, is indisputable.
Timwi
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