...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(a)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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