Re: dialectal diversity in English

Jan van Steenbergen scripsit:

> Well, to me as a Dutch person this looks very strange. What we are taught is
> that all these are Dutch dialects; only Frisian is a separate language.
Sure, the usual story.

> Linguistically, the Ethnologue might be right, although it surprises me that
> Limburgs is not mentioned at all, although I have seen it referred to as a
> separate language, a Dutch dialect, and a Low German dialect elsewhere.
There are often anomalies like this; in general, the Ethnologue list
grows with time.

> Besides, I wonder why Romany is mentioned, and not huge immigrant languages
> like Turkish, Moroccan Arabic, Sranan, and Papiamentu.
They are in fact enumerated at the top of the page:  Algerian and Tunisian
Arabic are also very large, as is Cantonese.  I'm not sure why the Romany
languages are considered indigenous; possibly because they are a result of
pre-20th-century migrations?

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