Re: THEORY: Languages divided by politics and religion

John Cowan wrote:
> I also remember a story about Punjabi-speakers in New Delhi, in
> the heart of the Hindi-speaking region.  The distinction between
> Punjabi and Hindi is mainly morphophonemic, with a few lexical
> items as well, and such people can "assimilate" their Punjabi
> arbitrarily close to Hindi in structure, while keeping the
> lexical items ("kyaa" vs. "kii" 'what?', e.g.) so that they
> still claim to be "speaking Punjabi".
Many Australian tribes who spoke different "languages" actually spoke
dialects that were almost completely mutually intelligible, Dixon gives
an example [quoting]:

"When I began fieldwork in Australia in 1963, my Aboriginal teacher
Chloe Grant explained that there were two tribes in her region and
characterised them as follows: Jirrbal say _bana_ for 'water' and _buni_
for 'fire' but Girramay use _gamu_ for 'water' and _yugu_ for 'fire'.
Closer study showed that these are mutually intelligible dialects of one
language (in the linguistic sense of the term), sharing about 80% of
their lexicon and with very similar grammar.  But speakers identify
tribal affiliation in terms of a few lexemes that differ, such as
'water' and 'fire' in this instance."

> >  What's interesting, is that English is spoken as the
> > standard language in a number of nations, whose people
> > (usually :-) ) all insist that they speak the same language across
> > national boundaries.
One wonders, if the South had won the Civil War, and the two sides
remained in bitter animosity, would they claim to speak different
languages?  Or, if America and Britain had remained bitter enemies after
the Rev. War, would we claim to speak American, rather than English?

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