Re: THEORY: Languages divided by politics and religion

Dan Sulani wrote:

> >>As someone once said:
> >>"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."
Max Weinreich.  Here's a citation that was given on Linguist List:

'a shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot.'
     Weinreich, M. 1945. Der yivo un di problemen fun undzer
     tsayt. [YIVO and the problems of our time.] Yivo-bleter
     25.1.13.

*Obviously*, he meant it ironically!

> The problem is, IMHO, what happens after all the above
> analyses have been made, and the experts conclude that
> the people who speak X are merely speaking a variation
> of the prestige dialect, and yet, the speakers of X, for any
> number of nonlinguistic reasons still consider themselves
> special.
It has been said (anyone for hunting down *this* one?) that in India,
when a peasant says "I speak language X" he means "If I (or my
children) were to become literate, I would want (them) to learn
the writing conventions of language X".

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".

>  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.
German has this property too, as does Spanish, and even Portuguese.
Arabic is more shaky: people speak of Arabic colloquials as belonging
to "the same language" only if there is diglossia with modern standard
Arabic: thus Maltese is a separate language, and Chad Arabic and Nigerian
Arabic, where there is no diglossia with m.s.A., should probably be thought of as
separate too.

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