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Standard and nonstandard dialects

Dialect as linguistic variety of a language

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Colloquial meaning of dialect

Dialect and accent

Examples

See also

Notes

References

External links

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about dialects of spoken and written languages. For other uses, see Dialect
(disambiguation).

Not to be confused with diaspora language.

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Sociolinguistics

Key concepts

 Code-switching

 Language change

 Language ideology

 Language planning

 Multilingualism

 Prestige

 Variation

Areas of study

 Accent

 Bilingual pun

 Dialect

 Diglossia

 Homophonic translation

 Macaronic language

 Phono-semantic matching

 Register

 Discourse analysis

 Language varieties

 Linguistic description

 Loanword

 Pragmatics

 Pidgin
  Soramimi

People

Sociolinguists

Related fields

 Applied linguistics

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 Linguistic anthropology

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A dialect[i] is a variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include
dominant and standardized varieties as well as vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardized
varieties, such as those used in developing countries or isolated areas. [2][3][4]
The non-standard dialects of a language with a writing system will operate at different degrees
of distance from the standardized written form.

Standard and nonstandard dialects

A standard dialect, also known as a "standardized language", is supported by institutions. Such

institutional support may include any or all of the following: government recognition or
designation; formal presentation in schooling as the "correct" form of a language; informal
monitoring of everyday usage; published grammars, dictionaries, and textbooks that set forth
a normative spoken and written form; and an extensive formal literature (be it prose, poetry,
non-fiction, etc.) that uses it. An example of a standardized language is the French
language which is supported by the Académie Française institution. A nonstandard dialect also
has a complete grammar and vocabulary, but is usually not the beneficiary of institutional
support.

The distinction between the "standard" dialect and the "nonstandard" (vernacular) dialects of
the same language is often arbitrary and based on social, political, cultural, or historical
considerations or prevalence and prominence.[5][6][7] In a similar way, the definitions of the
terms "language" and "dialect" may overlap and are often subject to debate, with the
differentiation between the two classifications often grounded in arbitrary or sociopolitical
motives,[8] and the term "dialect" is sometimes restricted to mean "non-standard variety",
particularly in non-specialist settings and non-English linguistic traditions.[9][10][11][12]

Dialect as linguistic variety of a language

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The term dialect is applied mostly to speech patterns that are unique to an area, which is
sometimes called a regiolect,[13] but a dialect may also be defined in other ways such as social
class, a sociolect, or ethnicity, a ethnolect.[14]

According to this definition, any variety of a given language can be classified as "a dialect",
including any standardized varieties. In this case, the distinction between the "standard
language" (i.e. the "standard" dialect of a particular language) and the "nonstandard"
(vernacular) dialects of the same language is often arbitrary and based on social, political,
cultural, or historical considerations or prevalence and prominence. [5][6][7] In a similar way, the
definitions of the terms "language" and "dialect" may overlap and are often subject to debate,
with the differentiation between the two classifications often grounded in arbitrary or
sociopolitical motives.[8] The term "dialect" is however sometimes restricted to mean "non-
standard variety", particularly in non-specialist settings and non-English linguistic
traditions.[15][10][16][17] Conversely, some dialectologists have reserved the term "dialect" for
forms that they believed (sometimes wrongly) to be purer forms of the older languages, as in
how early dialectologists of English did not consider the Brummie of Birmingham or
the Scouse of Liverpool to be real dialects, as they had arisen fairly recently in time and partly
as a result of influences from Irish migrants.[18]

Difference between dialects and languages

See also: Abstand and ausbau languages and A language is a dialect with an army and navy

There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing two different languages from two
dialects (i.e. varieties) of the same language. [19] A number of rough measures exist, sometimes
leading to contradictory results. The distinction between dialect and language is therefore
subjective[how?] and depends upon the user's preferred frame of reference.[20] For example,
there has been discussion about whether or not the Limón Creole English should be
considered "a kind" of English or a different language. This creole is spoken in the Caribbean
coast of Costa Rica (Central America) by descendants of Jamaican people. The position that
Costa Rican linguists support depends upon which university they represent. Another example
is Scanian, which even, for a time, had its own ISO code.[21][22][23][24]

Linguistic distance

Main article: Linguistic distance

An important criterion for categorizing varieties of language is linguistic distance. For a variety
to be considered a dialect, the linguistic distance between the two varieties must be low.
Linguistic distance between spoken or written forms of language increases as the differences
between the forms are characterized.[25] For example, two languages with completely different
syntactical structures would have a high linguistic distance, while a language with very few
differences from another may be considered a dialect or a sibling of that language. Linguistic
distance may be used to determine language families and language siblings. For example,
languages with little linguistic distance, like Dutch and German, are considered siblings. Dutch
and German are siblings in the West-Germanic language group. Some language siblings are
closer to each other in terms of linguistic distance than to other linguistic siblings. French and
Spanish, siblings in the Romance Branch of the Indo-European group, are closer to each other
than they are to any of the languages of the West-Germanic group.[25] When languages are
close in terms of linguistic distance, they resemble one another, hence why dialects are not
considered linguistically distant to their parent language.

Mutual intelligibility

One criterion, which is often considered to be purely linguistic, is that of mutual intelligibility:
two varieties are said to be dialects of the same language if being a speaker of one variety has
sufficient knowledge to understand and be understood by a speaker of the other dialect;
otherwise, they are said to be different languages.[26] However, this definition has often been
criticized, especially in the case of a dialect continuum (or dialect chain), which contains a
sequence of varieties, where each mutually intelligible with the next, but may not be mutually
intelligible with distant varieties.[26]

Others have argued that mutual intelligibility occurs in varying degrees, and the potential
difficulty in distinguishing between intelligibility and prior familiarity with the other variety.
However, recent research suggests that there is some empirical evidence in favor of using
some form of the intelligibility criterion to distinguish between languages and
dialects,[27] though mutuality may not be as relevant as initially thought. The requirement for
mutuality is abandoned by the Language Survey Reference Guide of SIL International,
publishers of the Ethnologue and the registration authority for the ISO 639-3 standard
for language codes. They define a dialect cluster as a central variety together with all those
varieties whose speakers understand the central variety at a specified threshold level or
higher. If the threshold level is high, usually between 70% and 85%, the cluster is designated as
a language.[28][clarification needed]

Sociolinguistic definitions

Local varieties in the West Germanic dialect

continuum are oriented towards either Standard Dutch or Standard German depending on
which side of the border they are spoken on.[29]

Another occasionally used criterion for discriminating dialects from languages is

the sociolinguistic notion of linguistic authority. According to this definition, two varieties are
considered dialects of the same language if (under at least some circumstances) they would
defer to the same authority regarding some questions about their language. For instance, to
learn the name of a new invention, or an obscure foreign species of plant, speakers
of Westphalian and East Franconian German might each consult a German dictionary or ask a
German-speaking expert in the subject. Thus these varieties are said to be dependent on,
or heteronomous with respect to, Standard German, which is said to be autonomous.[29]
In contrast, speakers in the Netherlands of Low Saxon varieties similar to Westphalian would
instead consult a dictionary of Standard Dutch, and hence is categorized as a dialect of Dutch
instead. Similarly, although Yiddish is classified by linguists as a language in the High
German group of languages and has some degree of mutual intelligibility with German, a
Yiddish speaker would consult a Yiddish dictionary rather than a German dictionary in such a
case, and is classified as its own language.

Within this framework, W. A. Stewart defined a language as an autonomous variety in addition

to all the varieties that are heteronomous with respect to it, noting that an essentially
equivalent definition had been stated by Charles A. Ferguson and John J. Gumperz in
1960.[30][31] A heteronomous variety may be considered a dialect of a language defined in this
way.[30] In these terms, Danish and Norwegian, though mutually intelligible to a large degree,
are considered separate languages.[32] In the framework of Heinz Kloss, these are described as
languages by ausbau (development) rather than by abstand (separation).[33]

Dialect and language clusters

See also: Dialect continuum

In other situations, a closely related group of varieties possess considerable (though

incomplete) mutual intelligibility, but none dominates the others. To describe this situation,
the editors of the Handbook of African Languages introduced the term dialect cluster as a
classificatory unit at the same level as a language. [34] A similar situation, but with a greater
degree of mutual unintelligibility, has been termed a language cluster.[35]
In the Language Survey Reference Guide issued by SIL International, who produce Ethnologue,
a dialect cluster is defined as a central variety together with a collection of varieties whose
speakers can understand the central variety at a specified threshold level (usually between
70% and 85%) or higher. It is not required that peripheral varieties be understood by speakers
of the central variety or of other peripheral varieties. A minimal set of central varieties
providing coverage of a dialect continuum may be selected algorithmically from intelligibility
data.[36]

Political factors

In many societies, however, a particular dialect, often the sociolect of the elite class, comes to
be identified as the "standard" or "proper" version of a language by those seeking to make a
social distinction and is contrasted with other varieties. As a result of this, in some contexts,
the term "dialect" refers specifically to varieties with low social status. In this secondary sense
of "dialect", language varieties are often called dialects rather than languages:

 if they have no standard or codified form,

 if they are rarely or never used in writing (outside reported speech),

 if the speakers of the given language do not have a state of their own,

 if they lack prestige with respect to some other, often standardised, variety.

The status of "language" is not solely determined by linguistic criteria, but it is also the result
of a historical and political development. Romansh came to be a written language, and
therefore it is recognized as a language, even though it is very close to the Lombardic alpine
dialects and classical Latin. An opposite example is Chinese, whose variations such
as Mandarin and Cantonese are often called dialects and not languages in China, despite their
mutual unintelligibility.
National boundaries sometimes make the distinction between "language" and "dialect" an
issue of political importance. A group speaking a separate "language" may be seen as having a
greater claim to being a separate "people", and thus to be more deserving of its own
independent state, while a group speaking a "dialect" may be seen as a sub-group, part of a
bigger people, which must content itself with regional autonomy. [37][citation needed]

The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich published the expression, A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an
armey un flot ("‫"אַ שּפראַ ך איז אַ דיאַ לעקט מיט אַ ן אַ רמײ און ֿפלאָ ט‬: "A language is a dialect with an
army and navy") in YIVO Bleter 25.1, 1945, p. 13. The significance of the political factors in any
attempt at answering the question "what is a language?" is great enough to cast doubt on
whether any strictly linguistic definition, without a socio-cultural approach, is possible. This is
illustrated by the frequency with which the army-navy aphorism is cited.

Terminology

By the definition most commonly used by linguists, any linguistic variety can be considered a
"dialect" of some language—"everybody speaks a dialect". According to that interpretation,
the criteria above merely serve to distinguish whether two varieties are dialects of
the same language or dialects of different languages.

The terms "language" and "dialect" are not necessarily mutually exclusive, although they are
often perceived to be.[38] Thus there is nothing contradictory in the statement "the language of
the Pennsylvania Dutch is a dialect of German".

There are various terms that linguists may use to avoid taking a position on whether the
speech of a community is an independent language in its own right or a dialect of another
language. Perhaps the most common is "variety";[39] "lect" is another. A more general term is
"languoid", which does not distinguish between dialects, languages, and groups of languages,
whether genealogically related or not.[40]

Colloquial meaning of dialect

The colloquial meaning of dialect can be understood by example, e.g.

in Italy[41] (see dialetto[42]), France (see patois) and the Philippines,[43][44] carries
a pejorative undertone and underlines the politically and socially subordinated status of a non-
national language to the country's single official language. In other words, these "dialects" are
not actual dialects in the same sense as in the first usage, as they do not derive from the
politically dominant language and are therefore not one of its varieties, but instead they
evolved in a separate and parallel way and may thus better fit various parties' criteria for a
separate language.

Despite this, these "dialects" may often be historically cognate and share genetic roots in the
same subfamily as the dominant national language and may even, to a varying degree, share
some mutual intelligibility with the latter. In this sense, unlike in the first usage, the national
language would not itself be considered a "dialect", as it is the dominant language in a
particular state, be it in terms of linguistic prestige, social or political (e.g. official) status,
predominance or prevalence, or all of the above. The term "dialect" used this way implies a
political connotation, being mostly used to refer to low-prestige languages (regardless of their
actual degree of distance from the national language), languages lacking institutional support,
or those perceived as "unsuitable for writing".[45] The designation "dialect" is also used
popularly to refer to the unwritten or non-codified languages of developing countries or
isolated areas,[2][3] where the term "vernacular language" would be preferred by linguists.[46]

Dialect and accent

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expansion. You can help
by adding missing
information. (October 2024)

John Lyons writes that "Many linguists [...] subsume differences of accent under differences of
dialect."[6] In general, accent refers to variations in pronunciation, while dialect also
encompasses specific variations in grammar and vocabulary.[47]

Examples

See also: Mesoamerican languages § Language vs. dialect

Arabic

Main article: Arabic

See also: Varieties of Arabic

There are three geographical zones in which Arabic is spoken (Jastrow 2002). [48] Zone I is
categorized as the area in which Arabic was spoken before the rise of Islam. It is the Arabian
Peninsula, excluding the areas where southern Arabian was spoken. Zone II is categorized as
the areas to which Arabic speaking peoples moved as a result of the conquests of Islam.
Included in Zone II are the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, Iraq, and some parts of Iran. The
Egyptian, Sudanese, and Levantine dialects (including the Syrian dialect) are well documented,
and widely spoken and studied. Zone III comprises the areas in which Arabic is spoken outside
of the continuous Arabic Language area.

Spoken dialects of the Arabic language share the same writing system and share Modern
Standard Arabic as their common prestige dialect used in writing.

German

See also: German dialects

When talking about the German language, the term German dialects is only used for the
traditional regional varieties. That allows them to be distinguished from the regional varieties
of modern standard German. The German dialects show a wide spectrum of variation. Some of
them are not mutually intelligible. German dialectology traditionally names the major dialect
groups after Germanic tribes from which they were assumed to have descended.[49]

The extent to which the dialects are spoken varies according to a number of factors: In
Northern Germany, dialects are less common than in the South. In cities, dialects are less
common than in the countryside. In a public environment, dialects are less common than in a
familiar environment.

The situation in Switzerland and Liechtenstein is different from the rest of the German-
speaking countries. The Swiss German dialects are the default everyday language in virtually
every situation, whereas standard German is only spoken in education, partially in media, and
with foreigners not possessing knowledge of Swiss German. Most Swiss German speakers
perceive standard German to be a foreign language.

The Low German and Low Franconian varieties spoken in Germany are often counted among
the German dialects. This reflects the modern situation where they are roofed by standard
German. This is different from the situation in the Middle Ages when Low German had strong
tendencies towards an ausbau language.

The Frisian languages spoken in Germany and the Netherlands are excluded from the German
dialects.

Italy

Main articles: Languages of Italy and Regional Italian

Italy is an often-quoted example of a country where the second definition of the word
"dialect" (dialetto[42]) is most prevalent. Italy is in fact home to a vast array of separate
languages, most of which lack mutual intelligibility with one another and have their own local
varieties; twelve of them
(Albanian, Catalan, German, Greek, Slovene, Croatian, French, Franco-
Provençal, Friulian, Ladin, Occitan and Sardinian) underwent Italianization to varying degrees
(ranging from the currently endangered state displayed by Sardinian and southern
Italian Greek to the vigorous promotion of Germanic Tyrolean), but have been officially
recognized as minority languages (minoranze linguistiche storiche), in light of their distinctive
historical development. Yet, most of the regional languages spoken across the peninsula are
often colloquially referred to in non-linguistic circles as Italian dialetti, since most of them,
including the prestigious Neapolitan, Sicilian and Venetian, have adopted vulgar Tuscan as
their reference language since the Middle Ages. However, all these languages evolved
from Vulgar Latin in parallel with Italian, long prior to the popular diffusion of the latter
throughout what is now Italy.[50]

During the Risorgimento, Italian still existed mainly as a literary language, and only 2.5% of
Italy's population could speak Italian.[51] Proponents of Italian nationalism, like the
Lombard Alessandro Manzoni, stressed the importance of establishing a uniform national
language in order to better create an Italian national identity.[52] With the unification of Italy in
the 1860s, Italian became the official national language of the new Italian state, while the
other ones came to be institutionally regarded as "dialects" subordinate to Italian, and
negatively associated with a lack of education.

In the early 20th century, the conscription of Italian men from all throughout Italy
during World War I is credited with having facilitated the diffusion of Italian among the less
educated conscripted soldiers, as these men, who had been speaking various regional
languages up until then, found themselves forced to communicate with each other in a
common tongue while serving in the Italian military. With the popular spread of Italian out of
the intellectual circles, because of the mass-media and the establishment of public education,
Italians from all regions were increasingly exposed to Italian. [50] While dialect levelling has
increased the number of Italian speakers and decreased the number of speakers of other
languages native to Italy, Italians in different regions have developed variations of standard
Italian specific to their region. These variations of standard Italian, known as "regional Italian",
would thus more appropriately be called dialects in accordance with the first linguistic
definition of the term, as they are in fact derived from Italian,[53][44][54] with some degree of
influence from the local or regional native languages and accents. [50]
The most widely spoken languages of Italy, which are not to be confused with regional Italian,
fall within a family of which even Italian is part, the Italo-Dalmatian group. This wide category
includes:

 the complex of the Tuscan and Central Italian dialects, such as Romanesco in Rome,
with the addition of some distantly Corsican-derived varieties
(Gallurese and Sassarese) spoken in Northern Sardinia;

 the Neapolitan group (also known as "Intermediate Meridional Italian"), which

encompasses not only Naples' and Campania's speech but also a variety of related
neighboring varieties like the Irpinian dialect, Abruzzese and
Southern Marchegiano, Molisan, Northern Calabrian or Cosentino, and the Bari dialect.
The Cilentan dialect of Salerno, in Campania, is considered significantly influenced by
the Neapolitan and the below-mentioned language groups;

 the Sicilian group (also known as "Extreme Meridional Italian"), including Salentino and
centro-southern Calabrian.

Modern Italian is heavily based on the Florentine dialect of Tuscan.[50] The Tuscan-based
language that would eventually become modern Italian had been used in poetry and literature
since at least the 12th century, and it first spread outside the Tuscan linguistic borders through
the works of the so-called tre corone ("three crowns"): Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, and Giovanni
Boccaccio. Florentine thus gradually rose to prominence as the volgare of
the literate and upper class in Italy, and it spread throughout the peninsula and Sicily as
the lingua franca among the Italian educated class as well as Italian travelling merchants. The
economic prowess and cultural and artistic importance of Tuscany in the Late Middle Ages and
the Renaissance further encouraged the diffusion of the Florentine-Tuscan Italian throughout
Italy and among the educated and powerful, though local and regional languages remained the
main languages of the common people.

Aside from the Italo-Dalmatian languages, the second most widespread family in Italy is
the Gallo-Italic group, spanning throughout much of Northern Italy's languages and dialects
(such as Piedmontese, Emilian-
Romagnol, Ligurian, Lombard, Venetian, Sicily's and Basilicata's Gallo-Italic in southern Italy,
etc.).

Finally, other languages from a number of different families follow the last two major groups:
the Gallo-Romance languages (French, Occitan and its Vivaro-Alpine dialect, Franco-Provençal);
the Rhaeto-Romance languages (Friulian and Ladin); the Ibero-Romance
languages (Sardinia's Algherese); the Germanic Cimbrian, Southern Bavarian, Walser
German and the Mòcheno language; the Albanian Arbëresh language; the Hellenic Griko
language and Calabrian Greek; the Serbo-Croatian Slavomolisano dialect; and the
various Slovene languages, including the Gail Valley dialect and Istrian dialect. The language
indigenous to Sardinia, while being Romance in nature, is considered to be a specific linguistic
family of its own, separate from the other Neo-Latin groups; it is often subdivided into
the Centro-Southern and Centro-Northern dialects.
Though mostly mutually unintelligible, the exact degree to which all the Italian languages are
mutually unintelligible varies, often correlating with geographical distance or geographical
barriers between the languages; some regional Italian languages that are closer in
geographical proximity to each other or closer to each other on the dialect continuum are
more or less mutually intelligible. For instance, a speaker of purely Eastern Lombard, a
language in Northern Italy's Lombardy region that includes the Bergamasque dialect, would
have severely limited mutual intelligibility with a purely Italian speaker and would be nearly
completely unintelligible to a Sicilian-speaking individual. Due to Eastern Lombard's status as a
Gallo-Italic language, an Eastern Lombard speaker may, in fact, have more mutual intelligibility
with an Occitan, Catalan, or French speaker than with an Italian or Sicilian speaker. Meanwhile,
a Sicilian-speaking person would have a greater degree of mutual intelligibility with a speaker
of the more closely related Neapolitan language, but far less mutual intelligibility with a person
speaking Sicilian Gallo-Italic, a language that developed in isolated Lombard emigrant
communities on the same island as the Sicilian language.

Today, the majority of Italian nationals are able to speak Italian, though many Italians still
speak their regional language regularly or as their primary day-to-day language, especially at
home with family or when communicating with Italians from the same town or region.

The Balkans

The classification of speech varieties as dialects or languages and their relationship to other
varieties of speech can be controversial and the verdicts inconsistent. Serbo-
Croatian illustrates this point. Serbo-Croatian has two major formal variants
(Serbian and Croatian). Both are based on the Shtokavian dialect and therefore mutually
intelligible with differences found mostly in their respective local vocabularies and minor
grammatical differences. Certain dialects of Serbia (Torlakian) and Croatia
(Kajkavian and Chakavian), however, are not mutually intelligible even though they are usually
subsumed under Serbo-Croatian. How these dialects should be classified in relation to
Shtokavian remains a matter of dispute.

Macedonian, which is largely mutually intelligible with Bulgarian and certain dialects of Serbo-
Croatian (Torlakian), is considered by Bulgarian linguists to be a Bulgarian dialect, while
in North Macedonia, it is regarded as a language in its own right. Before the establishment of a
literary standard of Macedonian in 1944, in most sources in and out of Bulgaria before the
Second World War, the South Slavic dialect continuum covering the area of today's North
Macedonia were referred to as Bulgarian dialects. Sociolinguists agree that the question of
whether Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian or a language is a political one and cannot be
resolved on a purely linguistic basis.[55][56]

Lebanon

See also: Lebanese Arabic

In Lebanon, a part of the Christian population considers "Lebanese" to be in some sense a

distinct language from Arabic and not merely a dialect thereof. During the civil war, Christians
often used Lebanese Arabic officially, and sporadically used the Latin script to write Lebanese,
thus further distinguishing it from Arabic. All Lebanese laws are written in the standard literary
form of Arabic, though parliamentary debate may be conducted in Lebanese Arabic.

Malay
See also: Malay language

Malay has a long history as a lingua franca (Indonesian and Malay: basantara) in the Malay
Archipelago which currently includes Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei
Darussalam, Singapore, East Timor, and the southern part of Thailand. This geographical
variation, which then spread widely even to South Africa, finally led to the formation of a
Malay language cluster which spread and had differences due to geographical conditions. [57]

The Malay language is pluricentric and a macrolanguage, i.e., several varieties of it are
standardized as the national language (bahasa kebangsaan or bahasa nasional) of several
nation states with various official names: in Malaysia, it is designated as either bahasa
Malaysia ("Malaysian") or also bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"); in Singapore and Brunei, it
is called bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"); in Indonesia, an autonomous normative variety
called bahasa Indonesia ("Indonesian language") is designated the bahasa
persatuan/pemersatu ("unifying language" or lingua franca) whereas the term "Malay"
(bahasa Melayu) is domestically restricted to vernacular varieties of Malay indigenous to areas
of Central to Southern Sumatra and West Kalimantan.[58][ii]

North Africa

See also: Maghrebi Arabic

In Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, the Darijas, colloquial Arabic varieties (Darija being
from ‫الد َِّار َجة‬, ad-dārija, "colloquial Arabic"), are sometimes considered more different from
other Arabic dialects. Officially, North African countries give preference to the Literary
Arabic and conduct much of their political and religious life in it (adherence to Islam), and
refrain from declaring each country's specific variety to be a separate language, because
Literary Arabic is the liturgical language of Islam and the language of the Islamic sacred book,
the Qur'an. Although, especially since the 1960s, the Darijas are occupying an increasing use
and influence in the cultural life of these countries. Examples of cultural elements where
Darijas' use became dominant include: theatre, film, music, television, advertisement, social
media, folk-tale books and companies' names.

Ukraine

The Books of Genesis of the Ukrainian Nation by Mykola Kostomarov

The Modern Ukrainian language has been in common use since the late 17th century,
associated with the establishment of the Cossack Hetmanate. In the 19th century,
the Tsarist Government of the Russian Empire claimed that Ukrainian (or Little Russian, per
official name) was merely a dialect of Russian (or Polonized dialect) and not a language on its
own (same concept as for Belarusian language). That concepted was enrooted soon after
the partitions of Poland. According to these claims, the differences were few and caused by
the conquest of western Ukraine by the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. However, in reality
the dialects in Ukraine were developing independently from the dialects in the modern Russia
for several centuries, and as a result they differed substantially.

Following the Spring of Nations in Europe and efforts of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and
Methodius, across the so-called "Southwestern Krai" of Russian Empire started to spread
cultural societies of Hromada and their Sunday schools. Themselves "hromadas" acted in same
manner as Orthodox fraternities of Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth back in 15th century.
Around that time in Ukraine becoming popular political movements Narodnichestvo
(Narodniks) and Khlopomanstvo.

Moldova

There have been cases of a variety of speech being deliberately reclassified to serve political
purposes. One example is Moldovan. In 1996, the Moldovan Parliament, citing fears of
"Romanian expansionism", rejected a proposal from President Mircea Snegur to change the
name of the language to Romanian, and in 2003 a Moldovan–Romanian dictionary was
published, purporting to show that the two countries speak different languages. Linguists of
the Romanian Academy reacted by declaring that all the Moldovan words were also Romanian
words; while in Moldova, the head of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova, Ion Bărbuţă,
described the dictionary as a politically motivated "absurdity". On 22 March 2023,
the president of Moldova, Maia Sandu, promulgated a law passed by Parliament that named
the national language as Romanian in all legislative texts and the constitution.[61]

Greater China

Main article: Varieties of Chinese § Classification

The hundreds of mutually unintelligible Chinese languages contain thousands of dialects. All
are commonly referred to indiscriminately as 'dialects' in English. In the north and southwest
of China the varieties are largely homogeneous, with about 50% intelligibility between Beijing
and Sichuan. In the southeast the varieties are much more diverse. The main language groups
in the south – Gan, Xiang, Wu, Min, Yue and Hakka – each consist of numerous mutually
unintelligible languages and even more regional dialects.

From the Ming dynasty onward, Beijing has been the capital of China and the Beijing
dialect of Mandarin has had the most prestige. With the founding of the Republic of
China, Standard Mandarin, based on Beijing dialect with some of its more idiosyncratic
elements removed, was designated the official language of the country, replacing Classical
Chinese. Other Chinese languages and dialects are referred to as fangyan (regional
speech). Cantonese, one of the Yue languages, is the most commonly spoken language
in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau and among some overseas Chinese communities,
whereas Shanghainese is dominant among the Wu [Link], one of the Min
languages, has been accepted in Taiwan as an important local language alongside Mandarin.

Chinese languages other than Classical Chinese and Standard Mandarin are for the most part
unwritten. Several regional languages, most notably Cantonese, have a limited literary
tradition. Some of these use the Latin script, with orthographies dating from the British
missionary era, and Dungan in Kazakhstan uses Cyrillic, but for the most part Chinese
languages are written in logographic Chinese characters, most of which they have in common,
making the gist of them intelligible to each other in writing, though many grammatical words
and much vocabulary differs. However, in the 1950s the written language diverged even for
Mandarin when the People's Republic of China introduced simplified characters, which are
now used throughout the country. Traditional characters remain the norm in Taiwan and some
overseas communities.

Hindi

Main article: Hindi

A number of dialects and languages are classified as Hindi dialects, which is a social rather than
linguistic concept. Standard Hindi (and Standard Urdu) are based on Khari Boli, the dialect
spoken around Delhi. Other dialects with high mutual intelligibility spoken in surrounding areas
include Haryanvi and languages from Western Uttar Pradesh, like Braj Bhasha. But many
languages less similar to Standard Hindi, and that do not have official status under the 8th
Schedule to the Constitution of India, are classified as dialects of Hindi.[62] This
includes Bhojpuri, spoken in Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which is objectively a distinct
language.[63] Over time, more and more languages have been recognized as distinct from Hindi,
and so are no longer considered Hindi dialects: Maithili was made a scheduled language of
India in 2003, and Chhattisgarhi was made official in Chhattisgarh.[64]

See also

 Accent perception

 Chronolect

 Colloquialism

 Creole language

 Dialect levelling

 Dialectology

 Dialectometry

 Ethnolect

 Eye dialect

 Idiolect

 Isogloss

 Koiné language

 Register (sociolinguistics)

 Literary language

 Nation language

 Regional language

 Sprachbund

Selected list of articles on dialects

 Varieties of Arabic

 Albanian dialects

 Bengali dialects

 Catalan dialects

 Varieties of Chinese
  Cypriot Greek

 Cypriot Turkish

 Danish dialects

 Dutch dialects

 English dialects

 Finnish dialects

 Varieties of French

 Georgian dialects

 German dialects

 Malayalam languages

 Varieties of Malay

 Connacht Irish, Munster Irish, Ulster Irish

 Italian dialects

 Japanese dialects

 Korean dialects

 Norwegian dialects

 Nguni languages

 Dialects of Polish

 Portuguese dialects

 Romanian dialects

 Russian dialects

 Slavic microlanguages

 Slovenian dialects

 Spanish dialects

 Swedish dialects

 Sri Lankan Tamil dialects

 Yiddish dialects

Notes

i. The word has multiple derivations: Middle French dialecte, Classical Latin dialectos,
and Ancient Greek διάλεκτος (diálektos), 'discourse', in turn derived from διά (diá),
'through', and λέγω (légō), 'I speak'.[1]
 ii. Since the standardized varieties of Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore are
structurally largely identical and mostly differ in lexicon and to a lesser degree in
phonetic details, the umbrella terms "Malay/Indonesian"[59] or "Malay-
Indonesian"[60] are often used in the linguistic literature when discussing the structure
or history of the language.

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23. Fishman, Joshua A. (1969). "National Languages and Languages of Wider

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26. Comrie, Bernard (2018). "Introduction". In Bernard Comrie (ed.). The World's Major
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criterion of demarcation between languages and
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28. Grimes, Joseph Evans (1995). Language Survey Reference Guide. SIL International.
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32. Chambers & Trudgill (1998), p. 11.

33. Kloss, Heinz (1967). "'Abstand languages' and 'ausbau languages'". Anthropological
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35. Hansford, Keir; Bendor-Samuel, John; Stanford, Ron (1976). "A provisional language
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37. Muljačić, Ž. (1997). The relationships between the dialect and the standard language.
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39. Finegan, Edward (2007). Language: Its Structure and Use (5th ed.). Boston, MA:
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40. "Languoid" at [Link]

41. «The often used term "Italian dialects" may create the false impression that the
dialects are varieties of the standard Italian language.» Martin Maiden, M. Mair Parry
(1997), The Dialects of Italy, Psychology Press, p. 2.

42. «Parlata propria di un ambiente geografico e culturale ristretto (come la regione, la

provincia, la città o anche il paese): contrapposta a un sistema linguistico affine per
origine e sviluppo, ma che, per diverse ragioni (politiche, letterarie, geografiche, ecc.),
si è imposto come lingua letteraria e ufficiale». Battaglia, Salvatore (1961). Grande
dizionario della lingua italiana, UTET, Torino, V. IV, pp. 321–322.

43. Peter G. Gowing, William Henry Scott (1971). Acculturation in the Philippines: Essays
on Changing Societies. A Selection of Papers Presented at the Baguio Religious
Acculturation Conferences from 1958 to 1968. New Day Publishers. p. 157.

44. Maiden, Martin; Parry, Mair (1997). The Dialects of Italy. Routledge.
p. 2. ISBN 9781134834365.

45. Defenders of the Indigenous Languages of the Archipelago (2007). Filipino is Not Our
Language: Learn why it is Not and Find Out what it is. p. 26.

46. Haugen, Einar (1966). "Dialect, Language, Nation". American

Anthropologist. American Anthropologist New Series, Vol. 68, No. 4. 68 (4):
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47. Lyons (1981), p. 268.

48. Watson, Janet C.E. (2011-12-21), "50. Arabic Dialects (general article)", The Semitic
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896, doi:10.1515/9783110251586.851, ISBN 978-3-11-025158-6, retrieved 2020-10-17

49. Danvas, Kegesa (2016). "From dialect to variation space". Cutewriters. Cutewriters Inc.
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50. Domenico Cerrato. "Che lingua parla un italiano?". [Link].

51. "Lewis, M. Paul (ed.), 2009. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition".
[Link]. Retrieved 2010-04-21.

52. An often quoted paradigm of Italian nationalism is the ode on the Piedmontese
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as "one by military prowess, by language, by religion, by history, by blood, and by
sentiment".

53. Loporcaro, Michele (2009). Profilo linguistico dei dialetti italiani (in Italian). Bari:
Laterza.; Marcato, Carla (2007). Dialetto, dialetti e italiano (in Italian). Bologna: Il
Mulino.; Posner, Rebecca (1996). The Romance languages. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
54. Repetti, Lori (2000). Phonological Theory and the Dialects of Italy. John Benjamins
Publishing. ISBN 9027237190.
55. Chambers, Jack; Trudgill, Peter (1998). Dialectology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University
Press. p. 7. Similarly, Bulgarian politicians often argue that Macedonian is simply a
dialect of Bulgarian – which is really a way of saying, of course, that they feel
Macedonia ought to be part of Bulgaria. From a purely linguistic point of view,
however, such arguments are not resolvable, since dialect continua admit of more-or-
less but not either-or judgements.

56. Danforth, Loring M. (1997). The Macedonian conflict: ethnic nationalism in a

transnational world. Princeton University Press. p. 67. ISBN 978-
0691043562. Sociolinguists agree that in such situations the decision as to whether a
particular variety of speech constitutes a language or a dialect is always based on
political, rather than linguistic criteria (Trudgill 1974:15). A language, in other words,
can be defined "as a dialect with an army and a navy" (Nash 1989:6).

57. Ikram, A. 2008. Bahasa Melayu penyebar budaya. Naskah-naskah sebagai saksi
persebaran bahasa. Jurnal ATL (in Indonesian). 1. Accessed from the Malayu
Online page on 2009-05-06.

58. Asmah Haji Omar (1992). "Malay as a pluricentric language". In Clyne, Michael
J. (ed.). Malay as a pluricentric language Pluricentric Languages: Differing Norms in
Different Nations. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyte. pp. 403–4. ISBN 3-11-012855-
1.

59. Blust, Robert (2013). The Austronesian Languages (revised ed.). Australian National
University. hdl:1885/10191. ISBN 978-1-922185-07-5.

60. Tadmor, Uri (2009). "Malay-Indonesian". In Bernard Comrie (ed.). The World's Major
Languages (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. pp. 791–818.
 61. "Președinta Maia Sandu a promulgat Legea care confirmă că limba de stat a Republicii
Moldova este cea română" (in Romanian). Presidency of the Republic of
Moldova. Astăzi am promulgat Legea care confirmă un adevăr istoric și incontestabil:
limba de stat a Republicii Moldova este cea română. [Today I have promulgated the
law that confirms a historical and indisputable truth: the state language of the
Republic of Moldova is Romanian.]

62. "Constitution of India, Eighth schedule" (PDF). Government of India. Retrieved 1

December 2023.

63. "Mahagathbandhan demands 'official language' status for Bhojpuri in Bihar". The
Hindu. 13 October 2024.

64. "About Hindi". UIUC. Retrieved 2024-10-20.

External links

Look up dialect in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

 Sounds Familiar? – Listen to regional accents and dialects of the UK on the British
Library's 'Sounds Familiar' website

 International Dialects of English Archive Since 1997

 [Link] – Compilation of Dialects from around the globe

 A site for announcements and downloading the SEAL System

 "Dialect" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 8 (11th ed.). 1911. pp. 155–156.

 v

 t

 e

Varieties of languages





 

Authority control databases

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Categories:

 Dialects

 Language

 Language varieties and styles

 Lexicology

 Linguistics terminology

 This page was last edited on 12 February 2026, at 17:20 (UTC).

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