Dialect and Language

Very often in everyday usage of the terms "dialect" and "language", the distinction between them is based very largely upon political or cultural considerations. For example, Mandarin and Cantonese are called dialects of Chinese, but they are more distinct from one another than, say, Danish and Norwegian or, even more strikingly, Dutch, Flemish and Afrikaans, which are frequently described as different languages. It might be thought that the criterion of inter-comprehensibility would suffice to draw a political and culturally neutral line of boundary between languages. This is indeed the major criterion that a practicing linguist would apply in establishing the limits of a language-community. But there are problems. It very often happens that dialect variation is gradual, and more or less continuous, over a wide area. Thus, speakers from two widely separated regions might be unable to understand one another, but there might be no point between any two adjacent dialects at which inter-comprehensibility breaks down. Then there is the further, more troublesome problem that comprehensibility is not always symmetrical; nor is it a matter of all or nothing. It is quite possible, and indeed quite common, for X to understand most of what Y says and for Y to understand little or nothing of what X says, when each speaks to the other in his own dialect. For various reasons, then, it is often very difficult to draw a sharp distinction between distinct languages and different dialects of the same language.

Indeed, it is very often the case that no sharp distinction can be drawn between the dialect of one region and that of another, usually neighboring region. However narrowly we circumscribe the dialect area by means of social, as well as geographical, criteria, we shall always find, if we investigate the matter, a certain amount of systematic variation in the speech of those who are thereby established as speakers of the same dialect. In the last resort, we should have to admit that everyone has his own individual dialect: that he has his own idiolect, as linguists put it. Every idiolect will differ from every other, certainly in vocabulary and pronunciation and perhaps also, to a smaller degree, in grammar. Furthermore, one's idiolect is not fixed once and for all at the end of what we normally think of as the period of language-acquisition: it is subject to modification and extension right through life.