Re: nationalists, languages and dialects

António Marques:

> hazchem wrote:
>
>> If you are a child and you go to school and none of the teachers ever
>> speak the language or dialect that you use in the home, if you never
>> see your language or dialect written down, if you never hear a radio or
>> TV program in your language or dialect, then it is not surprising that
>> when you have children of your own you don't speak to them in that
>> language or dialect. Fewer and fewer people speak the language or
>> dialect, and it will come more and more to resemble the 'standard'.
>
> Wrong. That applies to languages, but not dialects. And before someone
> asks 'what is the difference betwwen a language and a dialect', it is
> not relevant here.

While I agree with the remaining (snipped) portion of António's posting, I
am unable to follow the argument, put forth more than once by different
contributors, that dialects are less vulnerable than languages when it
comes to gradual adaptation. The contrary is plausible, and is also indeed
observed.

As a working definition of language and dialect for the sake of this
argument, let me define for the parents of a family: They are speaking
different languages if the family is bilingual, that is, each other family
member speaks only one of the languages in the family and not the other,
or switches languages deliberately or unconsciously. They speak different
dialects of the same language, if the other family members speak more or
less always the same language with the explicit or implicit understanding
that it is the language of both parents even though each of the parents
may have language features that are specific for them.

The situation in Germany is normally one of the following:

a) The parents speak the same language and about the same dialect.

b) The parents speak different dialects of the same language according to
the above definition.

c) The parents speak different languages according to the above
definition.

Case (a) is uninteresting.

Case (c) happens only if one of them is a non-German speaker. It will not
happen with two mutually unintelligible "dialects" of German, such as one
High German and and one Low German, or Ripuarian and Swiss: in such a
situation, the two will agree on a variety of standard German that is
easily accessible to both, and we have case (a) or a mild form of case
(b).

Case (b) could theoretically happen with a local German language and the
language of a neighbouring country, e.g. Western Low German and Dutch, or
Moselle-Franconian and Luxemburgish. I do not know what happens then and
therefore exclude this subcase.

The most normal thing besides case (a) is case (b), not regarding the
special case of the preceding paragraph. Two people from about the same
region, but with different fine-grain dialects, start a new family. They
have no reason to give up each one's dialect, but their children will not
learn two dialects the same way as one learns two languages in a bilingual
family. The effect is a watered-down version of the dialects of the
parents, and this is what we do observe in many regions: the main features
of the larger-region dialect are kept, but the fine-grain differences of
the local dialects get lost. An additional impact comes from the standard
language or the standard dialect ("common Austrian", "common Swiss, also
called 'Bahnhofsbuffet Olten'") which people hear in the media for the
same reasons.

In former times, there were two effects that slowed down or prevented this
development: marriages were much more local, and the new family came to
settle in the one-dialect environment of either the husband or the wife so
that the children learnt from their peers which of the dialects of their
parents is "normal" and which is "weird". Both is no longer the case, or
only to much a lesser extent.

Helmut Richter
.

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