Читать книгу An Introduction to Sociolinguistics - Ronald Wardhaugh, Janet M. Fuller - Страница 39

A commonly cited criterion used to determine if two varieties are dialects of the same language or distinct languages is that of mutual intelligibility: if language users can understand each other, they are using dialects of the same language; if they cannot, they are speaking different languages. However, there are several problems with this criterion (Gooskens 2018). First, mutual intelligibility is not an objectively determined fact (Salzman et al. 2012, 170). For example, some speakers of German can understand Dutch, while others may find it incomprehensible. Your ability to understand someone who speaks differently from you may vary according to your experience with different ways of speaking.

Second, mutual intelligibility may depend on the regional variety you speak. Because there are different varieties of German and Dutch, and they exist in what is called a dialect continuum, speakers of some varieties of German can understand varieties of Dutch better than they can understand other varieties of German! Historically, there was a continuum of dialects across the region of northern Germany and the Netherlands which included what we now call the different languages of German and Dutch. The varieties which became standardized as the languages of the Netherlands and Germany, Standard Dutch and Standard German, are no longer mutually intelligible for most speakers. However, in the border area, speakers of the local varieties of Dutch and German still exist within a dialect continuum and remain largely intelligible to one another. People on one side of the border say they speak a variety of Dutch and those on the other side say they speak a variety of German, but linguistically these varieties are very similar. There are important sociopolitical distinctions, however. The residents of the Netherlands look to Standard Dutch for their model; they read and write Dutch and are educated in Dutch. Consequently, if they speak the local variety, they call it a dialect of Dutch. On the other side of the border, German replaces Dutch in all equivalent situations, and the speakers identify the local variety as a dialect of German. The interesting linguistic fact is that there are more similarities between the local varieties spoken on each side of the border than between the Dutch dialect and Standard Dutch and the German dialect and Standard German. Thus, situations in which there is a dialect continuum make it apparent that the lines drawn between languages are not based on linguistic criteria.

The third problem with using mutual intelligibility as the criterion for status as a dialect or a language is that even without a dialect continuum, there are many examples of named, distinct languages that are mutually intelligible. Hindi and Urdu are considered by linguists to be the same language in its spoken form, but one in which certain differences are becoming more and more magnified for political and religious reasons in the quest to establish different national identities. Hindi is written left to right in the Devanagari script, whereas Urdu is written right to left in the Perso‐Arabic script. Hindi incorporates more words from Sanskrit, while Urdu draws on Arabic and Persian sources. Large religious and political differences make much of small linguistic differences. The written forms of the two varieties, particularly those favored by the elites, also emphasize these differences. They have become highly symbolic of the growing differences between India and Pakistan (see King 2001 for more details on this historical development). As far as everyday use is concerned, it appears that the boundary between the spoken varieties of Hindi and Urdu is somewhat flexible and one that changes with circumstances. This is exactly what we would expect: there is considerable variety in everyday use but somewhere in the background there is an ideal that can be appealed to, ‘proper’ Hindi or ‘proper’ Urdu. This ideal is based on a sociopolitical ideology of the language, and on different social identifications of the speakers, not on any clear and objective linguistic difference.

Another example showing the sociopolitical division of language is the story of the rise and fall of Serbo‐Croatian. In what was once Yugoslavia, now divided by the instruments of ethnicity, language, and religion, the language called Serbo‐Croatian was described by Brozović (1992) as a pluricentric language, meaning that it had more than one codified form. After the country of Yugoslavia disintegrated in the 1990s, the different varieties ceased to identify with the previously imposed umbrella term Serbo‐Croatian, and the different centers have become recognized as languages: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin, spoken in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro, respectively (Jordan 2018). The varieties are written in different scripts; Croatian is written in Roman script, Serbian in Cyrillic, Bosnian in both writing systems, and in Montenegro ‘Montenegrin Latin’ (which has 32 instead of 30 symbols) and Cyrillic writing systems are both used. These differences are very much the result of sociopolitical, religious, and ethnic divides between these groups; the different varieties were not the source of the social differences but the result.

There are other, less dramatically politically charged examples of how mutually intelligible varieties are considered different languages. We have already mentioned German and Dutch; we can also add the situation in Scandinavia as further evidence. Danish, Norwegian (actually two varieties), and Swedish are recognized as different languages, yet it is common for speakers of these languages to each speak their own language to each other and still be able to communicate (Gooskens 2018; Schüppert and Gooskens 2012). Linguistic overlap between these three languages is clearly enough to make communication feasible for most speakers, but the social and political boundaries foster the continued distinction of these varieties as separate languages.

The fourth reason that mutual intelligibility cannot be used as the sole means of distinguishing dialect versus language status is that there are sometimes unintelligible dialects which are identified by their users as being the same language. As a user of English, you may be aware of varieties of English you cannot understand, for instance. A particularly interesting instance of unintelligibility of dialects occurs with what we call Chinese, which is generally accepted to include two main sub‐categories of varieties, Cantonese and Mandarin. Although they share a writing system, Mandarin and Cantonese are not mutually intelligible in spoken discourse; written characters are pronounced differently in these varieties although they maintain the same meaning. Yet speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese consider themselves speakers of different dialects of the same language, for to the Chinese a shared writing system and a strong tradition of political, social, and cultural unity form essential parts of their definition of language (Kurpaska 2010).

Likewise, speakers of different regional varieties of Arabic often cannot understand one another’s dialects but are all oriented toward common standardized forms (Modern Standard Arabic, with its basis in Classical Arabic). Although some native speakers of some varieties of Arabic might not understand a radio broadcast in Modern Standard Arabic (Kaye 2001), no one questions the categorization of these disparate dialects as one language, because of the religious, social, historical, and political ties between the cultures in which they are spoken.