Linguistic Discrimination

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Linguistic discrimination (also known as linguicism) is the act of discriminating against someone because of their language, dialect, or accent. This can manifest itself in a belief that people who speak a certain way are less intelligent or otherwise inferior to speakers of a preferred or standardised language.

The social dimension of language[edit]

Languages of all societies exist in a variety of forms characterized by different degrees of social prestige and formality. Even in relatively unstratified or small linguistic communities, prestigious and colloquial varieties exist. There is often a separate ritual speech, used in religious or ceremonial gatherings, marking such occasions as a social space apart from ordinary conversation.^{[note 1]} All languages have some form of poetry or similar linguistic art; this often uses separate vocabulary and grammar. Some languages have gendered forms, different vocabularies or variant pronunciations for male and female speakers; others express social rank in separate pronouns or lexicons.^[1] The study of the social dimension of language is called sociolinguistics.^[2]

Register[edit]

In more stratified societies, several tiers on this continuum of linguistic status exist. One common terminology, originally deriving from creole-language studies, calls the high prestige registers^[3] on the top of this scale acrolect, the bottom basilect, with a spread of mesolects occupying the rungs in between.^[4] In a literate society, an acrolect may also become a standard language,^[5] defined by codification in dictionaries, prescriptive^[6] in grammars, and in a recognized canon of texts. A standard language may be further canonized as an official language, one that is given formal recognition by law.^[7] Indeed, social prestige,^[8] the self-descriptions of its community of speakers, and the support of a government are about the only meaningful distinction between a language and a "dialect", a distinction that is otherwise too elusive to be used in current linguistics.^{[note 2][note 3]} Nationalist or separatist movements often seek to ordain that the local variant spoken by the groups they claim to represent is a separate language rather than a dialect.

Where this continuum of high- and low-status variants exists, many speakers will employ a phenomenon called code-switching, modulating their usage towards the high-status or low-status registers based on the people they address at any given point. Using the high-status varieties where the low is called for is as great a gaffe as the opposite error.^[9] The fact that language exists on a continuum of prestigious versus colloquial forms means that, while non-standard or colloquial forms of a language may be described "broadly", by noting how the non-standard forms differ from the standard, this does not mean that a speaker of any given rank will use any given form. Rather, all speakers will use a varying mixture of standard and non-standard forms.^[10]

Language represents other aspects of social identity besides status, class, or rank. Various communities within a larger society may acquire a jargon, argot, or other in-group language. These may be considered generally innocuous by the society at large, such as the lexicon of wine fanciers. But other in-group languages may be perceived as threatening, such as thieves' cant, the specialized vocabulary of a cult, or complicated para-languages like Russian profanity. Cultural minorities may fashion cryptolects or cants: secret languages like Polari^[11] or Para-Romani, semi-secret lexicons that can be dropped into the syntax of the majority language. These argots can be used to deliberately exclude outsiders; as such, they are inherently spooky and carry a potential to freak out surrounding communities. Local accents and subcultural vocabularies can acquire covert prestige, prestige within that speech community, as opposed to the overt prestige of the high-status standard.^[12]

Accent[edit]

Most languages are spoken in a variety of different accents^[13] — variations in sound realization, prosody, and lexicon. These accents potentially encode information about the speaker's original native language, and regional, social class, ethnic, subcultural, or caste identities. Members of a language community will be able to make many superficially valid inferences about a speaker from their accent, a skill that can be honed with practice.^{[note 4]}

These kinds of paralinguistic information are constantly present in a speaker's language. As social value-judgments, the judgments that can be extracted from accent are immediately and involuntarily made by the listener.^[14] In other words, you don't have any choice; you will always be aware of any social fact that a speaker's accent and register communicate.

Linguistic prescription and discrimination[edit]

"Ain't I a woman?"^{[note 5]}

All human languages, therefore, have a social and even a political dimension. Together with its notional content, human speech continually transmits information about the speaker's class, ethnicity, region, and possibly other information about a speaker's social identity and status. Where class, ethnic, or regional conflict exists, language can serve as a badge that divides between Us and Them.

Prescriptive traditions^[6] in a language arise partly as an attempt to defuse these sources of conflict by promoting a particular variety as a standard, meant to be free from regional or ethnic cues, and current, accepted, and understood everywhere. The prescriptive tradition, as noted above, will frequently if not always be chosen from upper-class speech, and in a national language is often but not always based on the speech of a capital city.^{[note 6]} The choices made by the prescriptive tradition, though, may cause resentment if your ethnic group's speech habits are not the ones chosen for the standard.

Some note, as an argument against these prescriptive traditions, that the field of linguistics has for some time held that there is no such thing as an objectively "correct" way of speaking. Every language, except perhaps in the cases of those endangered ones with too few speakers, is a group of dialects, none of which are inherently superior to or "more correct" than any other.^[10] A standard language is simply a dialect that has had the prestige^[8] — read, political and economic power — to impose itself on all the other speakers of the language.

This is to misunderstand both what linguists do, and the actual source of sociolinguistic prestige. Linguists study the phonological, syntactical, historical, and social aspects of human languages. Their task is to describe and explain them as they are, not to tell them what they ought to be. It's not a linguist's job to correct your grammar. It might be a teacher, an editor, or an orator's job to do just that. Language communities decide which varieties of language enjoy the highest prestige and social status. Linguists only record that fact.

The supposed objectivity of non-standard inferiority[edit]

The idea that no form of speech can be objectively correct does not mean that languages have no rules, and that one can string words in whatever way one chooses. Languages do have their own grammatical rules regarding what is correct and incorrect within their own systems. However, what is meant by the statement that there is no "correct" form of speaking is that no language or dialect can be intrinsically superior to any other; they all have their own grammars and phonological rules.^{[note 7]} For example, there is nothing about the Standard English word "don't" that makes it "better" than the non-standard "ain't"; they are both, after all, only combinations of sounds. A sentence like "I ain't got no time" may indeed be grammatically incorrect Standard English, but it is perfectly grammatical in many other dialects. Different varieties can be more or less prestigious, but this prestige is a result of sociopolitical factors and has nothing to do with "correctness." Because prestige is socially motivated, the same linguistic feature may be both prestigious and non-prestigious depending on the context. For instance, non-rhoticity is prestigious in Received Pronunciation, but stigmatized in New York and Boston accents. Prestige may also change over time. The modern Standard French pronunciation of the word moi is /mwa/, and the regional pronunciation /mwe/ is stigmatized, but before the French Revolution, the situation was exactly the opposite; /mwe/ was the prestigious pronunciation used by the aristocrats,^[16] and /mwa/ was used by the lower classes. As linguist Peter Trudgill notes:^[17]

Obviously, if the prestige of certain linguistic features depended on objective linguistic criteria rather than social factors, such variation in social acceptability would not be possible.

All dialects, including non-standard ones, are equally capable of expressing human thought. All people learn language in the same way: by taking in the speech of those around them in childhood. From this input, every person forms an internal grammar (their "idiolect"), which has its own correctness conditions of what is and isn't correct in that idiolect. The difference between a "correct" language and a subordinate, "inferior" dialect is essentially political. Linguist John McWhorter, in his book The Power of Babel, said, "Dialects are all there is: the ‘language’ part is just politics."^[18] One wouldn't say that Spanish is just the result of people failing to speak proper French; they are separate systems. Similarly, Cockney is not a corrupted form of Received Pronunciation; rather, they both evolved in parallel, and over time Received Pronunciation happened to become the more prestigious variety.

Non-standard dialects are often criticized for being "illogical", or for being spoken by uneducated people. Both are flawed arguments.

For one thing, no language is perfectly logical. Consider the Standard English word "himself". Interpreting the word literally, one might argue that it is illogical, through prescriptivist reasoning somewhat like the following. "When one is using a reflexive pronoun, one is speaking about a self. Whose self? Well, the self of somebody: my self, or your self, or our selves. But to speak of him self is ludicrous — one would not say 'You are speaking of you self'. Clearly, the solution is to do away with this monstrosity and replace it with the vastly superior 'hisself'." Similar arguments could be made for sentences like "I am going to stay" or "I am going to think about it," yet nobody seriously argues that the phrase "going to" should only be used to refer to actual physical motion (which was, indeed, its original meaning).

In their quest to denigrate forms of speech that differ from the prestige dialect, prescriptivists will often rationalize^{[note 8]} their distaste for nonstandard or informal features by stating that they not only are not correct, but can never be correct because they are objectively illogical or otherwise flawed, even when the said features are in reality totally uncontroversial (and "correct") parts of many other standard languages. One such nonstandard feature often derided by prescriptivists is the use of double negatives. They claim it is inherently incorrect, because two negatives logically make a positive. Such people, however, fail to take into account the fact that the majority of Europe's standard languages use double negatives. The absence of double negatives in Standard English is in fact an anomaly. Another argument is that prepositions cannot be used to end sentences because prepositions by definition have to come before something. This is an example of the etymological fallacy; words belonging to the class in question are descriptively called prepositions because they generally occur before other words, but this is not a hard-and-fast rule. By the same "logic", the use of separable prefixes at the end of sentences in German (which is totally uncontroversial) would be "wrong" because prefixes "by definition" must be attached to the beginning of a word. Not to mention that "preposition" is a Latin loanword that entered English only in the 14th century;^[19] claiming that prepositions can only occur before other words because of the etymology of "preposition" would be like decreeing that nouns be called "thingwords" and objecting to their being used to refer to abstract concepts rather than physical "things".

As for the second argument, the speakers of a dialect may even conceivably be all poor and uneducated, but this does not mean they are grammarless individuals who "talk wrong." If it did, many endangered or not-widely-spoken languages of isolated tribes or impoverished ethnic groups would be chaotic, "primitive" forms of communication with no rhyme or reason, as compared to those of their more "civilized" neighbors, and undertaking linguistic fieldwork to write grammars of these languages would be a pointless endeavor. Of course, few would take this reasoning to its logical conclusion.

In the English speaking world[edit]

Linguistic discrimination is sometimes justified by its perpetrators on the basis that a given pronunciation or dialect is "not proper", but judging a non-standard English dialect by the standards of Standard English is not realistic: they are two different things, with different pronunciations and (often) grammars. Many people who would never think to call Hiberno-English or Scottish English wrong would find it perfectly acceptable to say that Cockney and African American Vernacular English (AAVE) are just "slang" or "broken" forms of English that must be eradicated. This is because the tendency to judge the value of a dialect results not from any inherent features of the dialect in question, but from a negative attitude against the group that speaks it.^[20] (It is for this reason that a given linguistic feature can be non-prestigious in some contexts and prestigious in others. For instance, the non-rhoticity of Boston or New York accents is stigmatized, while that of Received Pronunciation is considered prestigious.) When someone calls someone's dialect "wrong", they are really making a value judgment about the group the dialect speaker belongs to, though the accuser may not realize this. (In the case of AAVE, the group is African-Americans; in the case of Cockney, it is working-class Londoners.) The person is used to hearing a dialect being spoken by people he does not approve of, and unconsciously transfers this dislike of "bad people" to the dialect they speak, when in reality, there is no such thing as a "bad" dialect. In other words, linguistic discrimination is often (though not always) racism,^[21][22] classism, or some other form of prejudice.

For instance, a person hearing an African-American speaking AAVE to a friend may discriminate against her and consider her intellectually inferior, even if she can also speak flawless Standard English, for the mere reason that she speaks AAVE at all. Other American accents considered "inferior" include Southern Midlands and New York City English.^[23] In the UK, a report found that the top 5 accents discriminated against in job interviews include those from Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow, and Cockney.^[24] In these cases, discrimination is not based on the individual's command of Standard English grammar and spelling, but merely on pronunciation, even if it is completely comprehensible. Among the general public, linguistic discrimination is not regarded as wrong, because the fact that dialects/accents are not incorrect and inferior forms of Standard English that should be eliminated, but separate, different ways of speaking with different grammatical or phonological rules, is not generally recognized.^[25]

Linguistic discrimination in the English-speaking world does not just include different dialects and accents of the English language. For example, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Wales, schoolchildren overheard speaking Welsh would get a piece of wood called a "Welsh Not" hung around their necks. It could be moved from pupil to pupil if they were heard speaking the language, and whoever was wearing it at the end of lessons would receive a beating.^[26] Other examples include persecution of indigenous languages in the North American education system.

Talking white[edit]

Within the AAVE speech community itself, a similar but oppositional dynamic is at work. The use of standard English is condemned by some as "talking white", a perceived betrayal of the Black community by becoming assimilated to White culture. Success in education is seen as selling out.^[27] This, too, is a form of linguistic prescription; AAVE forms are held to be authentically Black and therefore prestigious within that community, while a different set of forms is held in low regard.

African Americans are apparently expected to perform an intricate linguistic balancing act. U.S. Senator Harry Reid accused President Barack Obama of being a "light skin" and "token" President "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one".^[28] But Rush Limbaugh has accused Obama of using "black dialect" while addressing the National Governors' Association, and moreover observed that "Obama can turn on that black dialect and turn it off."^[29] Limbaugh is as usual eager to make sure we are aware that Obama is, in fact, Black. Reid and Limbaugh's accusations may be racist, but they are true: this is called code switching, as noted above, and speakers of every language and every race have some range of formal and colloquial styles to use in different social settings.^[9] It apparently surprises some white Americans that President Obama possesses this basic linguistic competence, and they don't notice themselves doing the same damn thing several times a day. For example, the way you speak at a job interview or to your parents is likely to be different than the way you speak to your friends.

Politics and the English prescriptive tradition[edit]

The English prescriptive tradition has always had a strong political dimension. At the start of the twentieth century, The King's English (1906) and Modern English Usage (1926) by the Fowler brothers^[30] dripped with scorn for the United States and its English. Fowler wrote that "Americanisms are foreign words, and should be so treated;" and his definition of "Americanisms" was broad enough to compass such standard words as "placate" and "antagonize".^[31] The Fowlers went as far as to mock the "barbaric" taste of place names like "Pennsylvania" and "Minneapolis".^{[note 9]} Americans, still under something of a cultural inferiority complex, swallowed their pride and took the Fowlers' prescriptions to heart.

All hell broke loose with the 1962 publication of the third edition of the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary. This edition deigned to acknowledge the existence of ain't and irregardless as forms that readers might encounter and that wanted explanation. Even though the dictionary still flagged them as colloquial or nonstandard, for some, including reviewer James Macdonald, the admission of these words and senses meant that the barbarians were at the gate. The controversy was aggravated because it mapped onto 1960s political rhetoric with disconcerting ease. The prescriptive tradition got to portray itself as the defender of social standards against beatniks, rock musicians, racial minorities, and pointy headed professors who sought to tear them down. In the USA, the prescriptive tradition took on a decidedly Republican cast. Nixon-era stalwarts such as William Safire and James Kilpatrick wrote prescriptive usage handbooks that took up the cudgels against "permissiveness". The end result was to floridly overstate what was at issue in these usage wars: the usages appropriate for a formal style.^[32][33]

More recently, this politicization of grammar has taken root in the United Kingdom. Since 2010, a succession of Tory governments there has pushed for more emphasis on teaching traditional English prescriptive grammar in the UK's school system. There too, grammar is "the metaphorical correlate for a cluster of related political and moral terms: order, tradition, authority, hierarchy and rules. In the ideological world that conservatives inhabit, these terms are not only positive, they define the conditions for any civil society, while their opposites— disorder, change, fragmentation, anarchy and lawlessness— signify the breakdown of social relations."^[34]

On the other hand, George Orwell's Politics and the English Language^[35] is a masterpiece of the English prescriptive tradition. Orwell here judges bullshit, and finds it wanting:

Orwell's bad example seems fairly modest and unassuming at this point. And Orwell reminds us that linguistic prescription is not necessarily 'conservative' nor an arbitrary judgment of taste.^{[note 10]}

Elsewhere[edit]

"Speak French. Be clean". Painted on the wall of a schoolhouse in southern France.

In other countries, "linguistic discrimination" of various sorts is a national policy. Standard languages are aggressively promoted as vehicles for cultural unity in some places. Some languages, including minority languages, are protected by law. In some places this is done to assuage ethnic unrest. In others, the languages are considered cultural patrimony worth preserving. Government policies to foster or discourage the use of various languages go under the rubric of language policy. It seems safe to say that the charge that such policies constitute "racism" would not be well received, and may not be understood.^[36]

The endangered Irish language is given pride of place in the Republic of Ireland, despite the fact that the language itself is spoken at home only by 3% of its citizens. Irish is a compulsory school subject there, for now,^[37] a fact that draws some controversy due to perceptions that the language has little practical value; requirements that lawyers pass an exam in Irish proficiency have been recently abolished. The language continues to be held as culturally important, and the government subsidizes publishing and broadcasting in the language fairly heavily.

Attempts to revitalize an endangered or even revive a dead language are one particular kind of language policy. The most striking success along these lines is Israeli Hebrew, which went from a religious language of the educated at best to an everyday language including (borrowed) cursewords spoken by millions of people - including non-Jews. Other attempts have been made, with varying degrees of success, at reviving Native languages in the United States such as Hawaiian or Haida.

A comparable situation prevails in Finland, where a small Swedish speaking minority, concentrated in the Åland Islands, makes up under 6% of the country. There, too, Swedish is a resented compulsory school subject; there are other languages beside Swedish young Finns could be studying, languages that will take them further. The policy originated out of ethnic unrest in the late 19th and early 20th century. Prior to being acquired by the Russian Empire, Finland was a Swedish possession for centuries and thus the speakers of Swedish were often resented as an "elite" even though there were considerable numbers of rural and poor Swedish speakers even during Swedish rule.

Interestingly, in Norway, there is no "official" standard for spoken Norwegian (there are, however, two competing standards for written Norwegian), and dialectal diversity is celebrated, so that, unlike the situation in many other countries, it is socially acceptable to use regional varieties in public contexts (such as "in the media, in university lectures, and in Parliament").^[38] Not only that, Norway's Education Act specifically states that: "the teacher 'should pay due attention to the vernacular used by pupils, and that he or she should not attempt to make them abandon their home dialect.'"^[39]

France and French[edit]

Other language authorities have been harsher. France strongly promotes Metropolitan or Parisian French as the standard language in all French territories. This policy began under the French revolutionary government. Based on their experience with royalist and Catholic rural insurrections in the Vendée and elsewhere, the French government held local usages in very low regard; and in 1794 the Abbé Gregoire published a manifesto calling on the revolutionary government to suppress all local dialects, given the condescending name patois. The drive to impose a standard French language was given an ideological dimension; a single common language was necessary to achieve the revolutionary ideal of equality before the law, and that the language of equality would be the French of Paris was simply assumed. The traditional French attitude is that all variant forms of Romance language spoken in France are merely ungrammatical dialects of standard French.^{[note 11]}

In the Occitan and Provençal speaking areas of southern France, these policies became known as la vergonha, "the shame"; the process of enforced conformity to Parisian French told students that they should be ashamed of their parents and their speech. The only language allowed in schools was Parisian French; the use of others was severely punished, even in the schoolyard. Other casualties of this policy include the Breton language, a Celtic language once spoken throughout Brittany, but now spoken by less than two hundred thousand mostly elderly people. Not until the 1950s did the French government acknowledge the right of languages beside French to exist, and France has not ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.^[40]

Then there is Canadian French (or Quebec French), which is often considered not to be "real" French, like that spoken in France, but some kind of inferior "twangy" variety. This view is clearly incorrect, for reasons explained above. Ironically, one of the features prominently associated with Quebec French (or the sub-dialect Joual) and considered incorrect (that of pronouncing the diphthong oi as /we/, as opposed to the Standard French /wa/ (so that the word toi ("you") is pronounced /twe/ instead of /twa/)) is actually derived from the upper-class speech of pre-revolutionary France. The now-standard form /wa/ was itself originally looked down upon:

In Late Middle French the modern lowered pronunciation wa made its appearance in vulgar speech, at first before r. This broad pronunciation, however, found no favour with the educated classes or the grammarians… and was not fully accepted until the upheaval of the Revolution has destroyed the old tradition.^[41]

Yiddish[edit]

Prior to the 17th century, the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe were a prosperous middle-class group. However, after the 1648—1654 uprising of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, during which tens of thousands of Jews were killed, they underwent a period of economic decline, with more Jews taking up working-class trades; Yiddish began to be associated with poverty, and as a result of this loss of prestige, it was increasingly viewed as merely a "corrupt" and incorrect form of German.^{[42][note 12]} It was a Yiddish speaker, Max Weinreich, who gave us the aphorism that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy".

With the birth of Zionism in the late 19th century, Yiddish came under attack from another angle: Ashkenazi Jews themselves.^[43] Many early Zionists, especially secular ones, saw the vernacular revival of Hebrew as crucial for the Jewish nation's rebirth, and encouraged Jews who had moved to the Mandate of Palestine to abandon Yiddish for Hebrew. Ultimately, Hebrew won. Its victory was undoubtedly helped by the massive, sudden migration to the newly-independent Israel of Jews from the Arab world, who mainly spoke Judeo-Arabic dialects and thus probably found Hebrew, as another Semitic language, much easier to learn than Yiddish. However, linguists generally acknowledge that Modern Hebrew has a significant Yiddish substrate, which it inherited from the mother tongues of its first revivalists.^[44]

After the 1940s, Yiddish went into a sudden, severe decline, with half of the world’s Yiddish speakers being murdered and Hebrew triumphant as the language of the world’s only majority-Jewish state. However, Yiddish today is still alive, and is widely spoken among Orthodox Jews^{[note 13]} in both Israel and the US.

Latin America[edit]

Strong traditions of linguistic discrimination exist throughout the formerly colonized world, particularly in Latin America. However, contrary to popular belief the Catholic Church and Spain are — mostly — innocent of this. In fact, missionaries and monks spread some indigenous languages as local linguas francas, which can still be seen in Paraguay which is 80% bilingual in Spanish and Guarani — even among Paraguayans with nothing but European ancestry. A strong decline of most indigenous languages only began after the independence of most Ibero-American states, and it was mostly due to the policies of the white and/or mestizo elites as well as economic factors. To this day public schools often enforce Spanish- or Portuguese-only policies, and people who speak "incorrect" Spanish (be it a dialect lacking prestige or Spanish as a second language) are discriminated against both by state and private actors. However, a broad brush would be wrong, as many countries have discovered their indigenous heritage (similar to the Irish example mentioned above) and at the very least pay lip-service to the revival of indigenous languages such as Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs), Aymara or Quechua (the lingua franca of the Inca Empire). Which of those revival efforts will have success remains to be seen, but the mentioned languages alone have several million speakers each.

Belgium[edit]

Within 19th century Belgium Dutch was also actively oppressed; while in the constitution it was accepted as the language of Flanders, in practice Dutch was the language of the poor and French the language of the rich, as you had to speak French to learn at a university and to work at a public service. While this started to fade out in the 1890's when the right-wing Catholic Party had a wing of Flemish nationalists demanding these rights, the centrist Liberal Party actively opposed it to make sure only French was spoken there and the left-wing Labor Party was not interested and demanded a more international approach. It was only after World War 1, when Germans were popularizing the use of Dutch in the conquered territories, that Dutch was used in national public services.

During most of the 50's and 70's the then recently founded Dutch linguistic union introduced a standardized form of Dutch, called Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands (or in English: General Civilized Dutch) that was used in schools with the direct intention to purge all existing dialects in favor of a uniform homogeneous language. This stopped in the late 60's due to the burgeoning Dutch music scene making more dialect-based songs, making it less and less of a popular position until in the end the term became known as Algemeen Nederlands (or in English: General Dutch). Interestingly, the standardized form used is in itself a mixture of many spoken Dutch dialects, suggesting that it must have been known how tremendous^{[please explain]} it was to do it.

Pakistan[edit]

Following independence, Pakistan's first governor general, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, declared in 1948 that "Urdu, and only Urdu" would be the federal language of Pakistan. This was a highly divisive move because while the seat of government was in West Pakistan where Urdu was a major language, in East Bengal (modern Bangladesh), some 1800km distant, Urdu was not widely understood, and Bengali was spoken by the majority. Complicating matters 56% of Pakistan's population at the time resided in East Pakistan. Eventually the government language bias compounded by government funding favoring West Pakistan resulted in the Bangladesh Liberation War.

Language secessionism[edit]

Language secessionism occurs when speakers of different dialects of one language declare their dialects to be languages in their own right. The most extreme recent case of this occurred after the Yugoslav Wars between the four main dialects of the Serbo-Croatian language (Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin). With the emergence of the sovereign states of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro, these four dialects became codified as four supposedly separate languages. They are still 100% mutually intelligible — a Bosnian Muslim and a Serb can shout abuse at one another with total clarity — but their speakers, particularly the nationalists that want to keep them divided, despise one another too fiercely to share even a language.

Milder versions of this separatist tendency exist. There is controversy over the Malay-Indonesian language, with Malaysians tending to claim that Malay and Indonesian are two dialects of the same language, while Indonesians usually view Indonesian^{[note 14]} as a separate language. The result of this has been an odd linguistic call-and-response game, with Indonesians finding new ways to distinguish their language from Malaysian, and Malaysians trying to coordinate their language with Indonesian's trends.^{[note 15]} The Soviet Union tried to promote Moldovan as a distinct language from Romanian (with which it is completely identical), even going so far as to rewrite the "language" in the Cyrillic script. This project has ended, much like the USSR itself, although the Moldovan government still officially describes its language as "Moldovan." Within Catalan, a movement in Valencia calls the Valencian dialect a separate language. This position is controversial within the Valencian community, and almost completely ignored by other Catalan speakers.

The opposite trend exists among Kurds. What is sometimes called the Kurdish language is actually a collection of languages: The largest two, Sorani and Kurmanji, differ from one another as much as English and German do, and without acquired bilingualism, a Kurd from Turkey cannot understand one from Iraq. Similar circumstances exist among the varieties of the Chinese language, which are mutually incomprehensible when spoken. However, in written Chinese understanding is much aided by all forms usually using the same symbols to represent the different words, meaning that they are mostly comprehensible when written. The Chinese government, for that matter considers all Chinese languages to be mere dialects of one standard, and is promoting this stance aggressively, resulting in discrimination against minority languages' speakers.

Another peculiar example is a language that is considered a "dialect" of one language while sharing much more with a completely different language. The best known example of this would be Low German, which shares more similarities with Dutch than with (High-)German, yet is considered a dialect of the latter. Or where Occitan varieties were called "patois" (French dialect) while sharing way more with Catalan.

See also[edit]

• Shibboleth
• Pseudolinguistics

External links[edit]

• Ideology, Power, and Linguistic Theory, Geoffrey K. Pullum, Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh
• There Is No ‘Proper English’
• Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage, David Foster Wallace
• Mock Ebonics: Linguistic racism in parodies of Ebonics on the Internet, by sociolinguist Maggie Ronkin and linguist Helen Karn
• Mock Spanish: A Site For The Indexical Reproduction Of Racism In American English, by linguist Jane H. Hill
• Linguistic class-indicators in present-day English, by linguist Alan S. C. Ross
• Projects: Linguistic variation
• Do You Speak American? What Speech Do We Like Best? PBS
• Academics ‘talk posh’ to protect their careers, Jack Grove, Times Higher Education, 4 April 2013
• Shut yer face! I'm fed up being ridiculed for my regional accent in academia, The Telegraph
• The Way We Live Now: 9-12-99: On Language; Dialects, Margalit Fox, The New York Times, Sept. 12, 1999
• A New Record For Within-US Linguistic Prejudice?, Language Log, linguist Mark Lieberman
• Variation and Change in Our Living Language
• The Concept of Standard English, Albert H. Mackwardt
• Democrats, prejudice and rural America, Lucinda Roy
• Reid's Three Little Words: The Log In Our Own Eye, linguist John McWhorter
• From "RP" to "Estuary English, The concept 'received' and the debate about British pronunciation standards".
• Citizen, speak Turkish!, Wikipedia

Notes[edit]

References[edit]