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110-537: Veluws is usually divided into two main dialects , West-Veluws and Oost-Veluws (East Veluws), these two dialects are reasonably similar but differ in grammar . For example: in Oost-Veluws it is said ie warkt/wärkt ('you are working') and in West-Veluws jie warken/waarken ('you are working'). West-Veluws has more influence from Dutch . Typically the closer one gets to the border with Oost-Veluws,

220-474: A Japonic language family rather than dialects of Japanese, the Japanese language itself was considered a language isolate and therefore the only language in its family. Most of the world's languages are known to be related to others. Those that have no known relatives (or for which family relationships are only tentatively proposed) are called language isolates , essentially language families consisting of

330-453: A dialect of a language defined in this way. In these terms, Danish and Norwegian , though mutually intelligible to a large degree, are considered separate languages. In the framework of Heinz Kloss , these are described as languages by ausbau (development) rather than by abstand (separation). In other situations, a closely related group of varieties possess considerable (though incomplete) mutual intelligibility, but none dominates

440-508: 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. In many societies, however,

550-461: A dialect continuum . The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class or ethnicity . A dialect associated with a particular social class is called a sociolect ; one associated with a particular ethnic group is an ethnolect ; and a geographical or regional dialect is a regiolect (alternative terms include 'regionalect', 'geolect', and 'topolect' ). Any variety of

660-513: 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". The designation "dialect"

770-644: 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

880-465: 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. A heteronomous variety may be considered

990-456: 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 . 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

1100-533: 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. In Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco,

1210-402: 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. In

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1320-556: A given language can be classified as a "dialect", including standardized ones . A second usage, which refers to colloquial settings, typically diglossic , in a few countries like Italy , such as dialetto , patois in France , much of East Central Europe, and the Philippines , may carry a pejorative undertone and underlines the politically and socially subordinated status of an autochthonous non-national language to

1430-415: A language with a writing system will operate at different degrees of distance from the standardized written form. Some dialects of a language are not mutually intelligible in spoken form, leading to debate as to whether they are regiolects or separate languages. A standard dialect , also known as a "standardized language", is supported by institutions. Such institutional support may include any or all of

1540-509: A linguistic area). In a similar vein, there are many similar unique innovations in Germanic , Baltic and Slavic that are far more likely to be areal features than traceable to a common proto-language. But legitimate uncertainty about whether shared innovations are areal features, coincidence, or inheritance from a common ancestor, leads to disagreement over the proper subdivisions of any large language family. The concept of language families

1650-466: 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

1760-426: A number of sign languages have developed in isolation and appear to have no relatives at all. Nonetheless, such cases are relatively rare and most well-attested languages can be unambiguously classified as belonging to one language family or another, even if this family's relation to other families is not known. Language contact can lead to the development of new languages from the mixture of two or more languages for

1870-787: 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 ;

1980-478: 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 : The status of "language"

2090-582: A particular group of people. It can also refer to a language subordinate in status to a dominant language, and is sometimes used to mean a vernacular language. The more common usage of the term in English refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The dialects or varieties of a particular language are closely related and, despite their differences, are most often largely mutually intelligible , especially if geographically close to one another in

2200-438: 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

2310-663: 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. Genetic relationship (linguistics) This

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2420-430: A sequence of varieties, where each mutually intelligible with the next, but may not be mutually intelligible with distant varieties. 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

2530-399: 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, and the term "dialect" is sometimes restricted to mean "non-standard variety", particularly in non-specialist settings and non-English linguistic traditions. The term

2640-441: 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. The term "dialect" is however sometimes restricted to mean "non-standard variety", particularly in non-specialist settings and non-English linguistic traditions. Conversely, some dialectologists have reserved

2750-427: A single language and have no single ancestor. Isolates are languages that cannot be proven to be genealogically related to any other modern language. As a corollary, every language isolate also forms its own language family — a genetic family which happens to consist of just one language. One often cited example is Basque , which forms a language family on its own; but there are many other examples outside Europe. On

2860-512: A single language. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations. Thus, different sources, especially over time, can give wildly different numbers of languages within a certain family. Classifications of the Japonic family , for example, range from one language (a language isolate with dialects) to nearly twenty—until the classification of Ryukyuan as separate languages within

2970-462: A single language. There are an estimated 129 language isolates known today. An example is Basque . In general, it is assumed that language isolates have relatives or had relatives at some point in their history but at a time depth too great for linguistic comparison to recover them. A language isolate is classified based on the fact that enough is known about the isolate to compare it genetically to other languages but no common ancestry or relationship

3080-582: A socio-cultural approach, is possible. This is illustrated by the frequency with which the army-navy aphorism is cited. 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. Thus there

3190-649: 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,

3300-487: Is a geographic area having several languages that feature common linguistic structures. The similarities between those languages are caused by language contact, not by chance or common origin, and are not recognized as criteria that define a language family. An example of a sprachbund would be the Indian subcontinent . Shared innovations, acquired by borrowing or other means, are not considered genetic and have no bearing with

3410-483: Is also a sister language to that fourth branch, then the two sister languages are more closely related to each other than to that common ancestral proto-language. The term macrofamily or superfamily is sometimes applied to proposed groupings of language families whose status as phylogenetic units is generally considered to be unsubstantiated by accepted historical linguistic methods. Some close-knit language families, and many branches within larger families, take

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3520-503: Is also used popularly to refer to the unwritten or non-codified languages of developing countries or isolated areas, where the term " vernacular language " would be preferred by linguists. John Lyons writes that "Many linguists [...] subsume differences of accent under differences of dialect." In general, accent refers to variations in pronunciation, while dialect also encompasses specific variations in grammar and vocabulary . There are three geographical zones in which Arabic

3630-452: Is an absolute isolate: it has not been shown to be related to any other modern language despite numerous attempts. A language may be said to be an isolate currently but not historically if related but now extinct relatives are attested. The Aquitanian language , spoken in Roman times, may have been an ancestor of Basque, but it could also have been a sister language to the ancestor of Basque. In

3740-410: Is an accepted version of this page A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree , or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy . Linguists thus describe

3850-504: Is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class or ethnicity . A dialect that is associated with a particular social class can be termed a sociolect . A dialect that is associated with a particular ethnic group can be termed an ethnolect . A geographical/regional dialect may be termed a regiolect (alternative terms include 'regionalect', 'geolect', and 'topolect' ). According to this definition, any variety of

3960-543: Is based on the historical observation that languages develop dialects , which over time may diverge into distinct languages. However, linguistic ancestry is less clear-cut than familiar biological ancestry, in which species do not crossbreed. It is more like the evolution of microbes, with extensive lateral gene transfer . Quite distantly related languages may affect each other through language contact , which in extreme cases may lead to languages with no single ancestor, whether they be creoles or mixed languages . In addition,

4070-582: Is classified as Low Franconian ( Nederfrankisch ), more specifically as belonging to Hollands-Frankisch , while Oostveluws is Low Saxon ( Saksisch ). In another classification, the dialects in the South and West of Veluwe (together with e.g. North Holland and Utrecht ) belong to the Central Dutch varieties and are Low Franconian, while the North and East of Veluwe (together with e.g. Salland )

4180-533: Is found with any other known language. A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as Albanian and Armenian within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate, but the meaning of the word "isolate" in such cases is usually clarified with a modifier . For instance, Albanian and Armenian may be referred to as an "Indo-European isolate". By contrast, so far as is known, the Basque language

4290-542: Is heavily based on the Florentine dialect of Tuscan . 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

4400-486: 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 a varying degree (ranging from the currently endangered state displayed by Sardinian and southern Italian Greek to

4510-460: Is no upper bound to the number of languages a family can contain. Some families, such as the Austronesian languages , contain over 1000. Language families can be identified from shared characteristics amongst languages. Sound changes are one of the strongest pieces of evidence that can be used to identify a genetic relationship because of their predictable and consistent nature, and through

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4620-637: Is not a measure of) a genetic relationship between the languages concerned. Linguistic interference can occur between languages that are genetically closely related, between languages that are distantly related (like English and French, which are distantly related Indo-European languages ) and between languages that have no genetic relationship. Some exceptions to the simple genetic relationship model of languages include language isolates and mixed , pidgin and creole languages . Mixed languages, pidgins and creole languages constitute special genetic types of languages. They do not descend linearly or directly from

4730-451: Is not attested by written records and so is conjectured to have been spoken before the invention of writing. A common visual representation of a language family is given by a genetic language tree. The tree model is sometimes termed a dendrogram or phylogeny . The family tree shows the relationship of the languages within a family, much as a family tree of an individual shows their relationship with their relatives. There are criticisms to

4840-613: 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

4950-778: 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 "; " 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. The colloquial meaning of dialect can be understood by example, e.g. in Italy (see dialetto ), France (see patois ) and

5060-454: 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. However, this definition has often been criticized, especially in the case of a dialect continuum (or dialect chain), which contains

5170-405: 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. The extent to which

5280-533: Is part of Overijssel and belong to Low Saxon. In another terminology, Veluws is the dialect of the West, South and Center of Veluwe (Low Franconian) and Sallands is the dialect in a small part in the North and the East of Veluwe and Salland (Low Saxon). This article about Germanic languages is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Dialect A dialect is a variety of languages spoken by

5390-446: Is part of the larger Indo-European family, which includes many other languages native to Europe and South Asia , all believed to have descended from a common ancestor known as Proto-Indo-European . A language family is usually said to contain at least two languages, although language isolates — languages that are not related to any other language — are occasionally referred to as families that contain one language. Inversely, there

5500-422: Is possible to recover many features of a proto-language by applying the comparative method , a reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th century linguist August Schleicher . This can demonstrate the validity of many of the proposed families in the list of language families . For example, the reconstructible common ancestor of the Indo-European language family is called Proto-Indo-European . Proto-Indo-European

5610-518: Is said to be autonomous. 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,

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5720-641: Is spoken (Jastrow 2002). 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

5830-496: 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. In

5940-587: 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,

6050-572: The Darijas translated as literally meaning Dialect in Arabic (spoken North African languages) are sometimes considered more different from other Arabic dialects. Officially, North African countries prefer to 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

6160-603: 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

6270-609: 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 . During the Risorgimento , Italian still existed mainly as a literary language, and only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak Italian. Proponents of Italian nationalism , like the Lombard Alessandro Manzoni , stressed

6380-465: The North Germanic language family, including Danish , Swedish , Norwegian and Icelandic , which have shared descent from Ancient Norse . Latin and ancient Norse are both attested in written records, as are many intermediate stages between those ancestral languages and their modern descendants. In other cases, genetic relationships between languages are not directly attested. For instance,

6490-422: The Philippines , 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

6600-674: The comparative method can be used to reconstruct proto-languages. However, languages can also change through language contact which can falsely suggest genetic relationships. For example, the Mongolic , Tungusic , and Turkic languages share a great deal of similarities that lead several scholars to believe they were related . These supposed relationships were later discovered to be derived through language contact and thus they are not truly related. Eventually though, high amounts of language contact and inconsistent changes will render it essentially impossible to derive any more relationships; even

6710-489: The comparative method of linguistic analysis. In order to test the hypothesis that two languages are related, the comparative method begins with the collection of pairs of words that are hypothesized to be cognates : i.e., words in related languages that are derived from the same word in the shared ancestral language. Pairs of words that have similar pronunciations and meanings in the two languages are often good candidates for hypothetical cognates. The researcher must rule out

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6820-420: 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

6930-638: The daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related . The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with different regional dialects of the proto-language undergoing different language changes and thus becoming distinct languages over time. One well-known example of a language family is the Romance languages , including Spanish , French , Italian , Portuguese , Romanian , Catalan , and many others, all of which are descended from Vulgar Latin . The Romance family itself

7040-678: 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

7150-481: 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. An important criterion for categorizing varieties of language is linguistic distance . For a variety to be considered a dialect, the linguistic distance between

7260-630: The Romance languages and the North Germanic languages are also related to each other, being subfamilies of the Indo-European language family , since both Latin and Old Norse are believed to be descended from an even more ancient language, Proto-Indo-European ; however, no direct evidence of Proto-Indo-European or its divergence into its descendant languages survives. In cases such as these, genetic relationships are established through use of

7370-595: 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. In Lebanon , a part of the Christian population considers "Lebanese" to be in some sense

7480-558: 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. When talking about the German language, the term German dialects

7590-641: 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. 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. One criterion, which

7700-496: The common ancestor of the Germanic subfamily, was itself a descendant of Proto-Indo-European , the common ancestor of the Indo-European family. Within a large family, subfamilies can be identified through "shared innovations": members of a subfamily will share features that represent retentions from their more recent common ancestor, but were not present in the overall proto-language of the larger family. Some taxonomists restrict

7810-470: The country's official language(s). Dialects in this sense do not derive from a dominant language, are therefore not one of its varieties , but they evolved in a separate and parallel way. While they may be historically cognate with and share genetic roots in the same subfamily as the dominant national language and may, to a varying degree, share some mutual intelligibility with the latter, "dialects" under this second definition are separate languages from

7920-454: 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

8030-542: 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

8140-440: 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. The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich published

8250-606: 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

8360-461: The expression, A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot ( "אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמײ און פֿלאָט" : " 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

8470-563: The family tree model. Critics focus mainly on the claim that the internal structure of the trees is subject to variation based on the criteria of classification. Even among those who support the family tree model, there are debates over which languages should be included in a language family. For example, within the dubious Altaic language family , there are debates over whether the Japonic and Koreanic languages should be included or not. The wave model has been proposed as an alternative to

8580-415: The family. The largest five language families in terms of number of speakers (Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo and Austronesian) make up five-sixths (almost 83.3%) of the world’s population. Two languages have a genetic relationship , and belong to the same language family, if both are descended from a common ancestor through the process of language change , or one is descended from

8690-415: The family. Thus, the term family is analogous to the biological term clade . Language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, sometimes referred to as "branches" or "subfamilies" of the family; for instance, the Germanic languages are a subfamily of the Indo-European family. Subfamilies share a more recent common ancestor than the common ancestor of the larger family; Proto-Germanic ,

8800-401: The first linguistic definition of the term, as they are in fact derived from Italian, with some degree of influence from the local or regional native languages and accents. 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: Modern Italian

8910-495: The following families that contain at least 1% of the 7,164 known languages in the world: Glottolog 5.0 (2024) lists the following as the largest families, of 7,788 languages (other than sign languages , pidgins , and unclassifiable languages ): Language counts can vary significantly depending on what is considered a dialect; for example Lyle Campbell counts only 27 Otomanguean languages, although he, Ethnologue and Glottolog also disagree as to which languages belong in

9020-475: 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

9130-416: The form of dialect continua in which there are no clear-cut borders that make it possible to unequivocally identify, define, or count individual languages within the family. However, when the differences between the speech of different regions at the extremes of the continuum are so great that there is no mutual intelligibility between them, as occurs in Arabic , the continuum cannot meaningfully be seen as

9240-503: The global scale, the site Glottolog counts a total of 423 language families in the world, including 184 isolates. One controversial theory concerning the genetic relationships among languages is monogenesis , the idea that all known languages, with the exceptions of creoles , pidgins and sign languages , are descendant from a single ancestral language. If that is true, it would mean all languages (other than pidgins, creoles, and sign languages) are genetically related, but in many cases,

9350-413: The importance of establishing a uniform national language in order to better create an Italian national identity . 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,

9460-544: The intellectual circles, because of the mass-media and the establishment of public education , Italians from all regions were increasingly exposed to Italian. 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

9570-590: The intelligibility criterion to distinguish between languages and dialects, 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

9680-542: The language family concept. It has been asserted, for example, that many of the more striking features shared by Italic languages ( Latin , Oscan , Umbrian , etc.) might well be " areal features ". However, very similar-looking alterations in the systems of long vowels in the West Germanic languages greatly postdate any possible notion of a proto-language innovation (and cannot readily be regarded as "areal", either, since English and continental West Germanic were not

9790-444: The latter case, Basque and Aquitanian would form a small family together. Ancestors are not considered to be distinct members of a family. A proto-language can be thought of as a mother language (not to be confused with a mother tongue ) being the root from which all languages in the family stem. The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly since most languages have a relatively short recorded history. However, it

9900-405: 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 is an often quoted example of a country where the second definition of the word "dialect" ( dialetto )

10010-419: The more the dialects differ from Standard Dutch. For example, in the central part where West-Veluws is spoken hie staot ('he is standing'); in the northwestern part the corresponding phrase sounds hij steet , compared to hij/hee stiet in Oost-Veluws. The latter has more Low Saxon influence. In Hattem , the northeastern part where Oost-Veluws is spoken, it has more Sallandic influences. Westveluws

10120-585: The national language) of limited geographic distribution, languages lacking institutional support, or even those considered to be "unsuitable for writing". Occasionally, in a third usage, dialect refers to the unwritten or non-codified languages of developing countries or isolated areas, where the term " vernacular language " would be preferred by linguists. Features that distinguish dialects from each other can be found in lexicon ( vocabulary ) and grammar ( morphology , syntax ) as well as in pronunciation ( phonology , including prosody ). In instances where

10230-423: The oldest demonstrable language family, Afroasiatic , is far younger than language itself. Estimates of the number of language families in the world may vary widely. According to Ethnologue there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. Lyle Campbell (2019) identifies a total of 406 independent language families, including isolates. Ethnologue 27 (2024) lists

10340-454: The other. The term and the process of language evolution are independent of, and not reliant on, the terminology, understanding, and theories related to genetics in the biological sense, so, to avoid confusion, some linguists prefer the term genealogical relationship . There is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of

10450-459: 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. A similar situation, but with a greater degree of mutual unintelligibility, has been termed a language cluster . In the Language Survey Reference Guide issued by SIL International , who produce Ethnologue ,

10560-470: The possibility that the two words are similar merely due to chance, or due to one having borrowed the words from the other (or from a language related to the other). Chance resemblance is ruled out by the existence of large collections of pairs of words between the two languages showing similar patterns of phonetic similarity. Once coincidental similarity and borrowing have been eliminated as possible explanations for similarities in sound and meaning of words,

10670-653: The purposes of interactions between two groups who speak different languages. Languages that arise in order for two groups to communicate with each other to engage in commercial trade or that appeared as a result of colonialism are called pidgin . Pidgins are an example of linguistic and cultural expansion caused by language contact. However, language contact can also lead to cultural divisions. In some cases, two different language speaking groups can feel territorial towards their language and do not want any changes to be made to it. This causes language boundaries and groups in contact are not willing to make any compromises to accommodate

10780-536: The putative phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically (by ancestry) as opposed to horizontally (by spatial diffusion). In some cases, the shared derivation of a group of related languages from a common ancestor is directly attested in the historical record. For example, this is the case for the Romance language family , wherein Spanish , Italian , Portuguese , Romanian , and French are all descended from Latin, as well as for

10890-413: The relationships may be too remote to be detectable. Alternative explanations for some basic observed commonalities between languages include developmental theories, related to the biological development of the capacity for language as the child grows from newborn. A language family is a monophyletic unit; all its members derive from a common ancestor, and all descendants of that ancestor are included in

11000-570: The remaining explanation is common origin: it is inferred that the similarities occurred due to descent from a common ancestor, and the words are actually cognates, implying the languages must be related. When languages are in contact with one another , either of them may influence the other through linguistic interference such as borrowing. For example, French has influenced English , Arabic has influenced Persian , Sanskrit has influenced Tamil , and Chinese has influenced Japanese in this way. However, such influence does not constitute (and

11110-731: The salient distinctions are only or mostly to be observed in pronunciation, the more specific term accent may be used instead of dialect . Differences that are largely concentrated in lexicon may be classified as creoles . When lexical differences are mostly concentrated in the specialized vocabulary of a profession or other organization, they are jargons . Differences in vocabulary that are deliberately cultivated to exclude outsiders or to serve as shibboleths are known as cryptolects or cant, and include slangs and argots . The particular speech patterns used by an individual are referred to as that person's idiolect . Languages are classified as dialects based on linguistic distance . The dialects of

11220-486: 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

11330-476: The same language. A number of rough measures exist, sometimes leading to contradictory results. The distinction between dialect and language is therefore subjective and depends upon the user's preferred frame of reference. 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

11440-813: The same town or region. 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

11550-474: The standard or national language. Under this definition, the standard or national language would not itself be considered a dialect, as it is the dominant language in terms of linguistic prestige , social or political (e.g. official ) status, predominance or prevalence, or all of the above. Dialect used this way implies a political connotation, often being used to refer to non-standardized "low-prestige" languages (regardless of their actual degree of distance from

11660-426: The term family to a certain level, but there is little consensus on how to do so. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups , and groups into complexes . A top-level (i.e., the largest) family is often called a phylum or stock . The closer the branches are to each other, the more closely the languages will be related. This means if a branch of a proto-language is four branches down and there

11770-584: 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. There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing two different languages from two dialects (i.e. varieties) of

11880-502: The tree model. The wave model uses isoglosses to group language varieties; unlike in the tree model, these groups can overlap. While the tree model implies a lack of contact between languages after derivation from an ancestral form, the wave model emphasizes the relationship between languages that remain in contact, which is more realistic. Historical glottometry is an application of the wave model, meant to identify and evaluate genetic relations in linguistic linkages . A sprachbund

11990-621: The two varieties must be low. Linguistic distance between spoken or written forms of language increases as the differences between the forms are characterized. 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

12100-502: 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

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