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Who said language is a dialect with an army?
The pioneering sociolinguist and Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich had a quote:* A language is a dialect with an army and navy. His point being that the difference between a language and a dialect was ultimately a political distinction and had little to do with linguistics per se.
How can you understand the sentence a language is a dialect with an army and a navy?
Linguists like to say that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. It means that you tend to call something a language, rather than a dialect, when the people who speak it have some sort of political autonomy. It’s not a linguistic criterion at all, but rather an issue of social structure.
What is an example of dialect language?
The definition of a dialect is a variety of a language which has different pronunciation, grammar or vocabulary than the standard language of the culture. An example of dialect is Cantonese to the Chinese language.
What is dialect in sociolinguistics?
A dialect is a regional or social variety of a language distinguished by pronunciation, grammar, and/or vocabulary. The adjective dialectal describes anything related to this topic. The study of dialects is known as dialectology or sociolinguistics.
What makes a language a dialect?
A dialect is generally a particular form of a language which is specific to a region or social group and usually has differences in pronunciation, grammar, syntax and vocabulary. It’s still a bit fuzzy to understand because dialects can be spoken by people living in one particular town or by a whole nation.
Is every dialect a language?
Virtually every language in the world has dialects—varieties of the language that are particular to a group of speakers. Dialects vary by region and by social group.
What exactly is dialect?
dialect, a variety of a language that signals where a person comes from. A dialect is chiefly distinguished from other dialects of the same language by features of linguistic structure—i.e., grammar (specifically morphology and syntax) and vocabulary.
How do you identify dialects?
Dialect can be defined as the language characteristics of a specific community. As such, dialect can be recognized by a speaker’s phonemes, pronunciation, and traits such as tonality, loudness, and nasality.