A question about dialects and foreign languages (1 Viewer)

[Karl_O]

While English dialects in the most part are intelligible, why is it that dialects in many major languages are less intelligible from each other? For example, Chinese.
No technical replies please.

 

[Michael Reuben]

While English dialects in the most part are intelligible

Give examples of English "dialects" that you find intelligible. Regional differences in accent don't count.

M.

 

[Jeff Kleist]

British and US English are not really far apart at all, it's just the accents and regional slang

With Chinese, which is actually Mandarin (mainland) and Cantonese (Hong Kong and other coastal areas) the languages are about as alike as English and Spanish. 2 seperate languages with common ancestry

 

[HienN]

My guess is that we are dealing with two different situations. In one case, the dialects were originally languages of separate countries that merged into one (Many Asian countries or the former Soviet Union for example). In the other case, the "dialects" are languages of one country that at one point split into several (like the US and Britain), although I am not sure if they are technically "dialects".

 

[Yee-Ming]

as Jeff said, Chinese dialects are incomprehensible to someone who speaks another, e.g. I speak Mandarin, but don't understand Cantonese (maybe some "choice" words, but that's all...)

but the written text is substantially the same.

as a different example, would one consider German as spoken in Germany, Austria and Switzerland as merely regional accents, or outright dialects? or for that matter, German spoken in Bavaria, which I understand can be a bit different? is Yiddish a German dialect?

perhaps the Indian sub-continent would be a better region to consider for such an analysis? but I know nothing about Indian languages/dialects, could someone enlighten us?

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Karl_O wrote:

Quote:

I don't know a whole lot about the modern dialects of India, but my understanding is that Urdu and Hindi, the main official language(s), are essentially the same language (i.e., they're very close dialects, if dialects at all), one spoken by Muslims and written in Arabic script, the "second" spoken by Hindus (or Christianized Indians) and written in the native Devanagari script. As I have said in the link above, these matters are usually politically determined, often along "ethnic" lines. Members of the various groups in such cases usually do not wish to be identified with each by outsiders due to historic ethnic hostilities. This is also the case, for example, in Yugoslavia/Bosnia, where Croatian and Serbian are the same language, one spoken by Catholics who use the Roman alphabet, the other by Orthodox Christians who use Cyrillic. (The same goes for the Muslims.) They don't want to be identified with each other, even though they look essentially the same phenotypically and speak the same language. Before the post-Communist-era break-up, the language there was called "Serbo-Croatian".

 

[Denward]

Chinese has no alphabet. If two ancient Chinese 1000 miles apart look at the same character, there's nothing to tell them how to pronounce it, except their neighbors. Thus, you develop distinct spoken languages even though the written language is identical.

 

[Patrick Sun]

I can understand some Mandarin Chinese, but Cantonese just messes me up completely. It's almost like they are different languages.

 

[Lew Crippen]

perhaps the Indian sub-continent would be a better region to consider for such an analysis? but I know nothing about Indian languages/dialects, could someone enlighten us?

Languages on the sub-continent are so diverse that its pretty hard to generalize. To add a bit to Rex’s post, Hindi is closer linguistically to English than is Tamil (main language in the State of Tamil Nadu, nee Madras.
The reason for this is that Hindi belongs to the ‘Indo European’ set of languages, while Tamil is classed as a ‘Dravidian’ (sp?) language, which is not really related to anything else.

 

[Karl_O]

I thank those people who replied.

I would like to present a new question: how is it that English dialects, regardless of their geographical locations (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) are more mutually intelligible than dialects from other languages (German, Italy, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, etc.)?

 

[BrianB]

How long have there been English speaking people in the areas you listed, Karl, and how did the people in those regions start speaking English? The answers to those questions go a long way to answering your question.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Patrick Sun wrote:

If I understand the claim here, then you have it backwards. The Chinese ideographic and logographic script has all along been based on the fact that vast area of speakers using it has spoken different, mutually unintelligible "dialects", i.e., you have a society made up of many subgroups of speakers who speak related languages, but not one language. It is not the case that one language "split" into many because the script isn't phonetic.

 

[Jeff Kleist]

One thing you have to remember

There has been English in the US/Canada for what, 400 years? Australia/NZ for 300?

For a language to diverge like you're talking about takes a lot longer than that, and given the global community of today, isn't really likely to happen anymore