What counts as a language?

Here’s a conundrum or puzzle for you: Why can’t we give you a firm answer on how many languages are spoken in the area around the Baltic Sea in East-ern Europe or how many languages are spoken within the national boundaries of Cameroon in West Africa? The answer has to be: It depends. Depends on what? The answer depends on who you are listening to as your expert because there are two main ways of defining languages. (1) We may distinguish lan-guage A from lanlan-guage B on the basis of structural (linguistic) criteria. (2) Or, we may distinguish the two languages according to socio-political criteria, or because they’ve been differentiated historically. Sorry to make things compli-cated, but that’s the way they are.

2.2.1 Distinguishing languages on the basis of structure

If we use structural criteria, then we usually separate one linguistic variety from another when the differences in their various linguistic systems are so great that speakers of one language can’t understand speakers of the other variety. (By linguistic systems we mean phonology (pronunciation), morph-ology and syntax (word formation and sentence structure), and lexicon (vocabulary). Of course, when we say that these three are systems it means that speakers have to follow the rules of each system that make an utterance well-formed in the specific language that is under discussion; otherwise, they aren’t speaking that language.

The term grammar can be vague in reference to a linguistic variety. Some-times you’ll see it used for morphology and syntax, but it also can be used to refer to everything about the structural requirements of a language that make it well-formed. This would mean it includes phonology, too, but also could include information on how words are related to each other in the lexicon and other matters having to do with semantics. We will try to avoid using the term

“grammar” on its own, just because it is not always clear elsewhere what it covers in each instance of its use.

THE THREE MAIN SYSTEMS OF ANY LANGUAGE

Phonology: The sounds a language has and how they are organized into units, with one unit (a phoneme) being perceived as different from another by that language’s speakers; i.e., /b/ and /p/ are two different phonemes in English, but what is one phoneme in English, such as /b/, may be divided into two phonemes in another language (e.g. various Indian languages). Not all languages have the same sounds and not all organize their sounds in the same way.

Morphology and syntax: The way that meaningful units of sound are organized into words (morphology) and then organized again on another level into clauses and sentences (syntax).

Lexicon: The vocabulary or store of words that a language has, with their meanings (semantics) and their connotations, including how they are interpreted in certain contexts (pragmatics).

Although there are many similarities across the systems in languages, espe-cially in closely related languages, you can understand that if these systems are quite different, an addressee can’t work out what the speaker means. And if languages are being defined by structural criteria, then if any one system of variety X has very different rules than those in a similar system of variety Y, the two are called two different languages. For example, consider some simple differences in the sounds that are put together. In Swahili, a word may begin with a sound that never occurs at the beginning of a word in English. This is the sound that is written as ng in English, as in running, but it occurs at the beginning of some Swahili words and is written ng’, as in the word for ‘cow’

(ng’ombe). Also, in Swahili the marker for ‘past tense’ (and other tense/aspect markers, too) comes before the verb so that the prefix [li] in ni-li-pika chakula ‘I cooked food’ corresponds to the sounds that are written as ed for ‘past tense’

and that occur after the verb stem in English. Or, even if one of the words a speaker uses sounds familiar to you as an English speaker (mal sounds like “malady”), how would you understand that j’ai mal à la tête is the French way to say ‘I have a headache’? (Note that ai is the form of the French verb avoir, meaning ‘have’, that is used for a first-person subject in the present tense.) As these examples show, such differences in any one of the three main systems of language can make a huge difference in your ability to understand the other person.

When understandability fails, it usually means the speaker is literally “speak-ing a different language” – at least if we’re defin“speak-ing languages by consider-ing structure. From a structural point of view, we use mutual intelligibility to group together linguistic varieties and label them as a single language.

Mutual intelligibility means that two speakers can understand each other; it

equals understandability. This isn’t a perfect criterion, because remember that we are dealing with three main systems, not just one, when we are look-ing for similarities that permit understandlook-ing. When there are two varieties showing enough structural overlap so that mutual intelligibility is possible, we say we have two dialects of one language. What is structural overlap?

This is when two varieties show a number of the same features in the three systems of language (phonology, morphology–syntax, and lexicon). These systems represent the “structure”, and “overlap” means showing many of the same features. Dialects are discussed further later in this chapter.

Even though closely related languages do not have the same systems, their systems do show a good deal of structural overlap because the evidence (or claim) is that they come from a common ancestor. In fact, the basis for saying two languages are closely related is their structural overlap. So, it is no sur-prise that speakers of such closely related languages as Italian and French can

“almost” understand each other, pointing up the fact that mutual intelligibility or “understandability” is not an all-or-nothing thing.

2.2.2 Paying attention to social factors in defining languages

This brings us to our second set of criteria for differentiating one language from another. Not only does the criterion of mutual intelligibility not always work, but people don’t always pay attention to understandability, anyway, when they are saying what is a separate language and what isn’t. Instead, they use various socio-political criteria.

2.2.2.1 National borders

First, linguistic varieties are often called separate languages just because they are spoken in different nations. The best example of how national boundaries figure in where the line between languages is drawn is the case of three Scandinavian languages, Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. Even though these three varieties are clearly closely related and speakers of any one of these lan-guages can more or less understand speakers of the two other lanlan-guages, for historical reasons and because of present political boundaries, they are called three different languages.

When Scandinavians who are speakers of these languages meet, each par-ticipant speaks his or her own language in many conversations. This form of limited bilingualism is called receptive bilingualism; that is, the addressee only develops a receptive ability in the other speaker’s language (meaning he or she can understand, but not speak the language).

Sometimes, Scandinavian speakers try to make communication easier by accommodating to the other speaker’s language. They can do this by trying to speak the neighbor’s language, but sometimes they produce various forms that are neither one language nor the other. For example, a Danish political

scientist, being interviewed by a Swedish radio broadcaster, produced the form stött (with a final [t]) for ‘support’. But this corresponded to neither the Danish støtte [sdøde] nor Swedish stöd [stø:d], both of which have a final [d]

sound (Braunmüller, 2001). The problem is two-fold: He used a different “o”

vowel from the vowel that both Danish and Swedish have for this word, and then he used a final [t], not a final [d]. His efforts at accommodation may have muddied the already murky waters of intelligibility!

In recent modern history, Norway was under the control of the Danish, but not today. Swedish is the Scandinavian language with the most speakers and it is spoken in Sweden as the majority language, but also as a minority language in Finland, where Finnish is the main language but Swedish also has official status. (Finnish is not related to the other three Scandinavian languages at all; it’s in a separate language family.)

Another good example to show how mutual intelligibility doesn’t count for much at national borders is the case of the German-Dutch dialect continuum.

(A continuum is a linear representation without clear divisions between the elements on the line; that is, the elements just blend into their neighboring elements.) There is a well-known continuum of mutually intelligible varieties stretching from southeastern parts of the Netherlands across much of Germany.

This is called a dialect continuum because there are overlaps in the structural systems of varieties as you move along the continuum. At both ends, speakers probably do not understand each other, but at points along the continuum, neighboring varieties are mutually understandable. What happens to a dialect continuum when you come to the national border? Speakers at this point in the continuum end up saying they speak different languages – even though, from a structural point of view, they speak mutually intelligible dialects! On one side the dialect at the border is called German and on the other side it’s called Dutch.

An interesting sidelight is that this particular dialect continuum is losing out to the powers of national standard dialects. That is, young people on either side of the border now acquire the standard dialect of their nation’s official language (they learn it in school and hear it on the electronic mass media). So it’s only older people who understand with any ease the local dialect of their neighbors across the border. You’ll read more about what a standard dialect is later in this chapter.

In other parts of the world, national borders divide up dialect continua into languages as well. Mansour (1993) argues that the multilingual nature of West Africa is exaggerated because of the national borders that were artificially drawn to suit colonial powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centur-ies. What she means is that a single ethnic group and its linguistic variety are or have been classified as two different groups and two different languages, just because a national border intervenes. She cites the case of the cluster of Mandingo dialects, which are spoken in a number of different West African countries and go by many different names (as if they are separate languages).

2.2.2.2 Cultural borders

Second, when speakers see themselves as culturally different, they often refer to their varieties as separate languages. That is, again mutual intelligibility is ignored. Since the 1990s, we have seen that the number of languages has grown in the southern Slavic group in former Yugoslavia. (Russian, of course, is the best-known Slavic language, but it’s in the northern group.) Where there used to be three languages (Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian) there now are at least five. Slovenian has remained Slovenian, but Serbo-Croatian has split along ethnic and religious lines into Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian.

(Serbians are members of the Eastern Orthodox church, but Croatians are Roman Catholics.) The two languages are written in different scripts, too.

Serbian is written in the Cyrillic script (like Russian), but Croatian is written in the Roman or Latin script that is used in most European countries. (This book is in Roman script or orthography.) Bulgarian has largely remained Bulgarian.

A variety called Macedonian by its speakers is spoken in Bulgaria within Western Bulgaria, but it is just a dialect of Bulgarian, according to speakers of Bulgarian in Bulgaria. Why should the Bulgarians care? Because they want to unify all areas of Bulgaria under one language; they might also want to use language as a reason to extend Bulgarian borders. Macedonian is written in the Cyrillic script and so is Bulgarian.

But there are Macedonians elsewhere, giving Macedonian speakers in Bulgaria a rationale to claim they speak a language separate from Bulgarian that is called Macedonian. There is an area called Macedonia that is part of the former Yugoslavia; its administrative center is Skopje. In addition, there are Macedonians in Greece thanks to the Greek incorporation of Aegean Macedonia after the Second Balkan War of 1913, although many Macedonians migrated to other nations from this area, especially to Bulgaria.

A similar situation of “language creation”, but of longer standing, exists in northern Uganda in East Africa between the Acholi and Lango peoples. Their languages, Acholi and Lango, are referred to as separate languages (within the West Nilotic language group). In fact, the two varieties are mutually intelligible.

Yet, because the Acholi and Lango wish to differentiate themselves culturally, they refer to these as separate languages, not dialects of the same language.

Around the world, there are many examples like this where the salience of ethnicity takes precedence over mutual intelligibility.

2.2.2.3 Religious borders

South Asia provides an example of how languages can be created along religi-ous lines. When India and Pakistan were divided in 1947, a language formerly called Hindustani became two. Hindi is the version that is spoken in India by Hindus and other religious groups while the variety spoken in Pakistan by Moslems is called Urdu. The two languages are also written in different scripts.

Urdu is written in the Arabic script and Hindi is written in the Devanagari script of its ancient predecessor, Sanskrit. Language engineering of sorts has helped the two languages become more different than they were originally;

Urdu has taken in many Persian and Arabic-based forms, true to its Moslem profile, while Hindi has made a number of existing words more closely resem-ble Sanskrit. But the two varieties are mutually intelligiresem-ble. This suggests that if it hadn’t been for the partition of India and Pakistan, there might not be the view that Hindi and Urdu are two different languages. We discuss this case again in chapter 12.

2.2.2.4 Uniting linguistic varieties into one language

In contrast, other groups may wish to see themselves as members of one culture and in that case, they say they speak the same language even if the dialects making up that language are not necessarily mutually intelligible.

The most commonly cited example is the Chinese language. True, there is only a single writing system for all of the dialects of China. And there is only one spoken variety that is recognized as the standard dialect. Based on the dialect of the capital area, Beijing, this spoken dialect is still called Mandarin by many, but is called Putonghua in Chinese. But by no means are all the Chinese dialects mutually intelligible with each other or with Putonghua. That is, if we are using structural criteria, many of them should be called separate languages.

This is especially true for the southern varieties, such as Cantonese (spoken in Guangzhou, formerly called Canton).

That there should be linguistic differences in such a wide expanse as China is understandable; so why do the Chinese want to ignore the differences?

They do recognize a number of minority groups that speak their own separate languages (e.g. there are a number of Mongolian languages in the northeast).

But by referring to all the varieties spoken by persons from the Han ethnic group as “Chinese”, the Chinese government instills the notion of national identity across diverse communities.

Across the world, the Chagga peoples, who live in the area of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania (in East Africa), see themselves as a single ethnic group and refer to their linguistic varieties as one language. Still, from a struc-tural point of view, the dialects making up Chagga are different, especially regarding the sounds in their systems and therefore how certain words are pronounced.