Adialect[i] is avariety of language spoken by 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 avernacular language.
The more common usage of the term in English refers to avariety of alanguage that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers.[2] The dialects or varieties of a particular language are closely related and, despite their differences, are most often largelymutually intelligible, especially if geographically close to one another in adialect continuum. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such associal class orethnicity.[3] A dialect associated with a particular social class is called asociolect; one associated with a particularethnic group is anethnolect; and a geographical or regional dialect is a regiolect[4] (alternative terms include 'regionalect',[5] 'geolect',[6] and 'topolect'[7]). Any variety of a given language can be classified as a "dialect", includingstandardized ones.
A second usage, which refers tocolloquial settings, typicallydiglossic, exists in a few countries likeItaly,[8] such asdialetto,[9]patois inFrance, much of East Central Europe,[10] and thePhilippines,[11][12] and may carry apejorative undertone and underlines the politically andsocially subordinated status of anautochthonous non-national language to the country's official language(s). Dialects in this sense do not derive from a dominant language and are therefore not one of itsvarieties, though they may have evolved in a separate and parallel way. While they may be historicallycognate with and sharegenetic roots in the samesubfamily as the dominant national language and may, to a varying degree, share somemutual intelligibility with the latter, "dialects" under this second definition are separate languages from 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 oflinguistic 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 the national language) of limited geographic distribution, languages lacking institutional support, or even those considered to be "unsuitable for writing".[13]
Occasionally, in a third usage,dialect refers to the unwritten or non-codified languages of developing countries or isolated areas,[14][15] where the term "vernacular language" would be preferred by linguists.[16]
Features that distinguish dialects from each other can be found inlexicon (vocabulary) andgrammar (morphology,syntax) as well as in pronunciation (phonology, includingprosody). In instances where the salient distinctions are only or mostly to be observed in pronunciation, the more specific termaccent may be used instead ofdialect. Differences that are largely concentrated in lexicon may be classified ascreoles. When lexical differences are mostly concentrated in the specialized vocabulary of a profession or other organization, they arejargons. Differences in vocabulary that are deliberately cultivated to exclude outsiders or to serve asshibboleths are known as cryptolects or cant, and includeslangs andargots. The particular speech patterns used by an individual are referred to as that person'sidiolect.
Languages are classified as dialects based onlinguistic distance. The dialects of a language with awriting 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.
Astandard dialect, also known as a "standardized language", is supported by institutions. Such institutional support may include any or all of the following: government recognition or designation; formal presentation in schooling as the "correct" form of a language; informal monitoring of everydayusage; 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 theFrench language which is supported by theAcadémie Française institution. Anonstandard 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 oftenarbitrary and based on social, political, cultural, or historical considerations or prevalence and prominence.[17][18][19] In 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,[20] and the term "dialect" is sometimes restricted to mean "non-standard variety", particularly in non-specialist settings and non-English linguistic traditions.[21][22][23][24]
The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such associal class orethnicity.[3] A dialect that is associated with a particularsocial class can be termed asociolect. A dialect that is associated with a particularethnic group can be termed anethnolect.
A geographical/regional dialect may be termed a regiolect[4] (alternative terms include 'regionalect',[5] 'geolect',[6] and 'topolect'[7]). According to this definition, any variety of a given language can be classified as "a dialect", including anystandardized 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 oftenarbitrary and based on social, political, cultural, or historical considerations or prevalence and prominence.[17][18][19] In 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.[20] The term "dialect" is however sometimes restricted to mean "non-standard variety", particularly in non-specialist settings and non-English linguistic traditions.[25][22][26][27] Conversely, somedialectologists have reserved 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 theBrummie of Birmingham or theScouse of Liverpool to be real dialects, as they had arisen fairly recently in time and partly as a result of influences from Irish migrants.[28]
There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing two different languages from two dialects (i.e. varieties) of the same language.[29] A number of rough measures exist, sometimes leading to contradictory results. The distinction between dialect and language is therefore subjective[how?] and depends upon the user's preferred frame of reference.[30] For example, there has been discussion about whether or not theLimón Creole English should be considered "a kind" of English or a different language. This creole is spoken in 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 isScanian, which even, for a time, had its own ISO code.[31][32][33][34]
An important criterion for categorizing varieties of language islinguistic distance. For a variety to be considered a dialect, the linguistic distance between the two varieties must be low. Linguistic distance between spoken or written forms of language increases as the differences between the forms are characterized.[35] 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 determinelanguage families and language siblings. For example, languages with little linguistic distance, likeDutch andGerman, are considered siblings. Dutch and German are siblings in 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.[35] 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 is often considered to be purely linguistic, is that ofmutual 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.[36] However, this definition has often been criticized, especially in the case of adialect continuum (or dialect chain), which contains a sequence of varieties, where each mutually intelligible with the next, but may not be mutually intelligible with distant varieties.[36]
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 the intelligibility criterion to distinguish between languages and dialects,[37] though mutuality may not be as relevant as initially thought. The requirement for mutuality is abandoned by theLanguage Survey Reference Guide ofSIL International, publishers of theEthnologue and theregistration authority for theISO 639-3 standard forlanguage codes. They define adialect cluster as 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 alanguage.[38][clarification needed]
Local varieties in the West Germanic dialect continuum are oriented towards either Standard Dutch or Standard German depending on which side of the border they are spoken.[39]
Another occasionally used criterion for discriminating dialects from languages is thesociolinguistic notion oflinguistic authority. According to this definition, two varieties are considered dialects of 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 ofWestphalian andEast 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, orheteronomous with respect to,Standard German, which is said to be autonomous.[39]
In contrast, speakers in the Netherlands ofLow Saxon varieties similar to Westphalian would instead consult a dictionary ofStandard Dutch, and hence is categorized as a dialect of Dutch instead. Similarly, althoughYiddish is classified by linguists as a language in theHigh German group of languages and has some degree of mutual intelligibility with German, 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 alanguage 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 byCharles A. Ferguson andJohn J. Gumperz in 1960.[40][41] A heteronomous variety may be considered adialect of a language defined in this way.[40] In these terms,Danish andNorwegian, though mutually intelligible to a large degree, are considered separate languages.[42] In the framework ofHeinz Kloss, these are described as languages byausbau (development) rather than byabstand (separation).[43]
In other situations, a closely related group of varieties possess considerable (though incomplete) mutual intelligibility, but none dominates the others. To describe this situation, the editors of theHandbook of African Languages introduced the termdialect cluster as a classificatory unit at the same level as a language.[44] A similar situation, but with a greater degree of mutual unintelligibility, has been termed alanguage cluster.[45]
In theLanguage Survey Reference Guide issued bySIL International, who produceEthnologue, adialect 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.[46]
In many societies, however, a particular dialect, often the sociolect of theelite 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 lowsocial status. In this secondary sense of "dialect", language varieties are often calleddialects rather thanlanguages:
if they are rarely or never used in writing (outside reported speech),
if the speakers of the given language do not have astate of their own,
if they lackprestige with respect to some other, often standardised, variety.
The status of "language" 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 isChinese, whose variations such asMandarin andCantonese are often called dialects and not languages in China, despite their mutual unintelligibility.
National boundaries sometimes make 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.[47][citation needed]
TheYiddish linguistMax Weinreich published 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") inYIVO 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 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" ofsome language—"everybody speaks a dialect". According to that interpretation, the criteria above merely serve to distinguish whether two varieties are dialects of thesame language or dialects ofdifferent languages.
The terms "language" and "dialect" are not necessarily mutually exclusive, although they are often perceived to be.[48] Thus there is nothing contradictory in the statement "thelanguage of thePennsylvania Dutch is a dialect ofGerman".
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";[49] "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.[50]
The colloquial meaning of dialect can be understood by example, e.g. inItaly[8] (seedialetto[9]),France (seepatois) and thePhilippines,[11][12] carries apejorative undertone and underlines the politically andsocially 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 itsvarieties, but instead they evolved in a separate and parallel way and may thus better fit various parties' criteria for a separate language.
Despite this, these "dialects" may often be historicallycognate and sharegenetic roots in the samesubfamily as the dominant national language and may even, to a varying degree, share somemutual intelligibility with the latter. In this sense, unlike in the first usage, the national language would not itself be considered a "dialect", as it is the dominant language in a particular state, be it in terms oflinguistic 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".[13] The designation "dialect" is also used popularly to refer to the unwritten or non-codified languages of developing countries or isolated areas,[14][15] where the term "vernacular language" would be preferred by linguists.[51]
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John Lyons writes that "Many linguists [...] subsume differences of accent under differences of dialect."[18] In general,accent refers to variations in pronunciation, whiledialect also encompasses specific variations ingrammar andvocabulary.[52]
There are three geographical zones in which Arabic is spoken (Jastrow 2002).[53] 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 theLevant,Egypt,North Africa,Iraq, and some parts ofIran. The Egyptian, Sudanese, and Levantine dialects (including 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 theArabic language share the same writing system and shareModern Standard Arabic as their common prestige dialect used in writing.
When talking about the German language, the termGerman dialects 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 afterGermanic tribes from which they were assumed to have descended.[54]
The extent to which 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 inSwitzerland andLiechtenstein is different from the rest of the German-speaking countries. TheSwiss German dialects are 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.
TheLow German andLow Franconian varieties spoken in Germany are often counted among the German dialects. This reflects the modern situation where they areroofed by standard German. This is different from the situation in theMiddle Ages when Low German had strong tendencies towards anausbau language.
TheFrisian languages spoken in Germany and the Netherlands are excluded from the German dialects.
During theRisorgimento, Italian still existed mainly as a literary language, and only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak Italian.[56] Proponents ofItalian nationalism, like the LombardAlessandro Manzoni, stressed the importance of establishing a uniformnational language in order to better create an Italiannational identity.[57] With theunification 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, theconscription of Italian men from all throughout Italy duringWorld 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 the intellectual circles, because of the mass-media and the establishment ofpublic education, Italians from all regions were increasingly exposed to Italian.[55] Whiledialect 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 the first linguistic definition of the term, as they are in fact derived from Italian,[58][12][59] with some degree of influence from the local or regional native languages and accents.[55]
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, theItalo-Dalmatian group. This wide category includes:
Modern Italian is heavily based on theFlorentine dialect ofTuscan.[55] The Tuscan-based language that would eventually become modern Italian had been used in poetry and literature since at least the12th century, and it first spread outside the Tuscan linguistic borders through the works of the so-calledtre corone ("three crowns"):Dante Alighieri,Petrarch, andGiovanni Boccaccio. Florentine thus gradually rose to prominence as thevolgare of theliterate andupper class in Italy, and it spread throughout the peninsula and Sicily as thelingua franca among the Italianeducated class as well as Italian travelling merchants. The economic prowess and cultural and artistic importance ofTuscany in theLate Middle Ages and theRenaissance further encouraged the diffusion of the Florentine-Tuscan Italian throughout Italy and among the educated and powerful, though local and regional languages remained the main languages of the common people.
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 thedialect continuum are more or less mutually intelligible. For instance, a speaker of purelyEastern Lombard, a language inNorthern Italy'sLombardy region that includes theBergamasque dialect, would have severely limited mutual intelligibility with a purely Italian speaker and would be nearly completely unintelligible to aSicilian-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, 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 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 andCroatian). Both are based on theShtokavian 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 andChakavian), 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 a matter of dispute.
Macedonian, which is largely mutually intelligible withBulgarian and certain dialects of Serbo-Croatian (Torlakian), is considered by Bulgarian linguists to be a Bulgarian dialect, while inNorth 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 the Second World War, the South Slavic dialect continuum covering the area of today's North Macedonia were referred to asBulgarian 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.[60][61]
InLebanon, a part of the Christian population considers "Lebanese" to be in some sense a distinct language fromArabic and not merely a dialect thereof. During thecivil war, Christians often used Lebanese Arabic officially, and sporadically used theLatin 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.
The Malay language ispluricentric and amacrolanguage, i.e., several varieties of it are standardized as the national language (bahasa kebangsaan orbahasa nasional) of several nation states with various official names: in Malaysia, it is designated as eitherbahasa Malaysia ("Malaysian") or alsobahasa Melayu ("Malay language"); in Singapore and Brunei, it is calledbahasa Melayu ("Malay language"); in Indonesia, an autonomous normative variety calledbahasa Indonesia ("Indonesian language") is designated thebahasa persatuan/pemersatu ("unifying language" orlingua franca) whereas the term "Malay" (bahasa Melayu) is domestically restricted to vernacular varieties of Malay indigenous to areas of Central to SouthernSumatra andWest Kalimantan.[63][ii]
In Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, theDarijas 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 theLiterary Arabic and conduct much of their political and religious life in it (adherence toIslam), and refrain from declaring each country's specific variety to be a separate language, because Literary Arabic is theliturgical language of Islam and the language of the Islamic sacred book, theQur'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.
TheModern Ukrainian language has been in common use since the late 17th century, associated with the establishment of theCossack Hetmanate. In the 19th century, theTsarist Government of theRussian Empire claimed thatUkrainian (or Little Russian, per official name) was merely a dialect ofRussian (or Polonized dialect) and not a language on its own (same concept as forBelarusian language). That concepted was enrooted soon after thepartitions of Poland. According to these claims, the differences were few and caused by the conquest of western Ukraine by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. However, in reality the dialects in Ukraine were developing independently from the dialects in the modern Russia for several centuries, and as a result they differed substantially.
There have been cases of a variety of speech being deliberately reclassified to serve political purposes. One example isMoldovan. In 1996, theMoldovan Parliament, citing fears of "Romanian expansionism", rejected a proposal fromPresidentMircea Snegur to change the name of the language to Romanian, and in 2003 aMoldovan–Romanian dictionary was published, purporting to show that the two countries speak different languages. Linguists of theRomanian Academy reacted by declaring that all the Moldovan words were also Romanian words; while in Moldova, the head of theAcademy of Sciences of Moldova, Ion Bărbuţă, described the dictionary as a politically motivated "absurdity". On 22 March 2023, thepresident of Moldova,Maia Sandu, promulgated a law passed by Parliament that named thenational language asRomanian in all legislative texts and theconstitution.[66]
Unlike languages that use alphabets to indicate their pronunciation,Chinese characters have developed fromlogograms that do not always give hints to their pronunciation. Although the written characters have remained relatively consistent for the last two thousand years, the pronunciation and grammar in different regions have developed to an extent that thevarieties of the spoken language are often mutually unintelligible. As a series of migration to the south throughout the history, the regional languages of the south, includingGan,Xiang,Wu,Min,Yue andHakka often show traces ofOld Chinese orMiddle Chinese.
From theMing dynasty onward, Beijing has been the capital of China and the dialect spoken in Beijing has had the most prestige among other varieties. With the founding of theRepublic of China,Standard Mandarin was designated as the official language, based on the spoken language of Beijing. Since then, other spoken varieties are regarded asfangyan (regional speech).Cantonese is still the most commonly-used language inGuangzhou,Hong Kong,Macau and among some overseas Chinese communities, whereasHokkien has been accepted inTaiwan as an important local language alongsideMandarin. Then starting in the 1950s, thewritten language also diverged when thePeople's Republic of China introducedsimplified characters, which are now used throughout the country.Traditional characters are still the norm in Taiwan and some other overseas communities.
Hindi is one of the official languages ofIndia, alongsideEnglish, and an official language innine states (includingGujarat, whereGujarati is the most spoken language).Urdu is the national and official language ofPakistan, as well as being an additional official language in 5 states of India (3 of the 8 Hindi speaking states plusAndhra Pradesh andTelangana). While it is the second language for most Pakistanis (outside ofmuhajirs who immigrated duringpartition and their descendants) in favor of languages likePunjabi andSindhi, it is the first language of mostIndian Muslims inNorth India and theDeccan Plateau.
The two languages in their colloquially spoken form are mutually intelligible, but in written form, Hindi uses theDevanagari script while Urdu uses thePerso-Arabic script. For formal vocabulary, the two languages diverge, with Hindi drawing more fromSanskrit and Urdu more fromPersian orArabic.
In addition, several other dialects or languages are classified under Hindi that did not descend from it. Standard Hindi and Urdu are based onKhari Boli, the dialect spoken aroundDelhi. Other dialects with high mutual intelligibility spoken in surrounding areas includeHaryanvi and languages from WesternUttar Pradesh, likeBraj Bhasha. But many languages less similar to Standard Hindi do not have official status under the8th Schedule to the Constitution of India and are instead classified as dialects of Hindi.[67] This includesBhojpuri, spoken in Eastern Uttar Pradesh andBihar, which does not have official status in either state or in the 8th Schedule, despite being spoken by over 50 million people.[68] But over time, more languages have been recognized as distinct from Hindi.Maithili was made a scheduled language of India in 2003, andChhattisgarhi was made official inChhattisgarh.[69]
^Since the standardized varieties of Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore are structurally largely identical and mostly differ in lexicon and to a lesser degree in phonetic details, the umbrella terms "Malay/Indonesian"[64] or "Malay-Indonesian"[65] are often used in the linguistic literature when discussing the structure or history of the language.
^ab"topolect".The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2010.
^ab«The often used term "Italian dialects" may create the false impression that the dialects are varieties of the standard Italian language.» Martin Maiden, M. Mair Parry (1997), The Dialects of Italy, Psychology Press, p. 2.
^abc«Parlata propria di un ambiente geografico e culturale ristretto (come la regione, la provincia, la città o anche il paese): contrapposta a un sistema linguistico affine per origine e sviluppo, ma che, per diverse ragioni (politiche, letterarie, geografiche, ecc.), si è imposto come lingua letteraria e ufficiale». Battaglia, Salvatore (1961).Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, UTET, Torino, V. IV, pp. 321–322.
^abFodde Melis, Luisanna (2002).Race, Ethnicity and Dialects: Language Policy and Ethnic Minorities in the United States. FrancoAngeli. p. 35.ISBN9788846439123.
^Benedikt Perak, Robert Trask, Milica Mihaljević (2005).Temeljni lingvistički pojmovi (in Serbo-Croatian). p. 81.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^abSchilling-Estes, Natalies (2006). "Dialect variation". In Fasold, R.W.; Connor-Linton, J. (eds.).An Introduction to Language and Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 311–341.
^Ferguson, Charles A.;Gumperz, John J. (1960). "Introduction". In Ferguson, Charles A.; Gumperz, John J. (eds.).Linguistic Diversity in South Asia: Studies in Regional, Social, and Functional Variation. Indiana University, Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics. pp. 1–18. p. 5.
^Kloss, Heinz (1967). "'Abstand languages' and 'ausbau languages'".Anthropological Linguistics.9 (7):29–41.JSTOR30029461.
^Handbook Sub-committee Committee of the International African Institute. (1946). "A Handbook of African Languages".Africa.16 (3):156–159.doi:10.2307/1156320.JSTOR1156320.S2CID245909714.
^Hansford, Keir; Bendor-Samuel, John; Stanford, Ron (1976). "A provisional language map of Nigeria".Savanna.5 (2):115–124. p. 118.
^Grimes, Joseph Evans (1995).Language Survey Reference Guide. SIL International. pp. 17, 22.ISBN978-0-88312-609-7.
^Muljačić, Ž. (1997). The relationships between the dialect and the standard language. In M. Maiden, M. Maiden, & M. Parry (Eds.), The Dialects of Italy (1st ed.). essay, Routledge.
^An often quoted paradigm of Italian nationalism is the ode on thePiedmontese revolution of 1821 (Marzo 1821), wherein the Italian people are portrayed by Manzoni as "one by military prowess, by language, by religion, by history, by blood, and by sentiment".
^Loporcaro, Michele (2009).Profilo linguistico dei dialetti italiani (in Italian). Bari: Laterza.;Marcato, Carla (2007).Dialetto, dialetti e italiano (in Italian). Bologna: Il Mulino.;Posner, Rebecca (1996).The Romance languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
^Chambers, Jack; Trudgill, Peter (1998).Dialectology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 7.Similarly, Bulgarian politicians often argue that Macedonian is simply a dialect of Bulgarian – which is really a way of saying, of course, that they feel Macedonia ought to be part of Bulgaria. From a purely linguistic point of view, however, such arguments are not resolvable, since dialect continua admit of more-or-less but not either-or judgements.
^Danforth, Loring M. (1997).The Macedonian conflict: ethnic nationalism in a transnational world. Princeton University Press. p. 67.ISBN978-0691043562.Sociolinguists agree that in such situations the decision as to whether a particular variety of speech constitutes a language or a dialect is always based on political, rather than linguistic criteria (Trudgill 1974:15). A language, in other words, can be defined "as a dialect with an army and a navy" (Nash 1989:6).
^Asmah Haji Omar (1992). "Malay as a pluricentric language". InClyne, Michael J. (ed.).Malay as a pluricentric language Pluricentric Languages: Differing Norms in Different Nations. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyte. pp. 403–4.ISBN3-11-012855-1.
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