Dialect
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 second usage, which refers to colloquial settings, typically diglossic, exists in a few countries like Italy,[8] such as dialetto,[9] patois in France, much of East Central Europe,[10] and the Philippines,[11][12] and may carry a pejorative undertone and underlines the politically and socially subordinated status of an autochthonous non-national language to the country's official language(s).
[16] 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).
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 dialects of a language with a writing system will operate at different degrees of distance from the standardized written form.
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 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.)
[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 as social class or ethnicity.
[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, some dialectologists 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 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.
This creole is spoken in the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica (Central America) by descendants of Jamaican people.
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.
[38][clarification needed] Another occasionally used criterion for discriminating dialects from languages is the sociolinguistic notion of linguistic authority.
[43] In other situations, a closely related group of varieties possess considerable (though incomplete) mutual intelligibility, but none dominates the others.
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 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.
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.
[47][citation needed] The Yiddish linguist Max 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") in YIVO Bleter 25.1, 1945, p. 13.
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 the vigorous promotion of Germanic Tyrolean), but have been officially recognized as minority languages (minoranze linguistiche storiche), in light of their distinctive historical development.
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.
[55] 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.
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 the Centro-Southern and Centro-Northern 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] In Lebanon, a part of the Christian population considers "Lebanese" to be in some sense a distinct language from Arabic and not merely a dialect thereof.
Examples of cultural elements where Darijas' use became dominant include: theatre, film, music, television, advertisement, social media, folk-tale books and companies' names.
Following the Spring of Nations in Europe and efforts of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, across the so-called "Southwestern Krai" of Russian Empire started to spread cultural societies of Hromada and their Sunday schools.
On 22 March 2023, the president of Moldova, Maia Sandu, promulgated a law passed by Parliament that named the national language as Romanian in all legislative texts and the constitution.
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 the varieties of the spoken language are often mutually unintelligible.
Then starting in the 1950s, the written language also diverged when the People's Republic of China introduced simplified characters, which are now used throughout the country.
Other dialects with high mutual intelligibility spoken in surrounding areas include Haryanvi and languages from Western Uttar Pradesh, like Braj Bhasha.
