one of the most difficult theoretical issues in linguistics is to distinguish between language and dialect or language and varieties at first sight there may be no problem at all if two people speak differently there seem to be only two possibilities if they understand each other they must speak varieties of the same language if not they can be said to speak different languages but is it really that simple hmm probably not and this defines our program we will first of all look at some problem cases and knowing about these problems we will then look at criteria to define what a language really is and eventually we will look at dialects or varieties and define them more precisely let's look at some problems first here we have three problem cases the first one concerns the relationship between Dutch and German then we will look at Chinese and eventually we will look at Jamaican Creole so let's start with Dutch and you Germans here in the audience you can ask yourselves do you understand what the speaker says so here is our first example from the language index of the virtual linguistics composts the story the north wind and the Sun in Dutch now listen the nord event and the zoom violin and a discrete earrin vedas text of us tuna rice or her cichlids in environment mantle for balaam did you understand that well as a native speaker of German I can clearly say no I don't perhaps some words in it when I see them in spelling but really I don't understand it now native speakers of Dutch by contrast can understand German very well so here's our first problem let's look at Chinese now I have a native speaker of Chinese iam Mau Mau can you please come and help us a little bit a little bit closer so that you can see can be seen by the camera mom how can you say to us in standard Mandarin Chinese the very big book and dad again and dad a shoe okay thank you very much now we will load some varieties of joy of Chinese and we'll ask mama whether she understands that or not okay mama here's the first variety of Chinese so let's find out whether you understand what the speaker says handle taster yeah I can understand I distinguish but this not totally different but I can understand you can understand it okay handle this alright yes thank you now we will look at a different variety of Chinese and again we want your reaction okay now here we have a speaker from Suzhou and again please listen dogís oh can you understand that if they're Chinese oh yeah well no guess um no I don't think so and now look now look what we have here what about that and had that a shoe you can read it can't you yeah so in all three cases and this is the interesting thing we have the same writing system that unites Chinese and it's varieties the phonology was completely different though thank you very much while the Chinese problem told us quite clearly that we must distinguish between phonology and the orthography now the next problem concerns a language which is often classified as a variety of English but is it really a variety of English do all native speakers of English in the audience understand the following text in Jamaican Creole so here we are another example from the VLC language index a story in Jamaican Creole not with a descended across both which one Adam Changa when then we see one man a calm well wrap up in our sin will look like while winter cloak them decides that the first one we get demanded takeoff include at the chunga one well did you understand it well obviously our problems with the concept of mutual intelligibility so as we've seen with our three example Dutch versus German we have obviously Direction problems of intelligibility as a speaker of Dutch you can understand German but as a speaker of German you can't understand that Dutch then we may have levels of intelligibility that is speech versus writing lexis versus syntax you see in the Jamaican example you may have understood some words as a native speakers of English but the text as a whole was not comprehensible at all and eventually we might have degrees of intelligibility so many communication systems are classified as different languages even though their speakers may understand each other more or less well this is the case for for example the North Germanic languages where speakers of Norwegian Danish and Swedish would readily understand each other so in order to distinguish or to define what a language is we cannot use the criterion of mutual intelligibility as the sole criterion we need something more now what sort of criteria can we use well here they are the first one is standardization now here we have a picture that illustrate this languages involve a certain degree of standardization that is the development of a grammar here we have grammar books in present-day English spelling rules dictionary and in many cases even literature a second criterion for a language to define to be defined is the criterion of vitality this refers to the existence of a living community of speakers thus distinguishing languages which are alive from languages which are dead for example Manx a Celtic language that was formally spoken on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea as compared with Welsh a living language spoken in Wales both are two Celtic languages autonomy the next criterion autonomy is a matter of feeling and us a rather subjective criterion a language must be felt different from other languages but as we've already seen for example with Jamaican Creole this is a matter of degree rather than an all-or-none criterion reduction well that's an interesting criterion that reduced written standards reduced functions in society help to distinguish varieties from standard languages here you see a picture of London now in London there are many speakers of cockney a well-known variety of present-day English but they will certainly admit admit that they are not representative speakers of present-day English and will recognize other varieties as equally subordinate they are using to some extent a reduced variety well then we have norms norms between good and bad where languages normally involve norms varieties don't the speakers of languages have the feeling that they are good or bad speakers and that good speakers as good speakers they represent norms of proper usage for example there are prescriptive rules in present-day English like do not split infinitives do not say to boldly go well we know this is said in a famous movie anyway using these criteria and there are even more criteria such as the historical development of languages does the language have a history or not and their cultures one can define how languages differ from one another and from they're varieties they're sub varieties which many linguists call dialects now in fact there are three main types of variety or dialects both terms variety and dialect are sort of head terms they are considered as head terms for several types of dialect so we have regional dialects social dialects or phonological dialects or variety regional varieties social varieties of phonological varieties now what is a regional dialect indicated here by the Scottish versus English speaker mostly the term dialect is associated with some sort of regional difference between the speakers of a language in English for example we have degrees of rotisserie in words like car where we're looking at the pronunciation of the final are in the phonology we can also look at discourse markers like elements such as you know in British English versus like in American English rotisserie in that is the pronunciation of the post vocalic R is a distinctive criterion for the identification of one's regional background in English speakers from Australia most parts of England have a low degree of rotisserie they would say car the degree of post vocalic are in North America is higher they would say car in North America island and maybe even in Scotland there of course with a different type of R as in car social dialect well when two people speak with one another their language is always influenced by a number of social factors that is for example the role of the speaker and the listener the relationship between them here we have two may be socially differently organized people a mind worker and some sort of well could be some sort of gentlemen with official function and of course when they talk to one another when they talk about a particular topic their varieties influenced by these factors finally we have the phonological dialect here illustrated by two pictures the picture of the Queen indicating received pronunciation versus a picture of a person from North America signaling North American English and there are of course phonological variables that define these two types of phonological varieties and if we only look at the phonology we might even call that accent to give you one criterion that distinguishes these two that is for example the realization of the act class words we're in R P you would have something like class whereas here you would have something like class in many cases it is difficult to distinguish the types of dialect from one another the postulation of a dialect continuum seems to be a reasonable alternative but we'll deal with such a continuum elsewhere