So it says here you speak five languages? Yeah I speak American, Canadian eh, Australian mate, Irish and English of course Why are some ways of speaking called
languages while others are called dialects? People sometimes use the words interchangeably
but they're not exactly the same thing. You might have heard this saying
from Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich: A language is a dialect with an army
and a navy, and there's truth to that. Deciding what qualifies as a
language is pretty political. Sometimes the only thing that differentiates two languages is a border.
Take Scandinavia for example. Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are
pretty much mutually intelligible, but they're considered three separate languages.
Then there are the languages spoken in China, which are often lumped together under
a single label, but Chinese covers a huge number of local dialects, many of
which are not mutually intelligible. Needless to say, the classification of
languages and dialects is not an exact science. In fact, linguists often prefer to
avoid the terms completely because they can contain value judgments.
Dialects are often associated with "improper" speech, even though
they're just as valid as languages. You can skip the whole issue by just
calling everything a variety instead, which is popular in academic papers Oh yeah yeah that's what I
meant, I speak five varieties But for most people, dialects
are a subset of language. And if we want to throw accents into
the mix, an accent is part of a dialect. It's how a group of people pronounces words, like Ello govenah While a dialect refers to
vocabulary and grammar as well. Listen bruv, I was sat on the tube with
a cuppa and blimey there's the Queen! Make sense? So English is a language, American is a dialect,
and this is an accent: I'm walking here!