TWO years ago, a short post on the Johnson blog, called “What is the Chinese language?”, became one of the most commented pieces in the history of Economist.com. Classifying languages is a hot topic, because linguistic and social facts can be hard to disentangle. Last week, we returned to the topic with a piece called “How a dialect differs from a language”, explaining that mutual intelligibility is the most important criterion for language experts. On these grounds, for example, Cantonese and Mandarin are two languages, not two dialects of a single language called Chinese. Once again, many passionate objections appeared in the comments.

One is that speakers of different dialects of English can struggle to understand each other too. Does that make an Irish brogue and an Appalachian twang “languages”? No. But why not? The best answer is that they are very obviously modifications on a standard framework. Through education,…Continue reading

from Prospero http://ift.tt/1dzNgVb
via IFTTT