So, unless you live by an international border, the language you speak in your town is probably the same as the language people speak in the village next door. Yet when you go further afield within the same country, the language might have some distinctions despite being fundamentally the same. A dialect is generally a particular form of a language which is specific to a region or social group and usually has differences in pronunciation, grammar, syntax and vocabulary.
Think of a rainbow. These are varieties of a language that are considered mutually intelligible. This means that speakers of one form of the language can understand speakers of the other form without learning it from scratch. These are languages that, for social, political, or cultural reasons are considered to be less important when compared to a more standard language. Many translators enter into the profession due to a love of languages.
This means that many will be delighted to discover the intricacies of different dialects, with their new terminology and distinctive speech patterns.
As such, dialects have the potential to be hugely frustrating and disruptive in terms of workflow! We set out to answer the question of what the difference is between a language and a dialect. Perhaps we can settle on saying that a dialect is a regional variation of a language, while acknowledging that this is an incredibly simplistic way to view a debate that incorporates everything from geography and history to socio-economic status!
Do you agree? What other insights can you share to help define the differences between a language and a dialect? We would love to hear your thoughts, so please feel free to leave a comment below. Post your Comment. Tomedes Translation Services is committed to broadening the horizons of individuals and businesses in the United States and internationally, through the effective use of professional translation services. Translation Services. Interpretation Services.
Content Writing Services. Professional Proofreading. Testing Services. Globalization Consulting Services. Machine Translation Post-editing. Blog for Translators. Tomedes Insights. Translation News. Supported file formats. Our Translators. Translation Conferences. Customer Reviews. Summary Tool. Word Count Ratio. In , SIL Ethnologue cataloged 7, living human languages. Even these languages have different varieties known as dialects.
Dialect is a version of a language spoken in a particular geographical area or by a particular group of people. This could also be explained as a social or regional variety of a language distinguished by grammar, pronunciation, or vocabulary; this is especially a way of speaking that differs from the standard variety of the language.
For example, Cantonese and Mandarin are often classified as dialects of Chinese. Dialects can be classified into two categories: standard and non-standard.
A standard dialect is a dialect that is approved and supported by institutions. Likewise, non-standard dialects are those that are not supported by institutions. There are sub-dialects within these dialects as well. Speech worked this way from village to village across Western Europe until recently, when unwritten, rural dialects started steadily disappearing.
Now, a typical objection to using literature as the dividing line is that there is oral literature—the Iliad and the Odyssey likely originated as memorized poems. I recall an exquisite exchange I once caught between a man whom Nathan Lane could easily play, wearing an ascot and a long scarf and rather plummy of expression, and a man whom Sacha Baron Cohen would be cast as, straight-backed, earnest, and a little wary.
Nathan asked Sacha what he spoke. However, just about any Native American, Australian Aboriginal, or indigenous African tongue would easily rank among these in terms of difficulty, and actually, many obscure tongues around the world make any language on the FSI list look like a toy.
A language, then, is indeed a dialect with an army and a navy; or, more to the point, a language is a dialect that got put up in the shop window. Yes, people can sit down in a room and decide upon a standardized version of a dialect so that large numbers of people can communicate with maximal efficiency—no more clau , clav , and ciav.
Or, yes, the written dialect will have its words collected in dictionaries.
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