
Why isn't 'American' a Language? - fractalb
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150715-why-isnt-american-a-language
======
nkoren
There is no precise and official way to identify something as a "language"
rather than a "dialect".

For example: there are five major dialects of Hindi, some of which are
mutually unintelligible -- yet few people call them separate languages. On the
other hand, standard Hindi is mutually intelligible with Urdu -- they use
different writing systems, but as spoken languages are roughly as close as
American and British English -- yet they are considered different languages.
Similarly, China has a vast diversity of mutually unintelligible languages --
or, rather, what outsiders call "languages", and what the Chinese government
insists are merely dialects of a single language: "Chinese".

What's going on here? Max Weinreich's quip that "a language is a dialect with
an army and a navy" seems to hit the mark. If Britain and America had not
become allies in the late 19th century, then the ongoing antipathy between
them would have required their speaking systems to be classified as
"languages". But that would have been a political necessity, not a linguistic
one.

As an aside -- as somebody who grew up in America and emigrated at age 31 to
Britain -- I must say that the oft-cited differences in spelling and
pronunciation are the least important areas of divergence. Much more
significant (and confusing) are the idiomatic divergences. For example: in the
UK, people commonly say "are you alright?" as a greeting, equivalent to the
American "how do you do?" or "what's up?". But in American, "are you alright?"
is an expression of serious concern -- something you might say to somebody
walking around in a state of confusion with an apparent head injury. It was
extremely disconcerting when people kept asking me this -- I thought I must be
acting/looking really strange to provoke such continual concern!

~~~
slapshot
To your "dialect with an army and a navy" point, don't forget that in the US a
language is taught called "Serbo-Croatian." In Serbia, it's "Serbian" and is
its own language. In Croatia, it's "Croatian" and it is also a separate
language locally despite being almost entirely mutually intelligible with
speakers of the Serbian form.

(To add to the fun, in the UN it's called "Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-
Serbian", but who's counting?)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_language#Sociopolitic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_language#Sociopolitical_standpoints)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_standard_Bosnian...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_standard_Bosnian,_Croatian_and_Serbian)

~~~
madcaptenor
My wife studied this language once. The department she was studying it in
called it "BCS" (for Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian); she eventually just took to
calling it "Bosnifuckit".

------
hellofunk
French is also spoken very very differently in various regions of the world...
Haiti, France, Quebec, Africa. German too has significant variations. Does
that mean each dialect should be considered a unique language? My take is that
if two people can communicate with each other in the same "language,"
regardless of where they are from, then it really is the "same language."

~~~
Alphasite_
It's not that simple, as far as I know Hindi and Urdu are effectively the same
language when spoken, with some small divergences but use a different
character set. How would regard that?

~~~
olavk
I don't believe linguists consider the writing system as part of the language
as such. Multiple languages have shifted writing systems for convenience or
political reasons without the language itself changing.

------
dimitar
The point of the article is not that there is an American language, but that
there could have been one if Americans (and the British) chose to and allowed
AE to diverge significantly more from BE. People often consciously choose what
words to use.

In the end practical reasons - trade, business and mutual cultural influence
kept the language from splitting up.

------
spleen
Vocabulary constitutes a language "façade" and it is often interpreted as the
key differentiating factor between languages. Most linguists agree that the
language is based in grammar and rules for creating sentences.

That being said, official AE and BE are pretty much identical and the same
rules apply on both sides of the Atlantic. It is only logical that different
words are used, because of the different contexts that people live in, but
that doesn't mean that AE and BE are distinct languages.

~~~
rikkus
There are minor differences in spelling and vocabulary between British and US
English, but there are also differences in grammar, so I consider en_US and
en_GB to be quite different - enough that I always push for translations for
applications, where the differences in grammar are as important as those in
spelling and vocabulary.

Here are some excellent examples:

[http://www.onestopenglish.com/grammar/grammar-
reference/amer...](http://www.onestopenglish.com/grammar/grammar-
reference/american-english-vs-british-english/differences-in-american-and-
british-english-grammar-article/152820.article)

~~~
wink
Slightly related: Is the Oxford comma mostly a BE thing or just a style thing
that's used by x% of the English speakers everywhere?

~~~
dragonwriter
It's mostly a thing used by people who don't like ambiguity.

~~~
redblacktree
The oxford comma does not guarantee a list to be unambiguous. [0]

> But the serial comma can also create ambiguity. Consider the following
> adjusted version of the dedication [discussed in the preceding paragraph]:
> To my mother, Ayn Rand [,] and God. With the serial comma, the reader could
> understand the dedication as meaning either that the book is dedicated three
> ways or that the book is dedicated to the writer’s mother, who happens to be
> Ayn Rand, and to God. Omitting the serial comma makes the latter meaning
> less likely.

[0]: [http://www.adamsdrafting.com/the-serial-comma-can-cause-
ambi...](http://www.adamsdrafting.com/the-serial-comma-can-cause-ambiguity/)

~~~
dragonwriter
That's not a particularly good example, since you have the same ambiguity
between the use of commas to set off non-restrictive appositives and the use
of commas to separate list items, it still occurs in lists where the ambiguity
is between four (or more) elements with no appositive or three (or more)
elements, one of which has a non-restrictive appositive attached.

You can't really eliminate that source of potential ambiguity in isolated
excerpts, only in larger works or bodies of work by adopting consistent
practices that go beyond whether or not you use the Oxford comma (mostly,
structuring sentences so that if one or more items in a list needs a non-
restrictive appositive, it is either just the last item -- which is already
set off with a conjunction whether or not it also has the Oxford comma
preceding it, so the following appositive is unambiguously not a list item) or
using parentheses rather than commas for non-restrictive appositives attached
to list items (which is clearer even for two item lists, where item-separating
commas, Oxford or otherwise, don't actually come into play.)

------
wieckse
American English and Brittish are not different languages, 99% of the words
are the same or similar.

~~~
odiroot
A source for that? I would be surprised it was actually 99%.

~~~
yoz-y
It is probably even more.

~~~
iopq
Depends on how you count, if you count all words, then it would be much much
more than that, like 99.99% because of very specialized words like
"mononitrate" and the like.

But in common use I wouldn't be surprised if it was 98% or less

consider words like "pissed", "pants", "suspenders", "fag", "chips",
"bisquit", "jelly", "pavement", etc.

they mean different things in British and American English, even though
etymologically they come from the same source

~~~
duncanawoods
>> But in common use I wouldn't be surprised if it was 98% or less

I would. One bit of evidence against this is the amount of the Extra's script
Ricky Gervais had to rerecord for an American audience. Most of the change was
for unshared cultural references (local food brands etc.) and only a couple
for words (fanny).

Due to the level of exposure, I believe the difference between generic Brit
and generic US is less than the dialects within the countries e.g. older
generations of Yorkshire vs. Cornish, Glaswegian vs. Cockney etc. can suffer
great difficulties understanding each other.

The number of unshared words is much higher, methods of denotation and
sentence construction are different and even the pronunciation of shared words
become unrecognisable (I'm not a linguist, so open to correction). I'm sure
there are similar extremes in the US.

~~~
jaimebuelta
There's also the fact that, due AE being all the time in the TV, the average
Brit can understand it much better than the other way around. A lot of
americanisms are favoured by not-so-young people.

They were complains of American fans not understanding Peter Capaldi as the
new Doctor, as he has a (VERY understandable) Scottish accent.

~~~
duncanawoods
I wonder to what extent American dialects are objectively easier to understand
because they are the younger result of synthesising existing languages\accents
rather than a UK dialect that has diverged due to isolation.

~~~
iopq
They're easier to understand because of Hollywood. If the United Kingdom made
all the movies, everyone would think American dialects are really hard to
understand.

Besides, nobody understands Southerners anyway.

------
eyko
For the same reason that Argentinian, Mexican, Colombian, Canadian, Ghanaian,
Singaporean, Australian, Ivorycoastian, Nigerian, Brazilian, etc are not
languages, but dialects.

Regardless of what Max Weinreich may have said (which was more of a
political/philosophical statement than an academic one, and he didn't even
coin the phrase), the variation between english dialects is not enough to call
it a language.

Some pidgins are considered languages: they're spoken as lingua franca by
large populations and is quite different from English.

~~~
wink
From my limited knowledge Brazilian Portuguese seems to be a lot more
different from European Portuguese than AE differs from BE.

------
jkot
I dont know about English, but there was not common French language until 20th
century. Several dialects were united during WW I and latter with radio and
television.

------
gambiting
When Czechoslovakia split into Slovakia and the Czech Republic, they also
split the languages into two, even though they are virtually identical.

~~~
iopq
That's not true, otherwise it wouldn't be called "Czechoslovakia" \- the name
itself implies there's a Czechia and a Slovakia

~~~
gambiting
What isn't true? That the two languages are incredibly similar? There's less
difference between them than between American and British English. Some words
are pronounced differently, and they have different words for certain things,
but it's no different than Americans saying elevators and British people
saying lifts. Same thing.

~~~
yoz-y
This is actually not true. The two languages are incredibly similar but
nevertheless quite different. Quite more so than American and British English.
They are different to the point where many young Czechs do not actually
understand Slovak very well (well, this is a bit exaggerated, however I was
surprised by kids that were just staring at me until I started speaking in
Czech when asking for directions). Slovak people tend to speak Czech somewhat
better because they are (or at least were) exposed to the language more. At
least in my time no movies, books etc. were translated to Slovak.

Czech and Slovak have also quite a lot of differences in grammar (for example
Czech have one more case in their declination system).

------
jcrei
Considering the differences between Brazilian Portuguese and "European"
Portuguese, it makes more sense to ask "Why isn't Brazilian a language". Then
again, there are recent efforts to make all Portuguese languages around the
globe more similar

------
CmonDev
Well, if every colony will have it's own language - how many will you have for
no good reason?

~~~
iso8859-1
"Good reason"? It is a question of definition. If your reasoning makes you
define it as a dialect and not a language, what have you gained? It doesn't
matter.

------
ZeroGravitas
This seems the counter-example to the old "What's the difference between a
language and a dialect? A language has a navy" observation.

------
tokenadult
Thanks for submitting the interesting popular article on a perennial topic of
discussion. The subheading of the article begins with "Britain and the US
share a common language – but English is spoken and spelled very differently
on each side of the Atlantic." Spelling, first of all, is largely irrelevant,
because native speakers of English all over the world often coped without
standardized spellings and sometimes still do, and anyway can usually read one
another's spellings with understanding. How "very different" the speech of the
United States is from the speech of Britain is a matter of distinguishing how
different is different enough to be a problem.

I read the other comments here before typing out this comment. As several of
the comments say, distinguishing different varieties of speech as "dialects"
rather than "languages" is often a matter of politics rather than a matter of
linguistics. It happens that I was one of the Wikipedians who was active in
updating the Wikipedia article "English language"[1] earlier this year so that
it is now a "good article" by Wikipedia's article rating criteria. For years,
there were all kinds of stupid edit wars on that article by editors who didn't
bother to look up or read any sources, but when several Wikipedians agreed to
look up sources together and check what the sources actually say, we reached
consensus about how to improve the article. The main point about the English
language is that it has a very large speech community with high mutual
comprehensibility spread all over the globe. The spread around the globe came
first from trade, migration, and colonization, but even after the British
Empire dissolved, the spread of English has been maintained by
telecommunications, travel, broadcasting, film, book publishing, study abroad,
and the efforts of many national governments of non-English-speaking countries
to promote knowledge of English through formal schooling and government
administration. The majority of people who use English day-by-day now are not
descendants of English settlers who live in the "inner circle" of English-
speaking countries. When we consider that railroads, the telegraph, the
telephone, voice radio broadcasting, passenger airplanes, and talking motion
pictures were all invented in English-speaking countries, and were used in
international communication as early for United States-to-Britain
communication as for international communication between any other country
pairs, it is not surprising that English has stayed remarkably homogeneous
across the vast territory of the United States and has even stayed mutually
comprehensible despite the political separation of the United States and
Britain. Like the majority of my ancestors (I have only a little English
ancestry, from which I gain my family name), most Americans are descended
mostly from people who did NOT speak English when they arrived in North
America, but who learned English to communicate with one another as residents
of the United States. My two maternal grandparents were both born in Great
Plains states of the United States, but their schooling (only primary
schooling) was conducted entirely in the German language, and they learned
English as a second language as native-born United States citizens to interact
with neighbors.

There were earlier comments in this thread about Chinese. Absolutely,
positively the different Sinitic languages are distinct languages, not
mutually comprehensible, and it does violence to the English usage of the term
"dialect" to refer to Mandarin and to Cantonese as "dialects" of Chinese. I
speak Modern Standard Chinese fluently and have worked for many years as a
Chinese-English interpreter. I have also studied Taiwanese, Cantonese, and
Hakka (listed in decreasing order of proficiency). Mandarin and Cantonese are
more distinct, in several respects, than English is from German or than French
is from Spanish. Calling both Mandarin and Cantonese "dialects of Chinese" is
simply a matter of the politics of China denying linguistic reality.

The distinctions among Sinitic languages as distinct languages apply even if
you write them down in Chinese characters. Chinese characters still represent
speech (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to
the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story
about this can be found in the books _The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy_
[2] or _Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems_ [3] by the
late John DeFrancis or the book _Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of
Disembodied Meaning_ [4] by J. Marshall Unger. The book _Reading in the Brain:
The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention_ [5] by Stanislas Dehaene is a
very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural
perspective.

I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than
they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might
write the conversation

"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?

"No, he doesn't."

他會說普通話嗎？

他不會。

in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write

"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?

"No, he doesn't."

佢識唔識講廣東話？

佢唔識。

in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even
to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin"
and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.

Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are
essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard
Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of
other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to
Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links
Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically
Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-
DeFranci...](http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-
DeFrancis/dp/0824810686/)

[3] [http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-
Comp...](http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-
Comparisons/dp/0824812077/)

[4] [http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-
Disembodie...](http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodied-
Meaning/dp/0824827600/)

[5] [http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-
orange.fr/intro.htm](http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm)

------
elnygren
Well, "Asian" or "European" or "African" are not languages either. Why would
"American" be? ;)

~~~
learc83
The accepted English demonym for inhabitants of the United States of _America_
is American. It has been this way for 200 years. We call ourselves American,
and every English speaking country calls us American.

The only measure of correctness for language is use, and when speaking in
English, American is only commonly used in one way--in English, American is
almost universally unambiguous. No other country name contains the word
America, and no one else commonly refers to themselves as American _in
English_.

I don't go around telling Colombians they can't call themselves Colombians
because Columbia is another name for the Americas. It's also not a problem
here because we don't recognize one American continent.

Who refers to themselves by continent anyway? In what sense is it useful to
identify to yourself as someone who lives somewhere in _the entire western
hemisphere_? There is also no common language, race, ethnicity, or culture
that unifies North and South America.

~~~
satori99
>Who refers to themselves by continent anyway?

 __ _satori99_ __Waves hello from Australia :)

~~~
learc83
Ha :) But are you really referring to yourself as being from the continent or
the country?

By the way, do people from New Guinea get on your case about calling
yourselves Australian (since it is part of the continent), like South
Americans do to us?

~~~
satori99
I haven't ever met anyone from PNG, but I'll be sure to ask when I do!

