LING 1010 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Mutual Intelligibility, Dialect Continuum
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LING 1010 Full Course Notes
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Document Summary
A dialect is a variety of languages spoken by a group of people that is characterized by systematic differences from other varieties of the same language in terms of structural or lexical features. The colloquial use of the term dialect is really about socio political identity. Politically people in the same country are often considered to speak the same language but different dialects. Scientifically there is no way to distinguish dialects and languages. A dialect has all the properties of a language. In reality, there is no sudden break between dialects rather a dialect continuum. From a cognitive science perspective there is a spectrum: Some languages will be very different from each other, and some will be very similar to each other. Languages/dialects that are closer to each other geographically will be more mutually intelligible than others. Everyone speaks some variety of a language, or a dialect of a language but never a language.
