dialects

[邪悪歌]

as our resident dialectologist in training, hashi, I figured you'd have some insight on this at least... I was wondering if we could/should add information about dialects, or, at what point dialects vary enough that they could be given decent enough consideration to provide info about the differences...

[hashi]

It's too hard to accurately define a dialect. Any variation from the standard language could effectively be considered one. Take New Zealand English for example. That in itself is a dialect, but so is Southern New Zealand English as well as Southland (South of the South) New Zealand English. It all depends on the variety of the differences between the accepted standard and the spoken variant.

If you considered New Zealand English a sub-language of English, then Southern, Northern, Southland etc would all be dialects. Similarly you have piles of sub-dialects within American English.

I think its more interesting to talk about where a dialect can be considered a language in itself. I was reading a text the other day actually that talks about standardisation. Already we have an unofficial "standard" of English, or two rather:  British and American. The dialects in the English world are broken into 2 categories: Internal and External. Internal are broken into British-derived and American-derived. The external dialects are the biggest majority and are those spoken as a second language such as Chinglish and Singlish.

Back to standardisation, once an official standard is set up for both British and American English's, it was predicted that the languages would diverge at a much quicker pace. However, for them to achieve a standard, there has to be significant divergence first. Kind of a cyclic process that is slowly splitting the two languages.

</rant>

[邪悪歌]

hehe 
while this is indeed all interesting information, hashi, it doesn't quite answer the question of whether we should/could add information about dialects or "sub-languages" and if so, how it should be done 

[hashi]

hehe 
while this is indeed all interesting information, hashi, it doesn't quite answer the question of whether we should/could add information about dialects or "sub-languages" and if so, how it should be done 

Oh right. Uhmmm, what is there to add? (and if this was purely about wiki addition, should it not be in the cafe forum? )

[邪悪歌]

quite right, so I moved it there 
anyway, I'm saying for example things one might want to add if there is already a main language section is the things that vary between dialects, for example, different grammatical terms, different ways of forming the same morphemes, etc.  It seems that while dialects may not entirely be different languages, some of them are fairly different from the "core" language...

[Ashucky]

Well, I'd say discussing dialects can be interesting, especially if a language has lots of different dialects (according to the official categorization). And like 邪悪歌 said, dialects can be quite different from each other in various terms. Dialects in English generally differ from one another in phonology and some vocabulary but I can understand most of them. An Australian from Sydney would still understand an American from New York pretty good, I think (this is only my assumption, I'm not a native English speaker ). In terms of grammar, English dialects still, for example, form plural by adding -s to a noun.

I can give you examples of Slovene dialects which differ from Standard Slovene in pretty much everything, morphology, syntax, phonology and vocabulary. I can actually understand Russian more than some of Slovene dialects, and I speak two dialects (out of more than 40 or 50 main dialectal groups).

Take for example the word kolo /ko'lo/ 'bicycle' (Standard Slovene), in my native dialect we say bičikleta /bitSi'kleta/ and in the other dialect I speak we say kuolu or kwolu /'kwOlu/. When it comes to declining this noun, the differences are even bigger.