Another thing with Scots vs English is that english people assume there is much more mutual eligibility than there actually is, because typically scottish people speak a combination of both languages simultaneously. This is why so many believe Scots to be a dialect or a collection of slang.
Obviously there is still a ton of mutual eligibility, but not enough to understand an entire conversation outside of very basic stuff without already having some knowledge of Scots.
Thank you, this is often the case with varieties thought of as more similar than they actually are. Lack of prestige causes people not to speak their native language around the language with more prestige, using its more "pure" forms amongst each other. I.e. you can understand them when they speak to you, but not when they speak to each other
@@mattybrunolucaszeneresalas9072 doric is a dialect of scots, "regular" scots and doric shares loads of words that not common to English, to the point where if you speak scots you can understand doric much better than you could with english alone, and vice versa. It's the same for other dialects like Glaswegian, Dundonian etc. but to a lesser extent - although tbh in recent years all variations of scots have melded together somewhat
I've always wondered about this. When Yugoslavia disintegrated a few new languages emerged. Not because people suddenly started speaking differently but because they wanted to distinguish themselves from people from the other countries.
In my opinion, this is almost exclusively for political reasons in the cases of Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Serbia - they can understand each other with no issue (I think linguists identify this language as Serbo-Croatian and I think it was identified as such during Yugoslavia as well), probably the most noticeable difference being: 1) Serbia uses: ekavica (mleko/milk, dete/child, reč/word) 2) Dalmatia (coastal Croatia) uses ikavica (mliko, dite,) 3) The rest use ijekavica (mlijeko, dijete, riječ) Slovenia, Macedonia, and Kosovo all have their own langauges - with Kosovo being Albanian which is not a Slavic language as the rest of ex-Yugo
The thing to keep in mind is that most of the Yugoslavian constituents had their own (long) history before Yugoslavia was ever a thing. It's not just that they were trying to differentiate between each other, they merely continued their independent identity that was present prior to Yugoslavia. As similar and mutually inteligeble these languages can be (speaking specifically for the Serbo-Croatian case being split into Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin), they have meaningful functional differences besides the question of identity and culture. For example, Croatian uses exclusively the latin script for their language. Serbian uses both latin and cyrillic. You could equate the two as the same language, except while Serbians can read both scripts, Croatians literally do not know how to read the cyrillic script (other than the identical glyphs of course) unless they specifically go out of their way to learn it. If you can't read a language, is it really the same language? A lot of vocabulary is different between these languages too. You will have general mutual intelligibility, but that falls apart when you can't immediately infer from the context what a certain word or even whole sentence means. This might not be as big of a problem in every day life as you can always explain in other familiar terms what the meaning is, but this is severely impractical for any institutional purposes like schools and laws. Standardization here helps a ton and it makes more sense to classify your own "dialect" as your own language and bake it into the system to ensure consistency across the territory. It just simplifies things, especially because a lot of the vocabulary also has subtle differences like ekavica, ijekavica and such like the previous comment explains. Overall, there are enough meaningful differences both in practical and cultural reasons that makes these languages distinct from each other that aren't just a pride thing. Thus, this should be respected by foreigners even if it looks all the same to them.
@@mrgalaxy396the division of these languages is completely arbitrary because even within these 'separate' languages the differences in vocab dont always align with the country it comes from... especially since the standardised forms of all these 'languages' are all based on the exact same dialect: neo-shtokavian. the idea that the people of these nations are simply embracing their differences that were from before yugoslavia is just not true because the linguistic differences between these peoples dont reflect their nations. not to mention that fact that you are exxagerating the differences between these 'languages'. the difference in vocabulary is insanely minute.. the differences between english of separate countries is larger than the difference of these 'languages'. the small differences in spelling (and pronounciation) reflecting the divergence of proto slavic *ě is not a big enough reason to classify these as completely different languages. american english spells and sometimes pronounces many words differently from british english: pronounciation vs pronunciation, color vs colour. you can have standardised dialects, its not impossible to have a standardised serbian bosnian and croatian without having to divide them into languages. as well as the arguement that 'if you cant read it, is it really the same language' falls apart really quickly when you consider for example diaspora arabs who cant read the arabic script but can read and write a transliteration of it. the idea that these languages only emerged as languages because of politics is completely true
People didn't suddenly start speaking differently. They just wanted to distance themselves from one another. Croatians and Bosnians felt threatened by the influence of Serbia so they desperately tried to get rid of any instance of Serbian culture as soon as they broke away from Yugoslavia, rational or not. It even got to the point where movies made in Serbia would be dubbed or had subtitles in "Croatian" or "Bosnian" even though it was almost entirely intelligible.
@@mrgalaxy396 That is only the case between Croatians and Serbians. The rest - Bosnians, Montenegrins, Macedonians and Kosovars* (illegitimate country + non-Slavic people) only popped up in the later half of the 20th century after Tito's division.
Yep, like how species is a fuzzy term, just like language. Even the generally excepted definition, like they need to be able to make fertile offspring with one another has exceptions. Polar bears and grizzlies can make fertile offspring, Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals.
@@tonydai782The same goes for coyotes, wolves, and dogs, too. They can all interbreed and produce fertile offspring, yet we consider them (wolves and coyotes) separate species, and tbh I agree with that call. I think it just goes to show that just because distinctions can sometimes be fuzzy, and not 100% based on objective, standardized, clear-cut guidelines, it doesn't mean those distinctions are meaningless, or not worth making.
I’m a native Faroese speaker, and we learn Danish in school. I’m much better at understanding all Norwegian dialects compared to the average Dane, because Faroese and Icelandic are descendants of the Norse language of the variety spoken in the west coast of Norway, and together with me being fluent in Danish makes me understand Norwegian almost as well as Danish, even though I’ve never studied Norwegian. When I was a kid, before I was completely fluent in Danish, I sometimes accidentally read books that were Norwegian thinking I was reading a Danish book, without any issue. I remember one specific time, I was halfway through a book and then realized that the book was Norwegian, after maybe 100 pages, lol. I wasn’t the best at spelling back then, so I didn’t notice the spelling difference of many of the words.
For any Danish person that can read, Norwegian bokmål is quite easy to read. You'll only now and then see an atypical word or sentence. Nynorsk, on the other hand, can be quite challenging, but should pose less of a problem to a Faroese.
@@Aodericnynorsk and faroese are very closely related and i noticed that i understand faroese and icelandic (atleast writen) much better after i started learning nynorsk. Might not be surprising because faroese, nynorsk and icelandic are all west-norse languages, but bokmål, danish and swedish are east-norse.
Besides swedish, i really do think that faroese and norwegian are actually the two closest languages to each other, you can see that with nynorsk which was more or less created the same way that the faroese writen language was, we can see that they are very much alike, even to the point that i can read faroese news articles with very little problem, i struggle slightly more with spoken faroese, but not much more than i do with spoken danish. The thing i noticed most that is different with nynorsk and faroese is that faroese has a slightly more conservative grammar, and you also kept the ð which norwegian is general just replaced with a d.
I gotta say, as someone from western Norway, i think it moreso comes down to the fact that you've learned Danish, and Norwegian just happens to be pretty similar to Danish, but is often a bit more clearly spoken. I experience something similar with Portuguese (which I'm somewhat fluent in). Even though Portuguese is the language I've learned, i sometimes find it easier to understand Spanish, simply because Spanish is often more clearly enunciated than Portuguese. Because I gotta say, whether spoken or written, I find it extremely more difficult to understand Faroese than Danish, so i don't believe Faroese and Norwegian are the most similar.
@@mathiasseljebotnerdal8700 as a person from South Norway i struggle a lot more with understanding spoken danish than i do with writen faroese. With spoken it's about the same for both of them. However swedish is the one language i can understand without much issue, and pretty much everyone agree that swedish and norwegian are the two closest, but i think faroese is tied with danish for being the second closest.
Where you live in Norway also makes a difference in what other Scandinavian languages you understand. I live in a place close to Sweden, some words we only use here are very similar to Swedish, and people here usually understand Swedish much better than a person from Bergen or Oslo. Southern dialects of Norwegian are also more similar to Danish.
@@johan.ohgren Jamtlandic is or at least was a Norwegian dialect (3 gender system of western nordic), while Norwegian Bokmål is just Norwegianized Danish.
Yup. Unlike most other Swedes I can somehow understand Danish better than Norwegian, which I think is because of the structure of sentences rather than similar sounds
Makes sense why I have an easier time to understand southern Norwegians than northern. Had some Norwegian classmates who said they understood me better because I'm from Copenhagen than my other classmates who was from different parts of Jutland, due to we have different dialects.
As a person who speaks standard hindi. I can completely understand a Urdu speaker without any problem while i cant completely understand haryanvi person. while urdu and hindi are considered different languages while haryanvi is considered as dialect of hindi. Hindi is completely based on prakrit languague(prakrit is vulgar version of sanskrit) while urdu is 90% prakrit(structure and grammer) and 10% turkish,persian,arabic words
Prakrit is/was a set if languages, not just one language. Hindi mostly descends from Sauraseni prakrit, but bhojpuri, which is legally considered hindi descends from magadhi prakrit.
Prakrit is not a "vulgar" version of Sanskrit. It is a group of Middle Indo Aryan languages that developed in Parallel with Vedic Language. Even the oldest scriptures such as Rigveda contain traces of Prakrits. Which means the Prakrits are just as old as Vedic which the predecessor of (Classical) Sanskrit.
I am assuming that the Hindi-Urdu situation is the same as the Malayalam-Tamil-Telugu situation. Spoken language is understandable and sentence structure is similar. But writing is completely different and some words get extremely confusing.
@@hsihdbssbcjtzksk7426 Everyday speech is basically the same, it's the literary registers that are artificially "Sanskritized" for Hindi and "Arabo-Persianized" for Urdu.
@@hsihdbssbcjtzksk7426 No you cannot compare those examples. For context Tamil is my native language, have inetracted with Telugu, Urdu, Malayalam a lot, can talk like a 5 year old in Hindi but still understand 90 per cent of it. Telugu: Can't understand most of it because of classical Sanskrit influence and it's own dravidian deviations. Like I might hear something familiar every 10 or 20 words. And even then I will have to squint my ears. Malayalam: From a Tamil perspective, I can get a general gist but there is still significant vocabulary differences that don't make them similiar the same way Urdu and Hindi is. Tho I have heard that Mallus have easier time understanding us than vice versa. And I am saying this as someone who was surrounded by Mallus and so know more Malayalam words than your average Tamil. Urdu: I can understand it the same level I am able to understand Hindi tho I do hear or recognize slight differences (due to the higher Persian/Arabic influence) I hope my own experiences gave new perspectives. Tho the fact that you brought those up makes me think you know at least 1 Dravidian language.
Once upon a time I did a little research for school on an endangered language: Ainu. It only has around ten native, fluent speakers, all tribal elders. The are variants of the language that are not mutually intelligible, those being Hokkaido Ainu (which is the only spoken variant), Sakhalin Ainu (of which the last speaker died in 1994), and Kuril Ainu (which is long gone). The Ainu people spread to different areas in and surrounding Japan, and brought their language with them. It evolved greatly after different groups were separated.
Amazing video! I’m Chinese and I always try to tell people that Mandarin speakers in itself can not understand each other, let alone including other LANGUAGES like Cantonese, hokkien, shanghainese, fujianese, etc
Yeah but that's not what the government wants us to believe 😔 (I'm Cantonese and I've had to live with this discourse about my mother tongue my whole life)
Didn't mandarin just "constructed" for common use (I know it is heavily inspired by those from Beijing)? From my experience if you are school-educated (or you got the national language certificate for Mandarin) you should (for the most part, unless you are using idioms derived from local dialects) understand each other without much resistance when communicating in Mandarin
@@yty1941 yes, Mandarin is the lingua franca in China, if your native tongue isn’t Mandarin then you would to some degree have to learn/understand it (especially in school and cities) But people who don’t speak any s’initie language often talk about how they’re all dialects or accents when they’re unintelligible
Fun fact: not all languages are two-side mutually intelligible. A Ukrainian speaker can understand a Russian speaker fairly easily, while a Russian speaker has difficulty understanding a Ukrainian speaker. Rhis is partially due to cultural reasons, but also because Ukrainian has a lot of Russian words that are considered taboo or juat aren't used, while alot of the Ukrainian lexicon doesn't appear in Russian outside of borderland dialects.
що? які "російські" слова в нас є в мові, але не використовуються? це ж оксюморон - якщо щось не використовується носіями, то цього *немає* в мові. а в росіянскькій купа слів як раз з нашим походженням - прапорщик, очки, дума ітд. це якщо не враховувати, що базовий "спільний" лексикон, типу всіляких мам, хлібів та котів, в Київській Русі використовувався віками ще до появи Москви. тому це скоріше вони нашими (не тільки нашими, очевидно, а також попередників інших західно та південно слов'янських народів) словами користуються, а не ми їхніми. якщо ви, звісно, не маєте на увазі "товариш" та "колхоз" як російські слова. а так, згодна з попереднім коментатором - ми русифіковані, ще 10 років тому в жодному місті України не можна було комфортно жити без знання російської. Казахи чи грузини теж російську розуміють - що, теж мови в них схожі?
Same with Maghred Arabic speakers who can understand Egyptian Arabic, but Egyptians have a hard time understanding a Moroccan. This is because most movies are in Egyptian Arabic, so people have to get used to that dialect. And also in many other countries. All people in Bavaria understand standard German, but people from the North (Lower Saxony for instance) cannot understand Bavarian dialect.
Brilliant video! Although to be fair scotland also has gaelic, which is definitely it's own language, separate from English! (Although not many speak it anymore)
@@FilipSrbinEnglish is still Germanic not barely. Influence on a language doesn’t make it change language families. If for example Polish was heavily Germanised and 80% of the words in this hypothetical Polish would be flat out from German, it would still be Slavic due to the genetic relationship and the fact the language. If the people identified as seperate from the Germans that would still credit tit for being a language. This is a heavy oversimplification on my part. But a language cannot change language families.
As a Ukrainian, I can almost fully understand Belarusan, our languages fully separated only a few centuries ago. I find this language very beautiful and I love it. It's a shame almost no one uses Belarusan anymore as it is replaced by Russian by a pro-Russian dictatorship in the country.
@@lisaanimi Polish is from a completely different branch of the Slavic family than Russian and Belarusian. A Slavic speaker well versed in speaking "common" (someone who grew up around many different Slavic languages) will generally be able to communicate across the boundary, but apparently to general speakers the differences between East Slavic (Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Rusyn) and West Slavic (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Lusatian, Kashubian, Moravian) and South Slavic (Slovenian, Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian, Bulgarian) are insurmountable and the languages are not mutually intelligible. At least that's the vibes I get from people when I tell them that they should really have no problem understanding eachother lmao
Yeah, I'm Indonesian therefore i speak Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) but an Indonesian person and a Malaysian person could pretty much understand each other, cause Bahasa Indonesia is a descends from Melayu, what's interesting though, is that some Sumatran dialects are much closer to Melayu than it is to some Papuan dialects, anyways great video!
Btw gw mau bilang, gw kadang ga paham org melayu ngomong apa. Karena emg bahasanya udah beda jauh bgt. Btw soal bahasa Indonesia, bahasa Indonesia punya dua jenis. ada bahasa formal dan bahasa gaul (yg didasarkan dari dialek Jakarta). Keduanya beda. Itulah sebabnya bule yg belajar bahasa Indonesia di negaranya pas datang ke Indonesia ga bisa komunikasi karena org Indonesia berbicara pake dialek Jakarta, ragam gaulnya, bahkan di sekolah pun pakenya yg itu
Not even surprised by the second fact you mentioned lol, of course Indonesian is a literary standard of Malay, the Malay people are from that area, far from Papua. Papua is just a territory under central Indonesian control, like Puerto Rico or Hawaii under American control, and Tibet/Xinjiang under Chinese control. But that's fine, if you are able to instill a sense of Indonesian nationalism in the west Papaun people then you have won and there's no objection to be made, it's fair and it's just how it is, empires have to grow this way or they can't grow.
I remember when I was a kid, all the languages in my country (apart from the main one spoken in and around the capital) were just considered dialects, despite them not being mutually intelligible. I'm glad they changed it because it only reeks of superiorism of one ethnic group. This is also why the line between languages and dialects are so blurry. We need to rethink how we see languages and dialects
Exactly, there’s so many stories about language erasure because languages were considered improper “dialects” and not languages in their own right. It’s heartening to see the tides are largely changing nowadays
I don't understand when people say "in my country", and then proceed not to say which country is in question. Can you say which country you're talking about, please?
An important thing to note is stnadardization. Hindi and Urdu are not mutually intelligible on paper because they can not be read the same way. The official language of almost all Arabic speaking countries is Modern Standard Arabic which is the same through all countriss in written form. But the spoken language is standardized.
Mutual intelligibility means how well can you understand each other when you speak. Hindi and Urdu speakers have no problem understanding each other as they're speaking pretty the same dialect of Western Hindustani, with some vocabulary changes in the standard languages(use of Persian and Arabic loanwords vs use of Sanskrit loanwords)
on the topic if scandinavian languages, especially Norwegian has a ton of dialects that sometimes have different grammar rules. these dialects are sometimes so different that it's almost like a seperate scandinavian language all together
Definitely. A Faroese speaker will understand a Norwegian from Bergen way better than one from Oslo. And a Swedish speaker will understand a Norwegian from Oslo way better than one from Trondheim. Then there's Älvdalsk which if you ask me is somewhere between Norwegian and Swedish. Almost like an old version of Norwegian that got influenced more and more by Swedish over hundreds of years, which is completely unconfirmed but wouldn't be too far-fetched considering it's literally on the border between the two geographically
the last point is true to some extent because croatian bosnian and serbian are considered separate by their respective speakers despite the fact they are only actually separated by some minor phonological differences and some minor vocabulary. in the case of serbocroatian its very clear its one language as each of its forms are identical in 99% of its aspects. its like saying american english and british (also the added meaning of 'serbian' not being one variety, same with british not being one variety) are separate languages even though they are from different countries. one could argue that these forms of english are even more different from each other than the varieties of serbo croatian. if we are calling serbian and croatian separate languages then we should definitely consider american and british different languages
'Serbian', 'Croatian' and 'Bosnian' aren't nearly different enough to be classified as different languagues - you're rigjt on that. But you're not right on what you said about British dialects being more different from one another than Yugoslav dialects. Even though the standard versions of these 'languages' are almost the same, the local dialects can differ a lot. Not only between Serbian and Croatian dialects, for example, but even between two Croatian dialects. It's not different enough to the point of being completely unintelligible, but the words and pronunciations are very different depending on which region you are in. Here in Belgrade, it is common for people to not understand folks from Pirot or generally the south due to their accents being so foreign. It's like the difference between Southern English and Scottish accents, they're the same language when written, but spoken, they're very different, except that in the case of Belgrade and Pirot lots of words are different too. Yap session over
I’d say with standardised serbo-Croatian clusterfuck which is entirely based on štokavian is one language. Issue for me is the fact that 2 other things are generally included. Chakavian and Kajkavijan. Kajkavijan is closer to Slovene and Chakavian is its own thing.
@@Entety303 i honestly somewhat agree with this, especially with kajkavian because some people think that kajkavian is more genetically related. of course most linguists for simplicity call it a dialect continuum (like arabic) kajkavian > čakavian > štokavian > torlakian
For example, Italian dialects are actually languages, but it's like Arabic. I speak Barese "dialect" and I can try to understand someone speaking Napoletano (it would be difficult, tho), but I can't understand someone who speaks Milanese, even if I tried to
also, lots of italian “dialects” aren’t closely related to italian. venetian, for example, is more closely related to french or catalan than it is to italian.
I feel like that even makes sense to me as a foreigner. Bari and Napoli are relatively close to each other on each coast, while Milano is the almost exact opposite end of the country, with miles upon miles seperating it from either of the two others.
@@creppruby Interesting! I've heard Catalan is similar to Occitan (in France) which is similar to Romansch (in Switzerland). If accurate, that would mean there is (or was) a horizontal continuum from Catalonia all the way to Venezia
@@oivinfyeah i’m from liguria and i think that most northern italian dialects are in some ways similar to french and catalan, i once went to catalonia and basically had no issues with the language, spanish is usually pretty easy to understand for italians but catalan was even easier even though i don’t really speak genoese(the dialect spoken in liguria) that well but i can understand it ps a thing that really surprised me was the fact that in catalan the X is pronounced the same as in genoese, we kinda pronounce it like someone would pronounce the J in “je” in french, which is kinda weird since i’m not sure it’s pronounced like that in any other italian dialect
One thing to also keep in consideration is that two people groups understanding each other well can also have been influenced by how exposed they are to each other. In Scandinavia, we're exposed to each other's languages a lot. You'll see actors and other celebrities from each country show up talking their own language in the other countries' entertainment industries. You'll see people move around the 3 countries (aided by mutual freedom of movement), so we meet each other fairly frequently. In the store shelves you'll sometimes see products with just 1 of the languages represented, or they'll have a mix of the languages. This makes it so that even sentences in a different Scandinavic language with very few words in common with your own, can still be understood because you've been slowly exposed to that language all your life. Yes, our languages are closely related, but if someone had learned Norwegian without actually growing up here, i wouldn't see it as guaranteed that they'd also have a good comprehension of Swedish or Danish (and even more so in regards to certain dialects).
Same in Croatia, we understand some serbian, bosnian or even slovenian words not because we use them but because we have been exposed to those languages
I think causality is much more the other way around. BECAUSE the languages are so similar and have common origins, people are able to speak to each other in 2 different languages without issue. ...although of course, the languages are probably similar because the region always had a lot of cultural exchange... Just saying though, going to a country with a different language and easily communicating without knowing the local language and without locals knowing yours already necessitates a very high similarity between the languages EDIT: Forgot to mention I speak some Swedish, and reading Norwegian and Danish are about the same difficulty as Swedish for me. Although listening to Danish is HARD!
czech and slovak (which are, for most purposes mutually intelligible) used to be considered two dialects of one czechoslovak language from 1920 (early first republic)to depending on the source either the 30s or 40s (i am not sure which, but both seem plausible due to the events which happened in these decades). I think this is a great example of how what counts as a language and a dialect can be a political issue more than a linguistic one
During about the same period the official language of Yugoslavia was "Serbo-Croato-Slovenian" (Srpsko-hrvatsko-slovenački). The pan-Slavists went a bit ham in that period.
@@2712animefreak I mean all the slavic languages are basically the same thing right _insert footage of me in poland a couple months ago struggling to keep up with what I was being told by people half the time here_
Yeah, it’s funny for myself that those two are considered separate languages when I was told by a Czech former friend that it’s like the difference between American and British English, and from others online that Czech and Slovak are like 95% intelligible. Reason is that being Chinese, Chinese was always referred to like a single language when Mandarin and Fuzhounese* (my family regional speak) are both Chinese “dialects” and are practically unintelligible from each other, like 95%+ unintelligible. It is even possible (according to Wikipedia lol) that people who both claim to speak Fuzhounese won’t understand each other, because the region is mountainous so I am guessing it was easier to form separate ways of saying things over time. For this reason I think of the Chinese “dialects” as separate languages and refer to Chinese as like a language family rather than a single language with “dialects,” even though being all from the same country, “dialect” would be more accurate (according to mainland Chinese folks I think though it seems this is contested on). *tangent: some may consider this to be Fujianese and technically that would be more accurate bc Fujian is the name of the province, Fuzhou is the capital of Fujian, and my parents are not from the capital. With the Fuzhounese folks in the community I grew up in, though, it was always referred to as Fuzhounese, both when referring to it in the Mandarin way and the Fuzhounese way. Not sure why, maybe Fujian is a more modern term. You may also hear others refer to Fuzhounese as “Hokkien” though in my searches online it appears that may be inaccurate since Hokkien refers to languages like Taiwanese, while Fuzhounese is technically part of the Min language family, the same as Mandarin.
"A language is a dialect with its own army and borders" is only true in Europe and East Asia. In Africa and South East Asia, a language is a dialect with its own culture. For cultural reasons, a lot of the time, people who speak languages that are very similar often think of themselves as different groups in these places.
It's not even true in Europe, because there are languages that overlap several countries (English, German, French, Dutch), and there are languages that aren't a national language of any country but still are recognized as a language (Romontsch, Basque). I interpret the saying an allegory rather than a literal observation.
As an ethnic Hindi from India in London, I have met a lot of Urdus here from 🇵🇰Pakistan & can confirm that I can understand them fully (& to some extent Punjabis too)!
The thing is "Hindi" isn't agreed upon unilaterally. The Indian government lists completely different "dialects" as Hindi. But "dialects" like Marwari is Completely Different from say Magahi or Bundeli being completely different from say Garhwali. It's a complete mess. Some "dialects" are completely different from Hindi and are more similar to languages like Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati or Nepali than you may think.
As a Swede, I'll start saying i speak modern Norse. Sometimes Norwegians (and even Danes) are easier to understand than some Swedish dialects. Plus, "modern Norse" sounds cool.
hi, from Germany here: we're probably not the only ones, but we have a phenomenon the other way around: we tend to call (although admittedly always with a wink) some dialects like bavarian or swabian a language, as people who really grew up in those regions (on the countryside at least) have so different pronunciation, words and expressions, that no German native speaker could possibly understand them unless having lived there their whole live themselves 😅
We German have a weird History with language. For example Friesen can understand Dutch people better then people from the Swiss alps. Köln is Something that everyone laughs about. Prussian was full of y.(Bsp. Ey (Ei/Egg)) Hochdeutsch (High German) or Standarddeutsch (Standard German) is Not a language or a dialect. It is an invention to create a language that all germans could Use to read the bible. I personaly belive that without Luther, there would be No German. We would speak Bavarian, Frankisch, Prussian, Friesian, Thüringen, Hessen, Pfälzische,... today if the bible would Not have united us.
Austrian here, I know what you mean haha, I can understand you speaking german but if I start speaking austrian with a thick dialect Im not sure you'd understand me.
Chinese characters can be independent of the sounds they make. Nothing in the word "好" says it should be pronounced any specific way. Chinese characters can be used for entirely different languages, like Japanese and Korean, or similar but distinct languages, like Mandarin and Cantonese. That's how you end up with different Chinese languages that look like the same language, when they are phonetically unintelligible to each other.
Don't Chinese people of all languages write formally in a style based off of Mandarin (since around the 20th century)? The spoken language and the formal written language are vastly different in many cases, using words and grammar structures that would not be spoken aloud in their respective languages/'dialects'.
@@penguinlim Yes, the formal written language is standardized for the most part, but Mandarin speakers can still somewhat understand informal writing in non-Mandarin Chinese due to the shared characters. The same thing applies to Chinese people reading Japanese newspaper.
It's true that Cantonese and Mandarin are normally not intelligible, but they're not as far apart as they both are from Min Nan Chinese (Hokkien/Teochew)
@@sal_strazzullo Oh that's for sure. I'm using Mandarin and Cantonese as examples because that's what people are familiar with. Teochew is inside the Canton province, but Cantonese speakers would hardly understand a single word of Teochew.
My second language class was actually my native language. While studying it, we were told the key difference between a language and a dialect is A language has specific set of rules, the grammer, whereas the dialects don't, necessarily. We were taught dialects are tributaries while language is the river. Speaking of Hindi and Urdu, according to my understanding of a research paper I read titled 'the fault lines between Hindi and Urdu' (-Dr, Sanjay Gupta), Devanagari being chosen as the script for modern day Hindi had clearly something to do with political sentiments. Kaithi, a script widely popular between the speakers of both Persian influenced Urdu/ language(s) and Hindi speaking commonfolk, was disregarded as the initial script for Hindi as Urdu was getting to be seen as something clearly meant for the upper class ruler/invaders and other associated/influenced people from the middle east, and thus the feeling to have something clearly distinct and of one's own arose in the Hindi extremists resulting Devnagari, an exclusive script being chosen. Urdu is distinct from Hindi due to its Persian/middle eastern influence and the script it is written in. The Indian state of Bihar still had Kaithi as its official script until the 1950s I guess. Officials still struggle to read older official documents in courts due to them being written in Kaithi.
Hm, I would consider what was traditionally spoken in my native region (Rhineland) a dialect of German and not its own language, but it does have distinctive grammar, for example a progressive form that high German lacks.
@@kirstenkremer-yq6yc That's nice, thanks for telling. As I said dialects don't necessarily need to have or not have grammer. Btw would you like to tell me the origins of your native language? Like does it share the same roots with German or maybe is a branch drifted away from German? I would love to know more about it if you can.
IMO, the thing about "formal standardized" grammar is they are kind of constructed from one form of the language. In my country, people speak Malay with various dialects, but when they standardized the language and it's grammar, they choose 1 dialect to be the formal one. So, existence of grammar is not that good of indicator imo
We shouldn't be respecting people's identity just because. The vast majority of linguists agree that Arabic varieties, Chinese varieties, and Scots vs English are different languages while Hindi-Urdu, Serbo-Croatian are different standardized registers of the same language fueled by religious identity. Nordic languages are literary standards of basically two languages: Continental Norse (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) and Insular Norse (Icelandic & Faroese). Sure, it's not completely objective and mutual intelligibility is tricky but that doesn't mean we just put our hands up and say "just cause it's true doesn't make it right" when a group of people use toxic nationalism to lie through their teeth.
Very much this. It's not fully objective, but we can't get so subjective that an individual person can come out and say "I am speaking my own language" and be seriously acknowledged on an academic level, or having two people using completely phonemes and writing systems claim they speak the same language. Just because the lines are blurred doesn't mean we should throw the lines away.
@merdufer exactly. Something else I should've mentioned is the blurring of those lines aren't always linguistic. For example, Lebanese speakers understanding Egyptian has more to do with media exposure (Egyptian cinema) and multilingualism than actual linguistic similarity. Now that Tunisian is getting more exposure as an Arabic variety to be learned, many are pointing out its similarities with Levantine that aren't shared with Egyptian ("š-" interrogatives, "ha-" demonstratives, omission of the definite article, prepositional adverbs, etc.)
You have to draw the line somewhere, you're gonna offend people either way when you say Moroccan or Lebanese is a form of arabic, and the opposite is true as well.
@@Malek-dg4gh well, Lebanese and Moroccan are forms of Arabic, they're just relatively distantly related and lack even a moderate degree of intelligibility. They also have strong substrata from languages spoken previously and around their region like Amazigh in Moroccan and Aramaic in Lebanon. The important thing to point out imo is that this is not unique to Arabic, and if we're going to use a set of guidelines to measure some languages, we can't completely throw out our methods when using others. Arabic, on the whole, has almost the same degree of difference as the Slavic or Turkic languages and experiences of mutual intelligibility, word list comparison, cultural relationships between different groups, and use of lingua francas all point to a very similar experience. Yet if you ask many pan-Arab inclined Arabs, they'll tell you "it's like British and American" when you can easily fit the entire diversity of the English language (including Scots) in Egypt. Once you go into Sudan, Palestine, or Libya, there is no equivalent.
I think another problem with mutual intelligibility is that it's actually quite subjective. Just anecdotally, I'm a Geordie (NE England) living in Scotland, Americans tend to have much more difficulty understanding my accent than Scots, English people, Aussies and Kiwis, even though the latter don't tend to have heard my accent (/dialect?) any more.
I'm Filipino and our country has over 120 different languages. Growing up, a lot of us referred to them as dialects. But considering the fact that they're so diverse and varied, most people nowadays recognize them as different languages. (Unfortunately we don't tend to understand the languages of the different provinces very much :'))
Swedes, Norwegians and Danes can all talk together in their different languages if they try. I wouldn’t say either connection is to a lesser or greater extent, though perhaps certain regions within either country has an easier time with regional dialects in another. I for example speak a dialect of Bergen norwegian which lies closer to Riksmaal which is a very danish-adjecent speech originating during the union period. Meanwhile I hear the same danes struggle with Oslo dialects, particularly those with more words floating into one another during pronounciation like «må ikke» becomming «må’kke». Still I find my dialect works well in communicating with swedes too. Might just be that older Bergen dialects are well suited for this
one way that i've heard it put is this: "A language is just a dialect with a navy". That is to say, the difference between a dialect and a language is that the language has international recognition as a language, often because that community had/has some form of influence, be it military, prestige, or whatever, while the dialect has either yet to eclipse the language in influence(Arabic/Chinese) or simply doesnt want to split for whatever reason(American english). I like this distinction because it accounts for the interesting reverse case of dialects being recognised as languages, one being in the former yugoslavian territories, where serbian, bosnian, and croatian are all dialects by any account but because of ethnic "differences" have split from eachother politically and thus are regarded as separate languages.
I live on the west coast of Norway and can understand Swedish to an extent but not danish, but Swedes and Danes usually have difficulties understanding my dialect, to a lesser extent some other Norwegians struggle understanding my dialect at times and I have difficulties with some Norwegian dialects
Often times when I got to Sweden and Denmark people ask me what Norwegian dialect I'm speaking because they understand me really well. I just happen to be a Norwegian teacher so I have a tendency to pronounce a lot of the words really clear. If Danes and Swedes do the same I can talk with them for hours without having any problems understanding them.
I have mostly spoken with Norwegians from the Mo i Rana region and I understand them and they understand me perfectly fine in my experience. Can't say how much I'd understand of other dialects though. /A swede
Danish is extremely easy to read for Norwegians, but can be quite difficult to understand when heard, since Danish pronunciation is very... peculiar. Swedish is the opposite. It is a bit harder to read than Danish (but still not very difficult), but easy to understand when heard.
I can read Norwegian and Danish just fine, but it can be really difficult to underdtand for me as a native Swedish speaker. But I could imagine it getting easier after a few days together with natives. Danes don't even have the same accent. Whereas Swedish and Norwegian English both sound kind of the same to me, Danish English almost sounds German. Even Scanian Swedish gets subtitled on TV for the rest of Sweden to understand, and deep northern Swedish almost sounds Finnish.
Same thing happens with Portuguese and Spanish. Studies show that 89% of the vocabulary is the same, and with little effort to catch up the differences in pronunciation, we can understand each other very easily without any formal study (specially Brazilian portuguese). They are, however, considered different languages because of the historical political differences between Portugal and Spain, even though the languages are more similar than many of the so-called italian or german dialects.
@@seanhartnett79 Exactly! I could read texts in Spanish before I even had started to learn it, since the written language is even more similar than the spoken one. The only noticeable differences are some special characters such as Spanish “ñ”, that corresponds to Portuguese “nh”, and “ll”, that is similar to Portuguese “lh”, and Portuguese nasal vowels such as (ã/õ) as well. Also, Spanish has a lot of diphthongs that we don’t have in Portuguese (eg. fiesta/festa; huevo/ovo; huésped/hóspede) and drops a lot of Fs that we don’t (eg. hacer/fazer; rehén/refém; hada/fada). But since this differences are very small and very often follow a certain pattern, you’ll generally intuitively catch up the rule that differentiates one from the other and basically understand it all without much effort.
@@craftah as a portuguese native speaker, I can say some brazilians speak english with european portuguese speakers because of the huge pronunciation differences, but if we make a small effort and get used to the accent we can easily understand each other. same thing happens with spanish, but especially the other way around, since portuguese has a bunch of sounds that spanish doesn’t, so a lot of words are written the same, but pronounced quite differently.
"Swedes, Norwegians and to a lesser extent Danes can understand each other." Nope, you turned them around. Danes and Norwegians can understand each other, but a lot of Danes can't understand Swedish. "They're considered different languages." Well, yeah, because they're used in wildly different countries with entirely different words in them.
I speak Swedish (I'm not native), I can understand Norwegian, but it is difficult to me to understand spoken Danish, but I can understand many words if it is written. I have the sensation that Danes can understand swedes but not viceversa🤔
Norwegians understand Swedish better than Danish. Swedes understand Norwegian better than Danish. Danish understands Norwegian better than Swedish. There's obviously nuance to this but generally this is the way it is
This resloves some confusion I had in the last couple days. I had heard of Scots being a dialect and heard the similarity and difference in it to my English, and so I thought that big a change was a dialect. Then a few days ago some videos about Japanese dialects started popping up in my feed, even though from what I can tell the differences where what I considered sub-dialect/non-dialect variations, similarly to how my Californian English is a regional variation that has differences with Philly English.
Yeah for Scots it depends who you ask, some will say dialect some will say language. it's been revived in the last decade but up until then it was dying as a written language ever since the UK was created, leading to Scottish English being the dominant language - which is basically English with Scots words mixed in and much more of a dialect. Scots itself though developed separately from Middle English hundreds of years ago, so is much more distinct.
If Scotland had remained independent instead of joining the UK, it's likely that Scots would always have been considered a distinct language. Demoting Scots to a dialect of English was an essential part of British government policy in trying to create a common British identity. Scots could then be dismissed as 'bad English' with Scottish children forced to speak nothing but English at school
thank you so much for this video! as a cantonese speaker this debate frustrates me to no end. people are always insisting that mandarin & cantonese, as well as other sinitic languages, are all one chinese language and are all written the same way, but this is just false and it discounts the value and cultural significance of regional chinese languages. there's a growing movement originating from hong kong to promote and standardize written cantonese as a separate language from standard chinese (written mandarin), largely driven by the territory's desire to distinguish itself culturally and politically from china. the fact that this has mostly gained significant traction in recent years as china tightens its grip on hong kong makes it so obvious that the whole language vs dialect debate is all politics.
We have an opposite issue in the Bahamas. Bahamians call, and understand our version of English to be, a dialect. On Wikipedia, it's been classified principally by editors who don't come from the Bahamas as a creole. You'll also have some 'enlightened' Bahamians who will argue that you don't have enough ethnic pride, in fact you're ashamed, if you don't see Bahamian dialect as a separate language. Bahamian dialect is intelligible to other English speakers and has minor grammatical differences, unlike say Jamaican patois or Haitian creole. To people who speak both Bahamian dialect and a more received version of English, there are few differences. To me this is another example of respect the people who speak the language and how they define it.
I'm confused by the point you're trying to make. Should we respect those who want to say Bahamian English is its own language, despite you saying it's just a dialect?
@@adanactnomew7085 'The people who say its a language vs me who says it's just a dialect!' That's right folks, I coined the term "Bahamian dialect". Don't forget to credit me in all the encyclopediae.🤡 If you're confused then you should work on your reading comprehension. But you're not confused, are you?
In Norway we have two written languages, and one spoken language with many dialects. Two dialects of Norwegian can sound more different than two dialects of swedish and norwegian. I, as a Norwegian can understand swedish better than some dialects further south. Danish is more difficult for me to understand, probably because i (mostly) speak and am used to the northern dialect.
As a native swede who has lived in Norway for most of my adult life i would argue that our languages are mutually intelligeble if one has gotten about 100 hours of exposure. My 5 year old cousin who's Swedish was visiting me once and where playing with some Norwegian kids who were anout his age , and I had to translate both ways . Most Norwegians have watched a lot of Swedish tv-shows and Swedish music is not uncommon , but my point it that the Scandinavian languages are not as mutuality intelligeble at least in their spoken forms as many people belive.
Depends on the dialects of the Scandinavian languages as well, with how mutually intelligible they are. For example, Danes don’t necessarily understand spoken Nynorsk very well, but are much more proficient in understanding Bokmål from Olso better.
@@benjasine3472 I know, but certain dialects use the written form Nynorsk because it’s similar to their spoken dialects. What I meant is the spoken dialects, of whose people use the written form called Nynorsk. It was just a tedious sentence to write, so I wrote it in a way that I thought people would understand. Apparently I wasn’t being pedantic enough for some people. I’m not going to name every dialect relevant to my sentence, which is why I used Nynorsk and Bokmål.
So cool! I've been wondering about my mother tongue language, which is Javanese, that have a big portion of different words for different purposes. For example, the words you use when speaking to elderly people (a.k.a. _basa krama_ or _krama_ "language") and youngsters (a.k.a. basa ngoko or _ngoko_ language) are different even though the meaning is still the same. This well-made video helped me understand my own language better. Thank you for making this. 😊 BTW, I watch your videos daily but this is my first time leaving a comment. Keep up the good work!
This reminds me of Turkish and Azerbaijani. Most Turkic languages sound EXTREMELY similar but these two are especially similar. A Turkish speaker can understand an Azerbaijani speaker and vice versa without any problems. But they’re different languages.
I'm so used to you in shorts and since the video is in vertical i clicked on it and thought to myself halfway through "man this is a really long 60 seconds"
It's also funny how different people with the same geographical background can understand others to differing degrees. I'm from Sweden, my mom grew up a couple of miles from where I grew up and neither of us has lived beyond a few miles of here. But last year in a store, a danish woman came up and apparently asked for directions. My mom understood her no problem, while I had absolutely no clue what she said.
Absolutely love this. Also objectively, but also because my first language (Western Frisian) is by many considered to be “just a dialect” (of Dutch) which always makes me a bit mad even though i know it technically makes some sense 😅😅
Frysk i dont think most people consider a dialect of Dutch, just people joke about it because they think "It sounds weird" Ones people in NL do think is a dialect of Dutch however is the Low Saxon (Neddersassisk/Nedersaksisch) aka Low German (Plattdüütsk) part of the Netherlands. Twents, Drents, Grunnegs, Stellingswarfs, Veluws, Sallands, Achterhooks. This dialect continuum extends into Germany, with Westfaals, Ostfries, Mönsterlands, etc. All the way to Mecklenborgs, Holsteens, Hamborger Platt. Because people dont know the scale of this entire dialect chain, and there is no standard which we can rally behind to get it more used, people always think its just a dialect of Dutch or German (depending on the side of the border) whilst really, it officially is counted as a language, just without a common standard, just dialectual standards.
I feel like a lot of that has to be a joke. They're both West Germanic languages, but West Frisian is more closely related to English and (to a lesser extent) Low German, even if it's had a lot of Dutch influence for the last thousand years or so.
Sometimes when I speak it to non-Frisian Dutch speakers, they don’t get it at all (which makes them believe it’s its own language). But more often than that, I speak it and they say they can easily understand (which i get, often it’s only the vowels that are a bit different) and then follow up by believing it’s just a dialect. Sorry not sorry, you guys’ opinions don’t really erase the fact that this happens a lot \_(^-^)_/
In Arabic, although not everyone can understand everyone speaking the way they normally speak , all arabs know how to speak "formal Arabic" which is basically like the raw arabic which is used in books and stuff
Gaelic exists on a dialect continuum too, as Manxman my dialect is very central and I understand Donegal and Southern island Scottish dialects most easily
I think the most extreme example of this is standard Malaysian Malay (BM) and Bahasa Indonesia (BI) which both are based on the exact same variety of Malay. Even after 80+ years of divergence its pretty difficult to immediately differentiate two official documents in BM and BI, however two seperate identities have already formed and today it'll simply be not right to call Indonesian a variety of "Malay." Its casual spoken form can have a completely different grammar and lexicon. I think some other languages that comes closest to this situation is Serbo-Croatian and Hindi-Urdu.
Tbh i would consider Indonesian as another variation of standardized Johor-Riau Malay dialect rather than a different language or a new dialect of malay
But maybe in 70-100 years indonesian might be not mutually intellligible with modern Malay then it might have a right to consider it a different language entirely
I think another reason as to why they are considered different (speaking as an Indonesian) is due to the different history. Sure, both languages originate dialects of Malay, but colonialism also affected the way we speak. Indonesia was primarily a Dutch colony and so we get a lot of Dutch loans while Malaysia was primarily a British colony and so you get a lot of English loanwords. Example (note: some words are loaned from different languages besides just Dutch and English) 🇮🇩 - 🇲🇾 tas - beg (bag) kartu - kad (card) bioskop - pawagam (cinema) sepatu - kasut (shoe) And there are even certain words that are written and pronounced the same, but have different meaning kereta: train (Indonesia), car (Malay). The Indonesian word for car is "mobil" while the Malay word for train is "kereta api" percuma: useless (Indonesian), free (Malay) pejabat: official (Indonesian), office (Malay). The word for office in Indonesian is "kantor" (a Dutch loan)
From what I’ve heard about Scandinavia, most speak excellent English and use English when working with other Scandinavians who speak a different language/dialect. Also they correct my grammar and spelling. I’m an American and that’s just wild to me.
Depends a bit; a lot of younger Scandinavians tend to use English in those situations, while older ones are more comfortable speaking their own language slowly instead. I guess I could probably correct native speakers on grammar in some circumstances. One fun thing is to do this with archaic English: which may be a bit easier for a Scandinavian as we still have distinctions between thou/thee and where/whither. Then again I also read a lot of fantasy books and historical literature, so I'm not really representative.
I'm German and I learned Plattdeutsch from my Grandma which is also considered its own language. As someone from the north western part of the country, some dialects from the south and east are also hard to understand.
I thinkt that to consider a 2 languages dialects of one, bigger language, they should: -Be mutually intelligible -Have less than 20-15% differences in the phoneme inventory -Have the same max. Syllable structure
What fascinates me that intelligibility isnt always mutual. As a German speaker I might recognise some Dutch words but someone speaking Dutch will be better able to understand German. Blows my mind
Most German speakers have a more pronounced articulation than us mumbling Dutch. But I think a big difference is that we are more exposed to your language than the other way around. The older generations grew up with German television and teenagers still have German lessons at school, even if they drop the subject after a year. We hear Germans speak in various media (with subtitles), while the Germans translate any foreign content to their own language and talk over it.
@@Teun_Jac When you said the older generations grew up with German television, implying the younger ones don't, is that because television as a medium isn't relevant any more?
@xaverlustig3581 No, that's because until the late '80s, there were only one or two Dutch tv channels on the television, so they would sooner tune in on a foreign broadcasts (if they could receive it). I think tv still was very relevant in the '90s and '00s, but there was plenty to see in Dutch and (American) English, while the cable only showed the public broadcasts of neighbouring countries. Now the internet only makes American English even more dominant as second language. But most importantly, globalisation made English the lingua franca for everybody. Every kid learns English in school now, even the Germans and French.
@@Teun_Jac I wish we had the Dutch cable programming, because in Germany we don't get the public broadcasters of neighbouring countries on cable. Lots of shopping channels and other junk though.
I’m moroccan and I have a lebanese friend and we totally understand each other thought the vocabulary can be very different but we still understand each other
one thing to note about the scandi example is that while there is mutual intelligibility closer to the borders, because it is a dialect continuum that's not so much the case when further away. I speak a mixed rural western norwegian dialect (stril), and have tried speaking to swedes in our native tongues, which didn't work at all. Although we do generally have some basic idea of common swedish-only words because Astrid Lindgren's works are very popular for kids.
I’m just going too ad that many Sweds(me included) have a hard time understanding our nordic neighbours. They understand us just fine but we struggle to understand them. One notable exception is tho that we Swedes can often understand danish writing.
I have heard that Swedish and Norwegian speakers have a hard time understanding Danish, but Danish speakers have an easier time understanding Swedish and Norwegian.
@@isaacbruner65 Not quite. According to studies of students, Danish and Swedish speakers have the hardest time understanding eachother, while Norwegians understand both languages better, with the speakers of dialects geographically closest to Denmark understanding Danish better than the speakers of dialects further to the north or west do. It also depends on if you are talking about written or oral language. Reading Danish is very easy for Norwegians as the most popular written variant of Norwegian, Bokmål, was based on Danish 150 years ago and is still very similar. But dialects in Norway vary a lot and nobody speaks Bokmål (it literally means "book-tongue"), so Danes (and Swedes) can struggle with understanding dialects. Even some Norwegians have a hard time understanding certain other Norwegian dialects. I remember a TV-show a few years ago that found two speakers of very different Norwegian dialects and they could barely communicate at all. Then you have the very peculiar speech the Danes have - Norwegians and Swedes often say Danes have a potato in their throat and are constantly struggling to get it out - which means that understanding oral Danish is quite hard if not used to hearing it.
@@isaacbruner65 From my extensive time as a Norwegian in Denmark, I've experienced that Danes and Swedes have a much harder time of understanding me than I have of them. Heck, a majority of Danes can't even tell if I'm speaking Swedish or Norwegian most of the time! I'm guessing that its because of the amount of extremely variable dialects everywhere in Norway.
Another example for arabic mutual intelligibility: Red is similar to orange, which is similar to yellow, which is similar to green. But red in no way is similar to green. Now replace colours with dialects
Chinese linguists have created a word to separate the Chinese idea of dialects from the English/western one, referring to them as topolects. I think this is a good way of categorising these languages which seem to border between being seperate languages and dialects of the same language. Mandarin, cantonese, shanghaiese, Hakka, etc are all Chinese topolects, and I think this word can be extended to all these other languages. Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are scandinavian topolects. Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are Balkan/Serbo-Croation topolects. And all the varieties of Arabic are of course Arabic topolects.
To my knowledge it's not just the English/native English speakers. A large chunk of native Scots speakers stated, in a survey, that they considered it a dialect of English. (To be clear... I think it's quite easy to prove, by all definitions, Scots is a separate language.)
Not to a lesser extent Danes. It’s Swedish that’s the most different Scandinavian language and they use a different alphabet too. Especially considering the fact that Norway was a part of Denmark up until the Napoleonic wars and that our language is like 95% the same.
in italy we famously have a HUGE number of "dialects" which are. effectively, their own distinct languages. the funniest thing is that italian could be consieered a dialect of tuscan which it was developed from, and a not naturally developing language
I remember talking to a coworker about this subject but with Spanish. Both of us being Mexican, but talking to someone from Perto Rico, Cuba, Argentina, etc who speaks Spanish but has a different slang dictionary. We can sorta understand each other but there are noticable differences. That's not including the vast indiginous languages from Central America that need to be acknowleged as well. Being considered a language is powerful and that context is vital in ensuring language is not lost
Never really looked at it this way, but saying something is a language over a dialect really does give the people more power. Im a native low saxon speaker myself. Low saxon is usually put aside as a dialect of german or dutch, when really i think it should be considered a seperare language, with various dialects. Although i should also add that low saxon has been influenced a lot by Dutch and German. Getting that recognition does make me, and other low saxon speakers, feel seen and valued.
i think the main thing that separates languages from dialects is that dialects of the same language tend to evolve with each other and/or have similarities that different-but-similar languages wouldn't have. for example, hindi and urdu are very similar, but because of their geographic distance, different culture by speakers, etc., they're not likely to look towards each other for influence on how to speak in the future. but if you look at british and american english, they often "piggyback" off of each other, share the same writing system, pronounced more or less the same, etc.
As a filipino, the first definition is just like a Creole, like a chavocano speaker(filipino language) can understand spanish people like 80~90% of the chavocano speaker.
European portuguese speakers tend to downplay the importance of brazilian portuguese. They always state that the latinamerican variant isn't «real portuguese» or «pure portuguese», so they adjetive it as a mere dialect
European portuguese speaker here. No we don't. I mean, xenophobes do, but those are the fringe people that exist in every country/society. Brazillian portuguese is real portuguese like the one in Angola, the Azores, Cape Verde, Continental Portugal, etc. We do colloquially say "brasileiro" to refer to brazillian portuguese but only as a shortcut to say somebody speaks with a brazillian accent. I've heard british people say Americans speak American, french people say people from Quebec speak Québécois or Spaniards say hispanoamericans speak Latin American in a similar manner. It's not to try to invalidate other variants of the language, it's simply easier to provide context naturally in conversations.
What? I'm Portuguese and we DON'T say you speak Brazilian. You guys are the ones who always try to distantiate yourselves from us, saying it's too different, that you can't understand us and complain when something is not translated specifically into PT-BR... In Portugal we've always considered it the same language. We even sign accords to try to make it closer, and in the 1990 accord, there were more changes in PT-EU than in PT-BR...
Languages are difficult to measure but at the same time we have common sense. Take Scandinavia for example. Norwegian has no standardized speech and one of the written forms is essentially Danish while the other is Swedish written with the Danish alphabet. Norwegians can understand Swedes at varying degrees limited by dialect and exposure and vice versa. Danish is phonetically different but some dialect can manage. In writing Swedish is kinda like the black sheep of the three but that doesn’t make much sense to me personally because I have never had difficulty reading. In addition, Norway has dialects that are literally harder to understand than rikssvenska at times. Given all this it is rather difficult to given independence to these languages, especially Norwegian. Danish has very different phonetics and standardized speech, while Swedish has rather accessible phonetics with also standardized speech. Norway has no standardized speech and the language sounds funny to both Swedes and Danes although rather accessible. Based on this it becomes clear that Swedish and Danish have a much better argument when claiming independence while Norwegian doesn’t, because it’s freedom of diversity allows it to become more similar to other languages without having anything to control for that. Another example is Portuguese and Spanish. They are basically dialects of the same language that have diverged. But this has happened in a rather peculiar way where the old words of one language are the modern words of the other (in many cases) and there are rather standardized differences such as F becoming H. Point is that they feel like very well defined dialects rather than two different languages. If all these 5 count as fully independent languages then why don’t we count Austrian and Swiss as languages? Their dialects of German are so different that they even match Dutch in certain aspects of development. I am guessing that since they formally adhere to high German then this standard has defined them as German and not independent languages. So maybe it ultimately comes to having a proper standard, but then Norway wouldn’t be allowed to call its language Norwegian. We have many cases of this happening and I honestly think that the simplest way is to see how standardized the language is, and how it differs from other languages (usually from neighboring ones). If we take the example of Scots, we can see that the language is basically a dialect with an English base and tons of Celtic words. Nothing wrong with it, but it is not a proper language, rather a unique dialect.
Can you do something on the theme of Slavic/Balkan languages? Like for example how Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian are basically a dialects of the basically identical languages but how those 3 can also understand Slovenians about 80% of the way and Macedonias about 60-70% percent. Russian I mean only Serbians can understand writing but speaking all 5 can kind of understand it. I'd say at least 20%. But for example Polish is not understandable to any of the 5 (Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, Macedonian and Slovenian). Czech it's a bit of a toss up. Similar to Russian. But they also can't understand Polish people.
This is a terrible argument for the simple reason that English writing is not phonetic. If I were to be presented English written phonetically, I would also struggle reading it.
another fun thing is when dialects and different languages CAN be equal difficulty to understand, because of either word choice, or word construction whilst sounding close enough
As an austrian this hits close to home. Its such a highly debated topic whether or not austro-bavarian is a language or a german dialect. But after all bavarian didnt evolve from modern standard german but rather is a south germanic variety that has been spoken in the area of the alps for centuries. I would love to one day see a at least somewhat standardized version of my „dialect“ in literature
There is no dialect that evolved from standard German. All German dialects evolved from proto West Germanic, and later they converged again due to geographical proximity. Standard German is an "artificial" language constructed by scribes in order to be comprehensible to all German speakers, originally it was spoken natively by no-one.
I'm kinda suprised he didn't mention countries from ex Yugoslavia. Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin languages are remarkably similar yet different languages. For me as Croatian some dialects from Croatia are less understandable than Serbian for example. But I agree it would be really inappropriate to call it Yugoslavian language. It's important for our identity.
On Scandinavian languages. It's all the more confusing, because the standard varieties of danish, norwegian and swedish are quite similar, but some of their "dialects" (or local language varieties) can have some wild variation. Especially on the grammar. So you have dialects of danish that are further from standard danish than swedish is. This is also the case in Sweden. It's especially true in Norway where the "dialect culture" has been strong.
Spanish and Portuguese are also similar,I have heard its easier for Spanish speaker in latin American to understand Brazilian Portuguese when compared to Chileian Spanish because of thick acccent
I am Javanese speaker from Surabaya which is called "Arekan Javanese", we have dialects in Javanese. But the Standard Javanese is Mataram Javanese which originates from Central Java. it has language register, ngoko (informal) and krama (formal) meanwhile in my dialect, most word is ngoko and most young people can't speak krama (formal) in my city
When I heard that a dialect should mean you can understand each other, I was like no way lol and I assume many others thought that too. There are dialects in my country that are harder for me to understand than a different related language is. It makes sense tho, because those dialects borrow a lot from other languages that are not related to the main language. I'm finnish for the record and I do feel like I can sometimes understand estonian more than some of our dialects, which often borrow from swedish or russian or both (sometimes other languages).
Another thing with Scots vs English is that english people assume there is much more mutual eligibility than there actually is, because typically scottish people speak a combination of both languages simultaneously. This is why so many believe Scots to be a dialect or a collection of slang.
Obviously there is still a ton of mutual eligibility, but not enough to understand an entire conversation outside of very basic stuff without already having some knowledge of Scots.
Thank you, this is often the case with varieties thought of as more similar than they actually are. Lack of prestige causes people not to speak their native language around the language with more prestige, using its more "pure" forms amongst each other. I.e. you can understand them when they speak to you, but not when they speak to each other
Yeah he’s thinking of doric
@@mattybrunolucaszeneresalas9072 doric is a dialect of scots, "regular" scots and doric shares loads of words that not common to English, to the point where if you speak scots you can understand doric much better than you could with english alone, and vice versa. It's the same for other dialects like Glaswegian, Dundonian etc. but to a lesser extent - although tbh in recent years all variations of scots have melded together somewhat
@@robbiesim31 mmm
I've always wondered about this. When Yugoslavia disintegrated a few new languages emerged. Not because people suddenly started speaking differently but because they wanted to distinguish themselves from people from the other countries.
In my opinion, this is almost exclusively for political reasons in the cases of Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Serbia - they can understand each other with no issue (I think linguists identify this language as Serbo-Croatian and I think it was identified as such during Yugoslavia as well), probably the most noticeable difference being:
1) Serbia uses: ekavica (mleko/milk, dete/child, reč/word)
2) Dalmatia (coastal Croatia) uses ikavica (mliko, dite,)
3) The rest use ijekavica (mlijeko, dijete, riječ)
Slovenia, Macedonia, and Kosovo all have their own langauges - with Kosovo being Albanian which is not a Slavic language as the rest of ex-Yugo
The thing to keep in mind is that most of the Yugoslavian constituents had their own (long) history before Yugoslavia was ever a thing. It's not just that they were trying to differentiate between each other, they merely continued their independent identity that was present prior to Yugoslavia.
As similar and mutually inteligeble these languages can be (speaking specifically for the Serbo-Croatian case being split into Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin), they have meaningful functional differences besides the question of identity and culture.
For example, Croatian uses exclusively the latin script for their language. Serbian uses both latin and cyrillic. You could equate the two as the same language, except while Serbians can read both scripts, Croatians literally do not know how to read the cyrillic script (other than the identical glyphs of course) unless they specifically go out of their way to learn it. If you can't read a language, is it really the same language?
A lot of vocabulary is different between these languages too. You will have general mutual intelligibility, but that falls apart when you can't immediately infer from the context what a certain word or even whole sentence means. This might not be as big of a problem in every day life as you can always explain in other familiar terms what the meaning is, but this is severely impractical for any institutional purposes like schools and laws. Standardization here helps a ton and it makes more sense to classify your own "dialect" as your own language and bake it into the system to ensure consistency across the territory. It just simplifies things, especially because a lot of the vocabulary also has subtle differences like ekavica, ijekavica and such like the previous comment explains.
Overall, there are enough meaningful differences both in practical and cultural reasons that makes these languages distinct from each other that aren't just a pride thing. Thus, this should be respected by foreigners even if it looks all the same to them.
@@mrgalaxy396the division of these languages is completely arbitrary because even within these 'separate' languages the differences in vocab dont always align with the country it comes from... especially since the standardised forms of all these 'languages' are all based on the exact same dialect: neo-shtokavian. the idea that the people of these nations are simply embracing their differences that were from before yugoslavia is just not true because the linguistic differences between these peoples dont reflect their nations.
not to mention that fact that you are exxagerating the differences between these 'languages'. the difference in vocabulary is insanely minute.. the differences between english of separate countries is larger than the difference of these 'languages'. the small differences in spelling (and pronounciation) reflecting the divergence of proto slavic *ě is not a big enough reason to classify these as completely different languages. american english spells and sometimes pronounces many words differently from british english: pronounciation vs pronunciation, color vs colour. you can have standardised dialects, its not impossible to have a standardised serbian bosnian and croatian without having to divide them into languages.
as well as the arguement that 'if you cant read it, is it really the same language' falls apart really quickly when you consider for example diaspora arabs who cant read the arabic script but can read and write a transliteration of it.
the idea that these languages only emerged as languages because of politics is completely true
People didn't suddenly start speaking differently. They just wanted to distance themselves from one another. Croatians and Bosnians felt threatened by the influence of Serbia so they desperately tried to get rid of any instance of Serbian culture as soon as they broke away from Yugoslavia, rational or not. It even got to the point where movies made in Serbia would be dubbed or had subtitles in "Croatian" or "Bosnian" even though it was almost entirely intelligible.
@@mrgalaxy396 That is only the case between Croatians and Serbians. The rest - Bosnians, Montenegrins, Macedonians and Kosovars* (illegitimate country + non-Slavic people) only popped up in the later half of the 20th century after Tito's division.
The parallels between linguistics and biology seem never ending. The definition of language is very much like the definition of species.
Yep, like how species is a fuzzy term, just like language. Even the generally excepted definition, like they need to be able to make fertile offspring with one another has exceptions. Polar bears and grizzlies can make fertile offspring, Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals.
ikr? im biology student but definitely in love with linguistics too. I always find funny analogs, and often use them for easy representation
@@tonydai782The same goes for coyotes, wolves, and dogs, too. They can all interbreed and produce fertile offspring, yet we consider them (wolves and coyotes) separate species, and tbh I agree with that call. I think it just goes to show that just because distinctions can sometimes be fuzzy, and not 100% based on objective, standardized, clear-cut guidelines, it doesn't mean those distinctions are meaningless, or not worth making.
@@derdlerimdashayazilasidoyul, say that to a denier lmao
Y‘all are just describing constructivism
I’m a native Faroese speaker, and we learn Danish in school. I’m much better at understanding all Norwegian dialects compared to the average Dane, because Faroese and Icelandic are descendants of the Norse language of the variety spoken in the west coast of Norway, and together with me being fluent in Danish makes me understand Norwegian almost as well as Danish, even though I’ve never studied Norwegian.
When I was a kid, before I was completely fluent in Danish, I sometimes accidentally read books that were Norwegian thinking I was reading a Danish book, without any issue. I remember one specific time, I was halfway through a book and then realized that the book was Norwegian, after maybe 100 pages, lol. I wasn’t the best at spelling back then, so I didn’t notice the spelling difference of many of the words.
For any Danish person that can read, Norwegian bokmål is quite easy to read. You'll only now and then see an atypical word or sentence. Nynorsk, on the other hand, can be quite challenging, but should pose less of a problem to a Faroese.
@@Aodericnynorsk and faroese are very closely related and i noticed that i understand faroese and icelandic (atleast writen) much better after i started learning nynorsk. Might not be surprising because faroese, nynorsk and icelandic are all west-norse languages, but bokmål, danish and swedish are east-norse.
Besides swedish, i really do think that faroese and norwegian are actually the two closest languages to each other, you can see that with nynorsk which was more or less created the same way that the faroese writen language was, we can see that they are very much alike, even to the point that i can read faroese news articles with very little problem, i struggle slightly more with spoken faroese, but not much more than i do with spoken danish.
The thing i noticed most that is different with nynorsk and faroese is that faroese has a slightly more conservative grammar, and you also kept the ð which norwegian is general just replaced with a d.
I gotta say, as someone from western Norway, i think it moreso comes down to the fact that you've learned Danish, and Norwegian just happens to be pretty similar to Danish, but is often a bit more clearly spoken. I experience something similar with Portuguese (which I'm somewhat fluent in). Even though Portuguese is the language I've learned, i sometimes find it easier to understand Spanish, simply because Spanish is often more clearly enunciated than Portuguese.
Because I gotta say, whether spoken or written, I find it extremely more difficult to understand Faroese than Danish, so i don't believe Faroese and Norwegian are the most similar.
@@mathiasseljebotnerdal8700 as a person from South Norway i struggle a lot more with understanding spoken danish than i do with writen faroese. With spoken it's about the same for both of them. However swedish is the one language i can understand without much issue, and pretty much everyone agree that swedish and norwegian are the two closest, but i think faroese is tied with danish for being the second closest.
Where you live in Norway also makes a difference in what other Scandinavian languages you understand. I live in a place close to Sweden, some words we only use here are very similar to Swedish, and people here usually understand Swedish much better than a person from Bergen or Oslo. Southern dialects of Norwegian are also more similar to Danish.
Yeah I’m Swedish and I often kind of understand Norwegian but never on earth will I be able to understand danish💀
Same is true for Sweden, if ypu live in Jämtland your dialect is alot closer to norwegian. If you're a Älvdaling, well, nobody understands you.
@@johan.ohgren Jamtlandic is or at least was a Norwegian dialect (3 gender system of western nordic), while Norwegian Bokmål is just Norwegianized Danish.
Yup. Unlike most other Swedes I can somehow understand Danish better than Norwegian, which I think is because of the structure of sentences rather than similar sounds
Makes sense why I have an easier time to understand southern Norwegians than northern.
Had some Norwegian classmates who said they understood me better because I'm from Copenhagen than my other classmates who was from different parts of Jutland, due to we have different dialects.
As a person who speaks standard hindi. I can completely understand a Urdu speaker without any problem while i cant completely understand haryanvi person. while urdu and hindi are considered different languages while haryanvi is considered as dialect of hindi. Hindi is completely based on prakrit languague(prakrit is vulgar version of sanskrit) while urdu is 90% prakrit(structure and grammer) and 10% turkish,persian,arabic words
Prakrit is/was a set if languages, not just one language. Hindi mostly descends from Sauraseni prakrit, but bhojpuri, which is legally considered hindi descends from magadhi prakrit.
Prakrit is not a "vulgar" version of Sanskrit. It is a group of Middle Indo Aryan languages that developed in Parallel with Vedic Language. Even the oldest scriptures such as Rigveda contain traces of Prakrits. Which means the Prakrits are just as old as Vedic which the predecessor of (Classical) Sanskrit.
I am assuming that the Hindi-Urdu situation is the same as the Malayalam-Tamil-Telugu situation. Spoken language is understandable and sentence structure is similar. But writing is completely different and some words get extremely confusing.
@@hsihdbssbcjtzksk7426 Everyday speech is basically the same, it's the literary registers that are artificially "Sanskritized" for Hindi and "Arabo-Persianized" for Urdu.
@@hsihdbssbcjtzksk7426
No you cannot compare those examples.
For context Tamil is my native language, have inetracted with Telugu, Urdu, Malayalam a lot, can talk like a 5 year old in Hindi but still understand 90 per cent of it.
Telugu: Can't understand most of it because of classical Sanskrit influence and it's own dravidian deviations.
Like I might hear something familiar every 10 or 20 words. And even then I will have to squint my ears.
Malayalam: From a Tamil perspective, I can get a general gist but there is still significant vocabulary differences that don't make them similiar the same way Urdu and Hindi is. Tho I have heard that Mallus have easier time understanding us than vice versa.
And I am saying this as someone who was surrounded by Mallus and so know more Malayalam words than your average Tamil.
Urdu: I can understand it the same level I am able to understand Hindi tho I do hear or recognize slight differences (due to the higher Persian/Arabic influence)
I hope my own experiences gave new perspectives.
Tho the fact that you brought those up makes me think you know at least 1 Dravidian language.
Once upon a time I did a little research for school on an endangered language: Ainu. It only has around ten native, fluent speakers, all tribal elders. The are variants of the language that are not mutually intelligible, those being Hokkaido Ainu (which is the only spoken variant), Sakhalin Ainu (of which the last speaker died in 1994), and Kuril Ainu (which is long gone). The Ainu people spread to different areas in and surrounding Japan, and brought their language with them. It evolved greatly after different groups were separated.
would they be 3 ainu languages then in that case
Yeah but ppl wluldnt call them dofferent languages. but since theyre mutually unintelligible then yeah @suomeaboo
Amazing video! I’m Chinese and I always try to tell people that Mandarin speakers in itself can not understand each other, let alone including other LANGUAGES like Cantonese, hokkien, shanghainese, fujianese, etc
same indeed, and the idea of the languages being "written the same way" isn't even true (as this video demonstrates well)
Yeah but that's not what the government wants us to believe 😔 (I'm Cantonese and I've had to live with this discourse about my mother tongue my whole life)
Hokkien and Fujianese refer to the same thing? "Fujian" being the standard mandarin pronunciation of the min "Hokkien" :)
Didn't mandarin just "constructed" for common use (I know it is heavily inspired by those from Beijing)? From my experience if you are school-educated (or you got the national language certificate for Mandarin) you should (for the most part, unless you are using idioms derived from local dialects) understand each other without much resistance when communicating in Mandarin
@@yty1941 yes, Mandarin is the lingua franca in China, if your native tongue isn’t Mandarin then you would to some degree have to learn/understand it (especially in school and cities)
But people who don’t speak any s’initie language often talk about how they’re all dialects or accents when they’re unintelligible
Fun fact: not all languages are two-side mutually intelligible. A Ukrainian speaker can understand a Russian speaker fairly easily, while a Russian speaker has difficulty understanding a Ukrainian speaker. Rhis is partially due to cultural reasons, but also because Ukrainian has a lot of Russian words that are considered taboo or juat aren't used, while alot of the Ukrainian lexicon doesn't appear in Russian outside of borderland dialects.
this is because almost half of ukraine is russian speaking and knows russian
що? які "російські" слова в нас є в мові, але не використовуються? це ж оксюморон - якщо щось не використовується носіями, то цього *немає* в мові.
а в росіянскькій купа слів як раз з нашим походженням - прапорщик, очки, дума ітд. це якщо не враховувати, що базовий "спільний" лексикон, типу всіляких мам, хлібів та котів, в Київській Русі використовувався віками ще до появи Москви. тому це скоріше вони нашими (не тільки нашими, очевидно, а також попередників інших західно та південно слов'янських народів) словами користуються, а не ми їхніми. якщо ви, звісно, не маєте на увазі "товариш" та "колхоз" як російські слова.
а так, згодна з попереднім коментатором - ми русифіковані, ще 10 років тому в жодному місті України не можна було комфортно жити без знання російської. Казахи чи грузини теж російську розуміють - що, теж мови в них схожі?
Same with Swedish and Danish. We can mostly read each others written language, but Swedes have a much harder time understanding Danes than vice verca.
Same with Maghred Arabic speakers who can understand Egyptian Arabic, but Egyptians have a hard time understanding a Moroccan. This is because most movies are in Egyptian Arabic, so people have to get used to that dialect.
And also in many other countries. All people in Bavaria understand standard German, but people from the North (Lower Saxony for instance) cannot understand Bavarian dialect.
@@xx_gamer_xx8315 can confirm XD
I live in Italy, and just to summaries the linguistic situation in my country:
✨"It's a mess"✨
😂😂😂
🤌🏽A mess!🤌🏽
@@piiinkDeluxe precisely
Lol same with South Africa
Brilliant video! Although to be fair scotland also has gaelic, which is definitely it's own language, separate from English! (Although not many speak it anymore)
Are there any revival efforts?
@@lordsiomaiNot really, compared to Irish Gaelic, which was revived pretty effectively.
@@lordsiomaiScots had a large number of wikipedia articles written by an American teenager who didn’t really understand Scots.
Does that count?😅
Gaelic is a Celtic language, English is a "Germanic" language (barely).
Whether they're the same language or not shouldn't even be a discussion
@@FilipSrbinEnglish is still Germanic not barely. Influence on a language doesn’t make it change language families. If for example Polish was heavily Germanised and 80% of the words in this hypothetical Polish would be flat out from German, it would still be Slavic due to the genetic relationship and the fact the language. If the people identified as seperate from the Germans that would still credit tit for being a language. This is a heavy oversimplification on my part. But a language cannot change language families.
As a Ukrainian, I can almost fully understand Belarusan, our languages fully separated only a few centuries ago. I find this language very beautiful and I love it. It's a shame almost no one uses Belarusan anymore as it is replaced by Russian by a pro-Russian dictatorship in the country.
Ah, same with Danish and Norwegian. It was the same until like 200 years ago.
@@TheDanishGuyReviews kinda? Danes enforced their own writing system in Norway, but the Norwegians still had their own language before that.
What about Polish
@@lisaanimi Polish is from a completely different branch of the Slavic family than Russian and Belarusian. A Slavic speaker well versed in speaking "common" (someone who grew up around many different Slavic languages) will generally be able to communicate across the boundary, but apparently to general speakers the differences between East Slavic (Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Rusyn) and West Slavic (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Lusatian, Kashubian, Moravian) and South Slavic (Slovenian, Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian, Bulgarian) are insurmountable and the languages are not mutually intelligible. At least that's the vibes I get from people when I tell them that they should really have no problem understanding eachother lmao
Yeah, I'm Indonesian therefore i speak Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) but an Indonesian person and a Malaysian person could pretty much understand each other, cause Bahasa Indonesia is a descends from Melayu, what's interesting though, is that some Sumatran dialects are much closer to Melayu than it is to some Papuan dialects, anyways great video!
About to say this.
Btw gw mau bilang, gw kadang ga paham org melayu ngomong apa. Karena emg bahasanya udah beda jauh bgt. Btw soal bahasa Indonesia, bahasa Indonesia punya dua jenis. ada bahasa formal dan bahasa gaul (yg didasarkan dari dialek Jakarta). Keduanya beda. Itulah sebabnya bule yg belajar bahasa Indonesia di negaranya pas datang ke Indonesia ga bisa komunikasi karena org Indonesia berbicara pake dialek Jakarta, ragam gaulnya, bahkan di sekolah pun pakenya yg itu
Not even surprised by the second fact you mentioned lol, of course Indonesian is a literary standard of Malay, the Malay people are from that area, far from Papua. Papua is just a territory under central Indonesian control, like Puerto Rico or Hawaii under American control, and Tibet/Xinjiang under Chinese control.
But that's fine, if you are able to instill a sense of Indonesian nationalism in the west Papaun people then you have won and there's no objection to be made, it's fair and it's just how it is, empires have to grow this way or they can't grow.
@@sal_strazzulloby that logic javanese, bataknese, sundanese, etc are colonised by riau people because they speak malay. ridiculous.
@@rizkyadiyanto7922West Papua is far more colonised than the rest of Indonesia, given the ongoing genocide.
It's crazy how he just turned Asian mid-video
I remember when I was a kid, all the languages in my country (apart from the main one spoken in and around the capital) were just considered dialects, despite them not being mutually intelligible. I'm glad they changed it because it only reeks of superiorism of one ethnic group.
This is also why the line between languages and dialects are so blurry. We need to rethink how we see languages and dialects
Exactly, there’s so many stories about language erasure because languages were considered improper “dialects” and not languages in their own right. It’s heartening to see the tides are largely changing nowadays
I don't understand when people say "in my country", and then proceed not to say which country is in question.
Can you say which country you're talking about, please?
@@FilipSrbin He is Filipino
@@Spacemongerr Aha
@@FilipSrbin I did some detective work. But yes I generally agree
As a scots speaker, thanks for promoting scots language
Don't you mean Scots leid? 😊
I often mention Scots when people say that Frisian is the closest language to English.
An important thing to note is stnadardization. Hindi and Urdu are not mutually intelligible on paper because they can not be read the same way. The official language of almost all Arabic speaking countries is Modern Standard Arabic which is the same through all countriss in written form. But the spoken language is standardized.
Mutual intelligibility means how well can you understand each other when you speak. Hindi and Urdu speakers have no problem understanding each other as they're speaking pretty the same dialect of Western Hindustani, with some vocabulary changes in the standard languages(use of Persian and Arabic loanwords vs use of Sanskrit loanwords)
on the topic if scandinavian languages, especially Norwegian has a ton of dialects that sometimes have different grammar rules. these dialects are sometimes so different that it's almost like a seperate scandinavian language all together
Definitely. A Faroese speaker will understand a Norwegian from Bergen way better than one from Oslo. And a Swedish speaker will understand a Norwegian from Oslo way better than one from Trondheim. Then there's Älvdalsk which if you ask me is somewhere between Norwegian and Swedish. Almost like an old version of Norwegian that got influenced more and more by Swedish over hundreds of years, which is completely unconfirmed but wouldn't be too far-fetched considering it's literally on the border between the two geographically
👀
the last point is true to some extent because croatian bosnian and serbian are considered separate by their respective speakers despite the fact they are only actually separated by some minor phonological differences and some minor vocabulary. in the case of serbocroatian its very clear its one language as each of its forms are identical in 99% of its aspects. its like saying american english and british (also the added meaning of 'serbian' not being one variety, same with british not being one variety) are separate languages even though they are from different countries. one could argue that these forms of english are even more different from each other than the varieties of serbo croatian. if we are calling serbian and croatian separate languages then we should definitely consider american and british different languages
'Serbian', 'Croatian' and 'Bosnian' aren't nearly different enough to be classified as different languagues - you're rigjt on that.
But you're not right on what you said about British dialects being more different from one another than Yugoslav dialects.
Even though the standard versions of these 'languages' are almost the same, the local dialects can differ a lot. Not only between Serbian and Croatian dialects, for example, but even between two Croatian dialects.
It's not different enough to the point of being completely unintelligible, but the words and pronunciations are very different depending on which region you are in.
Here in Belgrade, it is common for people to not understand folks from Pirot or generally the south due to their accents being so foreign. It's like the difference between Southern English and Scottish accents, they're the same language when written, but spoken, they're very different, except that in the case of Belgrade and Pirot lots of words are different too.
Yap session over
I’d say with standardised serbo-Croatian clusterfuck which is entirely based on štokavian is one language. Issue for me is the fact that 2 other things are generally included. Chakavian and Kajkavijan. Kajkavijan is closer to Slovene and Chakavian is its own thing.
@@Entety303 It's so weird for me to imagine people saying "ča?" or "kaj?" instead of "šta?"
@@Entety303 i honestly somewhat agree with this, especially with kajkavian because some people think that kajkavian is more genetically related. of course most linguists for simplicity call it a dialect continuum (like arabic) kajkavian > čakavian > štokavian > torlakian
@@FilipSrbin the differences between them is more than how they say the word what
For example, Italian dialects are actually languages, but it's like Arabic.
I speak Barese "dialect" and I can try to understand someone speaking Napoletano (it would be difficult, tho), but I can't understand someone who speaks Milanese, even if I tried to
also, lots of italian “dialects” aren’t closely related to italian. venetian, for example, is more closely related to french or catalan than it is to italian.
I feel like that even makes sense to me as a foreigner. Bari and Napoli are relatively close to each other on each coast, while Milano is the almost exact opposite end of the country, with miles upon miles seperating it from either of the two others.
@@creppruby Interesting! I've heard Catalan is similar to Occitan (in France) which is similar to Romansch (in Switzerland). If accurate, that would mean there is (or was) a horizontal continuum from Catalonia all the way to Venezia
@@oivinfyeah i’m from liguria and i think that most northern italian dialects are in some ways similar to french and catalan, i once went to catalonia and basically had no issues with the language, spanish is usually pretty easy to understand for italians but catalan was even easier even though i don’t really speak genoese(the dialect spoken in liguria) that well but i can understand it
ps a thing that really surprised me was the fact that in catalan the X is pronounced the same as in genoese, we kinda pronounce it like someone would pronounce the J in “je” in french, which is kinda weird since i’m not sure it’s pronounced like that in any other italian dialect
One thing to also keep in consideration is that two people groups understanding each other well can also have been influenced by how exposed they are to each other. In Scandinavia, we're exposed to each other's languages a lot. You'll see actors and other celebrities from each country show up talking their own language in the other countries' entertainment industries. You'll see people move around the 3 countries (aided by mutual freedom of movement), so we meet each other fairly frequently. In the store shelves you'll sometimes see products with just 1 of the languages represented, or they'll have a mix of the languages.
This makes it so that even sentences in a different Scandinavic language with very few words in common with your own, can still be understood because you've been slowly exposed to that language all your life.
Yes, our languages are closely related, but if someone had learned Norwegian without actually growing up here, i wouldn't see it as guaranteed that they'd also have a good comprehension of Swedish or Danish (and even more so in regards to certain dialects).
Same in Croatia, we understand some serbian, bosnian or even slovenian words not because we use them but because we have been exposed to those languages
I think causality is much more the other way around. BECAUSE the languages are so similar and have common origins, people are able to speak to each other in 2 different languages without issue.
...although of course, the languages are probably similar because the region always had a lot of cultural exchange...
Just saying though, going to a country with a different language and easily communicating without knowing the local language and without locals knowing yours already necessitates a very high similarity between the languages
EDIT: Forgot to mention I speak some Swedish, and reading Norwegian and Danish are about the same difficulty as Swedish for me. Although listening to Danish is HARD!
czech and slovak (which are, for most purposes mutually intelligible) used to be considered two dialects of one czechoslovak language from 1920 (early first republic)to depending on the source either the 30s or 40s (i am not sure which, but both seem plausible due to the events which happened in these decades). I think this is a great example of how what counts as a language and a dialect can be a political issue more than a linguistic one
During about the same period the official language of Yugoslavia was "Serbo-Croato-Slovenian" (Srpsko-hrvatsko-slovenački). The pan-Slavists went a bit ham in that period.
@@2712animefreak I mean all the slavic languages are basically the same thing right
_insert footage of me in poland a couple months ago struggling to keep up with what I was being told by people half the time here_
some sentences can be made in slovak that is completely different from czech like every single word
Yeah, it’s funny for myself that those two are considered separate languages when I was told by a Czech former friend that it’s like the difference between American and British English, and from others online that Czech and Slovak are like 95% intelligible. Reason is that being Chinese, Chinese was always referred to like a single language when Mandarin and Fuzhounese* (my family regional speak) are both Chinese “dialects” and are practically unintelligible from each other, like 95%+ unintelligible. It is even possible (according to Wikipedia lol) that people who both claim to speak Fuzhounese won’t understand each other, because the region is mountainous so I am guessing it was easier to form separate ways of saying things over time.
For this reason I think of the Chinese “dialects” as separate languages and refer to Chinese as like a language family rather than a single language with “dialects,” even though being all from the same country, “dialect” would be more accurate (according to mainland Chinese folks I think though it seems this is contested on).
*tangent: some may consider this to be Fujianese and technically that would be more accurate bc Fujian is the name of the province, Fuzhou is the capital of Fujian, and my parents are not from the capital. With the Fuzhounese folks in the community I grew up in, though, it was always referred to as Fuzhounese, both when referring to it in the Mandarin way and the Fuzhounese way. Not sure why, maybe Fujian is a more modern term. You may also hear others refer to Fuzhounese as “Hokkien” though in my searches online it appears that may be inaccurate since Hokkien refers to languages like Taiwanese, while Fuzhounese is technically part of the Min language family, the same as Mandarin.
"A language is a dialect with its own army and borders" is only true in Europe and East Asia. In Africa and South East Asia, a language is a dialect with its own culture. For cultural reasons, a lot of the time, people who speak languages that are very similar often think of themselves as different groups in these places.
It's not even true in Europe, because there are languages that overlap several countries (English, German, French, Dutch), and there are languages that aren't a national language of any country but still are recognized as a language (Romontsch, Basque). I interpret the saying an allegory rather than a literal observation.
As an ethnic Hindi from India in London, I have met a lot of Urdus here from 🇵🇰Pakistan & can confirm that I can understand them fully (& to some extent Punjabis too)!
The thing is "Hindi" isn't agreed upon unilaterally. The Indian government lists completely different "dialects" as Hindi. But "dialects" like Marwari is Completely Different from say Magahi or Bundeli being completely different from say Garhwali. It's a complete mess. Some "dialects" are completely different from Hindi and are more similar to languages like Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati or Nepali than you may think.
As a Swede, I'll start saying i speak modern Norse. Sometimes Norwegians (and even Danes) are easier to understand than some Swedish dialects. Plus, "modern Norse" sounds cool.
hi, from Germany here: we're probably not the only ones, but we have a phenomenon the other way around: we tend to call (although admittedly always with a wink) some dialects like bavarian or swabian a language, as people who really grew up in those regions (on the countryside at least) have so different pronunciation, words and expressions, that no German native speaker could possibly understand them unless having lived there their whole live themselves 😅
We German have a weird History with language. For example Friesen can understand Dutch people better then people from the Swiss alps. Köln is Something that everyone laughs about. Prussian was full of y.(Bsp. Ey (Ei/Egg))
Hochdeutsch (High German) or Standarddeutsch (Standard German) is Not a language or a dialect. It is an invention to create a language that all germans could Use to read the bible. I personaly belive that without Luther, there would be No German. We would speak Bavarian, Frankisch, Prussian, Friesian, Thüringen, Hessen, Pfälzische,... today if the bible would Not have united us.
Austrian here, I know what you mean haha, I can understand you speaking german but if I start speaking austrian with a thick dialect Im not sure you'd understand me.
That was interesting.
This is the best answer I heard so far to the language/dialect thing. Especially when it comes to arabic
Chinese characters can be independent of the sounds they make. Nothing in the word "好" says it should be pronounced any specific way. Chinese characters can be used for entirely different languages, like Japanese and Korean, or similar but distinct languages, like Mandarin and Cantonese. That's how you end up with different Chinese languages that look like the same language, when they are phonetically unintelligible to each other.
Don't Chinese people of all languages write formally in a style based off of Mandarin (since around the 20th century)? The spoken language and the formal written language are vastly different in many cases, using words and grammar structures that would not be spoken aloud in their respective languages/'dialects'.
@@penguinlim Yes, the formal written language is standardized for the most part, but Mandarin speakers can still somewhat understand informal writing in non-Mandarin Chinese due to the shared characters. The same thing applies to Chinese people reading Japanese newspaper.
It's true that Cantonese and Mandarin are normally not intelligible, but they're not as far apart as they both are from Min Nan Chinese (Hokkien/Teochew)
@@sal_strazzullo Oh that's for sure. I'm using Mandarin and Cantonese as examples because that's what people are familiar with. Teochew is inside the Canton province, but Cantonese speakers would hardly understand a single word of Teochew.
My second language class was actually my native language. While studying it, we were told the key difference between a language and a dialect is A language has specific set of rules, the grammer, whereas the dialects don't, necessarily. We were taught dialects are tributaries while language is the river.
Speaking of Hindi and Urdu, according to my understanding of a research paper I read titled 'the fault lines between Hindi and Urdu' (-Dr, Sanjay Gupta), Devanagari being chosen as the script for modern day Hindi had clearly something to do with political sentiments. Kaithi, a script widely popular between the speakers of both Persian influenced Urdu/ language(s) and Hindi speaking commonfolk, was disregarded as the initial script for Hindi as Urdu was getting to be seen as something clearly meant for the upper class ruler/invaders and other associated/influenced people from the middle east, and thus the feeling to have something clearly distinct and of one's own arose in the Hindi extremists resulting Devnagari, an exclusive script being chosen.
Urdu is distinct from Hindi due to its Persian/middle eastern influence and the script it is written in.
The Indian state of Bihar still had Kaithi as its official script until the 1950s I guess. Officials still struggle to read older official documents in courts due to them being written in Kaithi.
Hm, I would consider what was traditionally spoken in my native region (Rhineland) a dialect of German and not its own language, but it does have distinctive grammar, for example a progressive form that high German lacks.
@@kirstenkremer-yq6yc That's nice, thanks for telling. As I said dialects don't necessarily need to have or not have grammer. Btw would you like to tell me the origins of your native language? Like does it share the same roots with German or maybe is a branch drifted away from German? I would love to know more about it if you can.
Dialects do have rules and grammar they're just SOMETIMES different than the rules and grammar of the standard dialect.
@@kakahass8845 I agree
IMO, the thing about "formal standardized" grammar is they are kind of constructed from one form of the language. In my country, people speak Malay with various dialects, but when they standardized the language and it's grammar, they choose 1 dialect to be the formal one. So, existence of grammar is not that good of indicator imo
We shouldn't be respecting people's identity just because. The vast majority of linguists agree that Arabic varieties, Chinese varieties, and Scots vs English are different languages while Hindi-Urdu, Serbo-Croatian are different standardized registers of the same language fueled by religious identity. Nordic languages are literary standards of basically two languages: Continental Norse (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) and Insular Norse (Icelandic & Faroese).
Sure, it's not completely objective and mutual intelligibility is tricky but that doesn't mean we just put our hands up and say "just cause it's true doesn't make it right" when a group of people use toxic nationalism to lie through their teeth.
Very much this. It's not fully objective, but we can't get so subjective that an individual person can come out and say "I am speaking my own language" and be seriously acknowledged on an academic level, or having two people using completely phonemes and writing systems claim they speak the same language. Just because the lines are blurred doesn't mean we should throw the lines away.
@merdufer exactly. Something else I should've mentioned is the blurring of those lines aren't always linguistic.
For example, Lebanese speakers understanding Egyptian has more to do with media exposure (Egyptian cinema) and multilingualism than actual linguistic similarity.
Now that Tunisian is getting more exposure as an Arabic variety to be learned, many are pointing out its similarities with Levantine that aren't shared with Egyptian ("š-" interrogatives, "ha-" demonstratives, omission of the definite article, prepositional adverbs, etc.)
You have to draw the line somewhere, you're gonna offend people either way when you say Moroccan or Lebanese is a form of arabic, and the opposite is true as well.
@@Malek-dg4gh well, Lebanese and Moroccan are forms of Arabic, they're just relatively distantly related and lack even a moderate degree of intelligibility.
They also have strong substrata from languages spoken previously and around their region like Amazigh in Moroccan and Aramaic in Lebanon.
The important thing to point out imo is that this is not unique to Arabic, and if we're going to use a set of guidelines to measure some languages, we can't completely throw out our methods when using others.
Arabic, on the whole, has almost the same degree of difference as the Slavic or Turkic languages and experiences of mutual intelligibility, word list comparison, cultural relationships between different groups, and use of lingua francas all point to a very similar experience.
Yet if you ask many pan-Arab inclined Arabs, they'll tell you "it's like British and American" when you can easily fit the entire diversity of the English language (including Scots) in Egypt.
Once you go into Sudan, Palestine, or Libya, there is no equivalent.
The terms aren't really useful here, Norwegian is West Scandinavic like Icelandic and Faroese.
I think another problem with mutual intelligibility is that it's actually quite subjective. Just anecdotally, I'm a Geordie (NE England) living in Scotland, Americans tend to have much more difficulty understanding my accent than Scots, English people, Aussies and Kiwis, even though the latter don't tend to have heard my accent (/dialect?) any more.
I'm Filipino and our country has over 120 different languages. Growing up, a lot of us referred to them as dialects. But considering the fact that they're so diverse and varied, most people nowadays recognize them as different languages. (Unfortunately we don't tend to understand the languages of the different provinces very much :'))
Swedes, Norwegians and Danes can all talk together in their different languages if they try. I wouldn’t say either connection is to a lesser or greater extent, though perhaps certain regions within either country has an easier time with regional dialects in another. I for example speak a dialect of Bergen norwegian which lies closer to Riksmaal which is a very danish-adjecent speech originating during the union period. Meanwhile I hear the same danes struggle with Oslo dialects, particularly those with more words floating into one another during pronounciation like «må ikke» becomming «må’kke». Still I find my dialect works well in communicating with swedes too. Might just be that older Bergen dialects are well suited for this
one way that i've heard it put is this: "A language is just a dialect with a navy".
That is to say, the difference between a dialect and a language is that the language has international recognition as a language, often because that community had/has some form of influence, be it military, prestige, or whatever, while the dialect has either yet to eclipse the language in influence(Arabic/Chinese) or simply doesnt want to split for whatever reason(American english).
I like this distinction because it accounts for the interesting reverse case of dialects being recognised as languages, one being in the former yugoslavian territories, where serbian, bosnian, and croatian are all dialects by any account but because of ethnic "differences" have split from eachother politically and thus are regarded as separate languages.
Ah, you anticipated me. Excellent :)
I love the message at the end🥰
you deserve thousands of views great video ❤
I live on the west coast of Norway and can understand Swedish to an extent but not danish, but Swedes and Danes usually have difficulties understanding my dialect, to a lesser extent some other Norwegians struggle understanding my dialect at times and I have difficulties with some Norwegian dialects
Often times when I got to Sweden and Denmark people ask me what Norwegian dialect I'm speaking because they understand me really well. I just happen to be a Norwegian teacher so I have a tendency to pronounce a lot of the words really clear. If Danes and Swedes do the same I can talk with them for hours without having any problems understanding them.
I have mostly spoken with Norwegians from the Mo i Rana region and I understand them and they understand me perfectly fine in my experience.
Can't say how much I'd understand of other dialects though.
/A swede
Danish is extremely easy to read for Norwegians, but can be quite difficult to understand when heard, since Danish pronunciation is very... peculiar.
Swedish is the opposite. It is a bit harder to read than Danish (but still not very difficult), but easy to understand when heard.
I can read Norwegian and Danish just fine, but it can be really difficult to underdtand for me as a native Swedish speaker. But I could imagine it getting easier after a few days together with natives. Danes don't even have the same accent. Whereas Swedish and Norwegian English both sound kind of the same to me, Danish English almost sounds German.
Even Scanian Swedish gets subtitled on TV for the rest of Sweden to understand, and deep northern Swedish almost sounds Finnish.
As a Swede, I 100% vibe with calling it Modern Norse
As a Swissgerman speaker this is so relatable. Having to explain it's situation is complicated.
Same thing happens with Portuguese and Spanish. Studies show that 89% of the vocabulary is the same, and with little effort to catch up the differences in pronunciation, we can understand each other very easily without any formal study (specially Brazilian portuguese). They are, however, considered different languages because of the historical political differences between Portugal and Spain, even though the languages are more similar than many of the so-called italian or german dialects.
I am a second language intermediate speaker of Spanish and it took an embarrassingly long time to realize I was reading portugese not Spanish.
@@seanhartnett79 Exactly! I could read texts in Spanish before I even had started to learn it, since the written language is even more similar than the spoken one. The only noticeable differences are some special characters such as Spanish “ñ”, that corresponds to Portuguese “nh”, and “ll”, that is similar to Portuguese “lh”, and Portuguese nasal vowels such as (ã/õ) as well. Also, Spanish has a lot of diphthongs that we don’t have in Portuguese (eg. fiesta/festa; huevo/ovo; huésped/hóspede) and drops a lot of Fs that we don’t (eg. hacer/fazer; rehén/refém; hada/fada). But since this differences are very small and very often follow a certain pattern, you’ll generally intuitively catch up the rule that differentiates one from the other and basically understand it all without much effort.
@@gabrielfigueiredo4372 Every other romance language: we count the weekdays with Roman gods.
Portuguese: But what about NUMBERS???
nah portuguese and spanish speaking people can't understand each other that much. i always see them speaking english to each other
@@craftah as a portuguese native speaker, I can say some brazilians speak english with european portuguese speakers because of the huge pronunciation differences, but if we make a small effort and get used to the accent we can easily understand each other. same thing happens with spanish, but especially the other way around, since portuguese has a bunch of sounds that spanish doesn’t, so a lot of words are written the same, but pronounced quite differently.
"Swedes, Norwegians and to a lesser extent Danes can understand each other." Nope, you turned them around. Danes and Norwegians can understand each other, but a lot of Danes can't understand Swedish. "They're considered different languages." Well, yeah, because they're used in wildly different countries with entirely different words in them.
I speak Swedish (I'm not native), I can understand Norwegian, but it is difficult to me to understand spoken Danish, but I can understand many words if it is written. I have the sensation that Danes can understand swedes but not viceversa🤔
Norwegians understand Swedish better than Danish.
Swedes understand Norwegian better than Danish.
Danish understands Norwegian better than Swedish.
There's obviously nuance to this but generally this is the way it is
This resloves some confusion I had in the last couple days. I had heard of Scots being a dialect and heard the similarity and difference in it to my English, and so I thought that big a change was a dialect. Then a few days ago some videos about Japanese dialects started popping up in my feed, even though from what I can tell the differences where what I considered sub-dialect/non-dialect variations, similarly to how my Californian English is a regional variation that has differences with Philly English.
Yeah for Scots it depends who you ask, some will say dialect some will say language. it's been revived in the last decade but up until then it was dying as a written language ever since the UK was created, leading to Scottish English being the dominant language - which is basically English with Scots words mixed in and much more of a dialect. Scots itself though developed separately from Middle English hundreds of years ago, so is much more distinct.
If Scotland had remained independent instead of joining the UK, it's likely that Scots would always have been considered a distinct language. Demoting Scots to a dialect of English was an essential part of British government policy in trying to create a common British identity. Scots could then be dismissed as 'bad English' with Scottish children forced to speak nothing but English at school
This is a great video, and the collab is really cool
thank you so much for this video! as a cantonese speaker this debate frustrates me to no end. people are always insisting that mandarin & cantonese, as well as other sinitic languages, are all one chinese language and are all written the same way, but this is just false and it discounts the value and cultural significance of regional chinese languages.
there's a growing movement originating from hong kong to promote and standardize written cantonese as a separate language from standard chinese (written mandarin), largely driven by the territory's desire to distinguish itself culturally and politically from china. the fact that this has mostly gained significant traction in recent years as china tightens its grip on hong kong makes it so obvious that the whole language vs dialect debate is all politics.
We have an opposite issue in the Bahamas. Bahamians call, and understand our version of English to be, a dialect. On Wikipedia, it's been classified principally by editors who don't come from the Bahamas as a creole. You'll also have some 'enlightened' Bahamians who will argue that you don't have enough ethnic pride, in fact you're ashamed, if you don't see Bahamian dialect as a separate language. Bahamian dialect is intelligible to other English speakers and has minor grammatical differences, unlike say Jamaican patois or Haitian creole. To people who speak both Bahamian dialect and a more received version of English, there are few differences. To me this is another example of respect the people who speak the language and how they define it.
I'm confused by the point you're trying to make. Should we respect those who want to say Bahamian English is its own language, despite you saying it's just a dialect?
@@adanactnomew7085 'The people who say its a language vs me who says it's just a dialect!' That's right folks, I coined the term "Bahamian dialect". Don't forget to credit me in all the encyclopediae.🤡 If you're confused then you should work on your reading comprehension. But you're not confused, are you?
Just be Hungarian. You'll never have that proplem of other nations understanding you.
Finnish and Mongolian:
As a Corsican, I just wanted to say: thanks you sir!
It was really interesting. Thank you for the video
In Norway we have two written languages, and one spoken language with many dialects. Two dialects of Norwegian can sound more different than two dialects of swedish and norwegian. I, as a Norwegian can understand swedish better than some dialects further south. Danish is more difficult for me to understand, probably because i (mostly) speak and am used to the northern dialect.
As a native swede who has lived in Norway for most of my adult life i would argue that our languages are mutually intelligeble if one has gotten about 100 hours of exposure. My 5 year old cousin who's Swedish was visiting me once and where playing with some Norwegian kids who were anout his age , and I had to translate both ways . Most Norwegians have watched a lot of Swedish tv-shows and Swedish music is not uncommon , but my point it that the Scandinavian languages are not as mutuality intelligeble at least in their spoken forms as many people belive.
Depends on the dialects of the Scandinavian languages as well, with how mutually intelligible they are.
For example, Danes don’t necessarily understand spoken Nynorsk very well, but are much more proficient in understanding Bokmål from Olso better.
@@Lemonz1989 you dont speak nynorsk or bokmål, you write them.
@@benjasine3472 I know, but certain dialects use the written form Nynorsk because it’s similar to their spoken dialects. What I meant is the spoken dialects, of whose people use the written form called Nynorsk. It was just a tedious sentence to write, so I wrote it in a way that I thought people would understand. Apparently I wasn’t being pedantic enough for some people. I’m not going to name every dialect relevant to my sentence, which is why I used Nynorsk and Bokmål.
As a Swede I agree
So cool! I've been wondering about my mother tongue language, which is Javanese, that have a big portion of different words for different purposes. For example, the words you use when speaking to elderly people (a.k.a. _basa krama_ or _krama_ "language") and youngsters (a.k.a. basa ngoko or _ngoko_ language) are different even though the meaning is still the same. This well-made video helped me understand my own language better. Thank you for making this. 😊
BTW, I watch your videos daily but this is my first time leaving a comment. Keep up the good work!
Excellent explanations!
This reminds me of Turkish and Azerbaijani. Most Turkic languages sound EXTREMELY similar but these two are especially similar. A Turkish speaker can understand an Azerbaijani speaker and vice versa without any problems. But they’re different languages.
A language is a dialect with an army and navy.
I'm so used to you in shorts and since the video is in vertical i clicked on it and thought to myself halfway through "man this is a really long 60 seconds"
It's also funny how different people with the same geographical background can understand others to differing degrees. I'm from Sweden, my mom grew up a couple of miles from where I grew up and neither of us has lived beyond a few miles of here. But last year in a store, a danish woman came up and apparently asked for directions. My mom understood her no problem, while I had absolutely no clue what she said.
Absolutely love this. Also objectively, but also because my first language (Western Frisian) is by many considered to be “just a dialect” (of Dutch) which always makes me a bit mad even though i know it technically makes some sense 😅😅
Can you understand Old English
@@washimpatwary1446 not sure, maybe a bit?
Frysk i dont think most people consider a dialect of Dutch, just people joke about it because they think "It sounds weird"
Ones people in NL do think is a dialect of Dutch however is the Low Saxon (Neddersassisk/Nedersaksisch) aka Low German (Plattdüütsk) part of the Netherlands. Twents, Drents, Grunnegs, Stellingswarfs, Veluws, Sallands, Achterhooks. This dialect continuum extends into Germany, with Westfaals, Ostfries, Mönsterlands, etc. All the way to Mecklenborgs, Holsteens, Hamborger Platt.
Because people dont know the scale of this entire dialect chain, and there is no standard which we can rally behind to get it more used, people always think its just a dialect of Dutch or German (depending on the side of the border) whilst really, it officially is counted as a language, just without a common standard, just dialectual standards.
I feel like a lot of that has to be a joke. They're both West Germanic languages, but West Frisian is more closely related to English and (to a lesser extent) Low German, even if it's had a lot of Dutch influence for the last thousand years or so.
Sometimes when I speak it to non-Frisian Dutch speakers, they don’t get it at all (which makes them believe it’s its own language). But more often than that, I speak it and they say they can easily understand (which i get, often it’s only the vowels that are a bit different) and then follow up by believing it’s just a dialect. Sorry not sorry, you guys’ opinions don’t really erase the fact that this happens a lot \_(^-^)_/
In Arabic, although not everyone can understand everyone speaking the way they normally speak , all arabs know how to speak "formal Arabic" which is basically like the raw arabic which is used in books and stuff
You also have the Arabic dialect used in the holy Qur'ān.
this is why i believe that studying specific dialects instead of languages as a whole is very important for reconstruction and other purposes
Gaelic exists on a dialect continuum too, as Manxman my dialect is very central and I understand Donegal and Southern island Scottish dialects most easily
I think the most extreme example of this is standard Malaysian Malay (BM) and Bahasa Indonesia (BI) which both are based on the exact same variety of Malay.
Even after 80+ years of divergence its pretty difficult to immediately differentiate two official documents in BM and BI, however two seperate identities have already formed and today it'll simply be not right to call Indonesian a variety of "Malay." Its casual spoken form can have a completely different grammar and lexicon.
I think some other languages that comes closest to this situation is Serbo-Croatian and Hindi-Urdu.
Tbh i would consider Indonesian as another variation of standardized Johor-Riau Malay dialect rather than a different language or a new dialect of malay
But maybe in 70-100 years indonesian might be not mutually intellligible with modern Malay then it might have a right to consider it a different language entirely
I think another reason as to why they are considered different (speaking as an Indonesian) is due to the different history.
Sure, both languages originate dialects of Malay, but colonialism also affected the way we speak.
Indonesia was primarily a Dutch colony and so we get a lot of Dutch loans while Malaysia was primarily a British colony and so you get a lot of English loanwords.
Example (note: some words are loaned from different languages besides just Dutch and English)
🇮🇩 - 🇲🇾
tas - beg (bag)
kartu - kad (card)
bioskop - pawagam (cinema)
sepatu - kasut (shoe)
And there are even certain words that are written and pronounced the same, but have different meaning
kereta: train (Indonesia), car (Malay). The Indonesian word for car is "mobil" while the Malay word for train is "kereta api"
percuma: useless (Indonesian), free (Malay)
pejabat: official (Indonesian), office (Malay). The word for office in Indonesian is "kantor" (a Dutch loan)
From what I’ve heard about Scandinavia, most speak excellent English and use English when working with other Scandinavians who speak a different language/dialect.
Also they correct my grammar and spelling. I’m an American and that’s just wild to me.
Depends a bit; a lot of younger Scandinavians tend to use English in those situations, while older ones are more comfortable speaking their own language slowly instead.
I guess I could probably correct native speakers on grammar in some circumstances. One fun thing is to do this with archaic English: which may be a bit easier for a Scandinavian as we still have distinctions between thou/thee and where/whither. Then again I also read a lot of fantasy books and historical literature, so I'm not really representative.
I'm German and I learned Plattdeutsch from my Grandma which is also considered its own language.
As someone from the north western part of the country, some dialects from the south and east are also hard to understand.
Can you talk about the dialect/language “plattdeutsch“? Its a dialect/language spoken in northern germany
I thinkt that to consider a 2 languages dialects of one, bigger language, they should:
-Be mutually intelligible
-Have less than 20-15% differences in the phoneme inventory
-Have the same max. Syllable structure
What fascinates me that intelligibility isnt always mutual. As a German speaker I might recognise some Dutch words but someone speaking Dutch will be better able to understand German. Blows my mind
Most German speakers have a more pronounced articulation than us mumbling Dutch. But I think a big difference is that we are more exposed to your language than the other way around. The older generations grew up with German television and teenagers still have German lessons at school, even if they drop the subject after a year. We hear Germans speak in various media (with subtitles), while the Germans translate any foreign content to their own language and talk over it.
@@Teun_Jac When you said the older generations grew up with German television, implying the younger ones don't, is that because television as a medium isn't relevant any more?
@xaverlustig3581 No, that's because until the late '80s, there were only one or two Dutch tv channels on the television, so they would sooner tune in on a foreign broadcasts (if they could receive it). I think tv still was very relevant in the '90s and '00s, but there was plenty to see in Dutch and (American) English, while the cable only showed the public broadcasts of neighbouring countries. Now the internet only makes American English even more dominant as second language. But most importantly, globalisation made English the lingua franca for everybody. Every kid learns English in school now, even the Germans and French.
@@Teun_Jac I wish we had the Dutch cable programming, because in Germany we don't get the public broadcasters of neighbouring countries on cable. Lots of shopping channels and other junk though.
I’m moroccan and I have a lebanese friend and we totally understand each other thought the vocabulary can be very different but we still understand each other
one thing to note about the scandi example is that while there is mutual intelligibility closer to the borders, because it is a dialect continuum that's not so much the case when further away. I speak a mixed rural western norwegian dialect (stril), and have tried speaking to swedes in our native tongues, which didn't work at all. Although we do generally have some basic idea of common swedish-only words because Astrid Lindgren's works are very popular for kids.
I’m just going too ad that many Sweds(me included) have a hard time understanding our nordic neighbours. They understand us just fine but we struggle to understand them.
One notable exception is tho that we Swedes can often understand danish writing.
I have heard that Swedish and Norwegian speakers have a hard time understanding Danish, but Danish speakers have an easier time understanding Swedish and Norwegian.
@@isaacbruner65 Yes
@@isaacbruner65 Not quite. According to studies of students, Danish and Swedish speakers have the hardest time understanding eachother, while Norwegians understand both languages better, with the speakers of dialects geographically closest to Denmark understanding Danish better than the speakers of dialects further to the north or west do.
It also depends on if you are talking about written or oral language. Reading Danish is very easy for Norwegians as the most popular written variant of Norwegian, Bokmål, was based on Danish 150 years ago and is still very similar. But dialects in Norway vary a lot and nobody speaks Bokmål (it literally means "book-tongue"), so Danes (and Swedes) can struggle with understanding dialects. Even some Norwegians have a hard time understanding certain other Norwegian dialects. I remember a TV-show a few years ago that found two speakers of very different Norwegian dialects and they could barely communicate at all.
Then you have the very peculiar speech the Danes have - Norwegians and Swedes often say Danes have a potato in their throat and are constantly struggling to get it out - which means that understanding oral Danish is quite hard if not used to hearing it.
@@isaacbruner65 From my extensive time as a Norwegian in Denmark, I've experienced that Danes and Swedes have a much harder time of understanding me than I have of them. Heck, a majority of Danes can't even tell if I'm speaking Swedish or Norwegian most of the time!
I'm guessing that its because of the amount of extremely variable dialects everywhere in Norway.
My dad always told me that if legal terms are different, it's a different language
Would this mean Canadian and American are different languages
@@adanactnomew7085maybe? I mean I’m American and I don’t consider them to be different languages but they are definitely different
Another example for arabic mutual intelligibility:
Red is similar to orange, which is similar to yellow, which is similar to green. But red in no way is similar to green.
Now replace colours with dialects
Chinese linguists have created a word to separate the Chinese idea of dialects from the English/western one, referring to them as topolects. I think this is a good way of categorising these languages which seem to border between being seperate languages and dialects of the same language. Mandarin, cantonese, shanghaiese, Hakka, etc are all Chinese topolects, and I think this word can be extended to all these other languages. Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are scandinavian topolects. Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are Balkan/Serbo-Croation topolects. And all the varieties of Arabic are of course Arabic topolects.
Respect 🏴 No English person will have any idea what a Scottish person speaking Scots is saying, yet they still call it a dialect
To my knowledge it's not just the English/native English speakers. A large chunk of native Scots speakers stated, in a survey, that they considered it a dialect of English.
(To be clear... I think it's quite easy to prove, by all definitions, Scots is a separate language.)
Not to a lesser extent Danes. It’s Swedish that’s the most different Scandinavian language and they use a different alphabet too. Especially considering the fact that Norway was a part of Denmark up until the Napoleonic wars and that our language is like 95% the same.
in italy we famously have a HUGE number of "dialects" which are. effectively, their own distinct languages. the funniest thing is that italian could be consieered a dialect of tuscan which it was developed from, and a not naturally developing language
I remember talking to a coworker about this subject but with Spanish. Both of us being Mexican, but talking to someone from Perto Rico, Cuba, Argentina, etc who speaks Spanish but has a different slang dictionary. We can sorta understand each other but there are noticable differences. That's not including the vast indiginous languages from Central America that need to be acknowleged as well. Being considered a language is powerful and that context is vital in ensuring language is not lost
No one understands Danish. Not even the Danes.
Danish is just drunk swedish
kamelåså?
Never really looked at it this way, but saying something is a language over a dialect really does give the people more power. Im a native low saxon speaker myself. Low saxon is usually put aside as a dialect of german or dutch, when really i think it should be considered a seperare language, with various dialects. Although i should also add that low saxon has been influenced a lot by Dutch and German. Getting that recognition does make me, and other low saxon speakers, feel seen and valued.
i think the main thing that separates languages from dialects is that dialects of the same language tend to evolve with each other and/or have similarities that different-but-similar languages wouldn't have. for example, hindi and urdu are very similar, but because of their geographic distance, different culture by speakers, etc., they're not likely to look towards each other for influence on how to speak in the future. but if you look at british and american english, they often "piggyback" off of each other, share the same writing system, pronounced more or less the same, etc.
As a filipino, the first definition is just like a Creole, like a chavocano speaker(filipino language) can understand spanish people like 80~90% of the chavocano speaker.
European portuguese speakers tend to downplay the importance of brazilian portuguese. They always state that the latinamerican variant isn't «real portuguese» or «pure portuguese», so they adjetive it as a mere dialect
European portuguese speaker here. No we don't.
I mean, xenophobes do, but those are the fringe people that exist in every country/society. Brazillian portuguese is real portuguese like the one in Angola, the Azores, Cape Verde, Continental Portugal, etc.
We do colloquially say "brasileiro" to refer to brazillian portuguese but only as a shortcut to say somebody speaks with a brazillian accent. I've heard british people say Americans speak American, french people say people from Quebec speak Québécois or Spaniards say hispanoamericans speak Latin American in a similar manner.
It's not to try to invalidate other variants of the language, it's simply easier to provide context naturally in conversations.
It's a dialect
@@thailux6494see the comment below yours, as someone who learned to speak in Brasil and now lives in Portugal it's a very common opinion
What? I'm Portuguese and we DON'T say you speak Brazilian. You guys are the ones who always try to distantiate yourselves from us, saying it's too different, that you can't understand us and complain when something is not translated specifically into PT-BR...
In Portugal we've always considered it the same language. We even sign accords to try to make it closer, and in the 1990 accord, there were more changes in PT-EU than in PT-BR...
Languages are difficult to measure but at the same time we have common sense. Take Scandinavia for example. Norwegian has no standardized speech and one of the written forms is essentially Danish while the other is Swedish written with the Danish alphabet. Norwegians can understand Swedes at varying degrees limited by dialect and exposure and vice versa. Danish is phonetically different but some dialect can manage. In writing Swedish is kinda like the black sheep of the three but that doesn’t make much sense to me personally because I have never had difficulty reading. In addition, Norway has dialects that are literally harder to understand than rikssvenska at times. Given all this it is rather difficult to given independence to these languages, especially Norwegian. Danish has very different phonetics and standardized speech, while Swedish has rather accessible phonetics with also standardized speech. Norway has no standardized speech and the language sounds funny to both Swedes and Danes although rather accessible. Based on this it becomes clear that Swedish and Danish have a much better argument when claiming independence while Norwegian doesn’t, because it’s freedom of diversity allows it to become more similar to other languages without having anything to control for that.
Another example is Portuguese and Spanish. They are basically dialects of the same language that have diverged. But this has happened in a rather peculiar way where the old words of one language are the modern words of the other (in many cases) and there are rather standardized differences such as F becoming H. Point is that they feel like very well defined dialects rather than two different languages.
If all these 5 count as fully independent languages then why don’t we count Austrian and Swiss as languages? Their dialects of German are so different that they even match Dutch in certain aspects of development. I am guessing that since they formally adhere to high German then this standard has defined them as German and not independent languages. So maybe it ultimately comes to having a proper standard, but then Norway wouldn’t be allowed to call its language Norwegian.
We have many cases of this happening and I honestly think that the simplest way is to see how standardized the language is, and how it differs from other languages (usually from neighboring ones). If we take the example of Scots, we can see that the language is basically a dialect with an English base and tons of Celtic words. Nothing wrong with it, but it is not a proper language, rather a unique dialect.
'A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet.'
-Max Weinreich
Can you do something on the theme of Slavic/Balkan languages? Like for example how Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian are basically a dialects of the basically identical languages but how those 3 can also understand Slovenians about 80% of the way and Macedonias about 60-70% percent. Russian I mean only Serbians can understand writing but speaking all 5 can kind of understand it. I'd say at least 20%. But for example Polish is not understandable to any of the 5 (Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, Macedonian and Slovenian). Czech it's a bit of a toss up. Similar to Russian. But they also can't understand Polish people.
I dare anyone who thinks that Scots isn’t a separate language to read a single paragraph.
This is a terrible argument for the simple reason that English writing is not phonetic. If I were to be presented English written phonetically, I would also struggle reading it.
@@adanactnomew7085 I dare anyone who thinks that Scots isn’t a separate language to listen to a single paragraph.
another fun thing is when dialects and different languages CAN be equal difficulty to understand, because of either word choice, or word construction whilst sounding close enough
Here in Morocco we speak Darija which the base is arabic and added like broken spanish/french words
*Cries in landlocked languages*
As an austrian this hits close to home. Its such a highly debated topic whether or not austro-bavarian is a language or a german dialect. But after all bavarian didnt evolve from modern standard german but rather is a south germanic variety that has been spoken in the area of the alps for centuries. I would love to one day see a at least somewhat standardized version of my „dialect“ in literature
There is no dialect that evolved from standard German. All German dialects evolved from proto West Germanic, and later they converged again due to geographical proximity. Standard German is an "artificial" language constructed by scribes in order to be comprehensible to all German speakers, originally it was spoken natively by no-one.
@@xaverlustig3581 i know
Awesome video! 😀
Linguist Max Weinreich notably said, "A language is a dialect with an army and navy". Before the days of air forces naturally.
I'm kinda suprised he didn't mention countries from ex Yugoslavia. Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin languages are remarkably similar yet different languages. For me as Croatian some dialects from Croatia are less understandable than Serbian for example.
But I agree it would be really inappropriate to call it Yugoslavian language. It's important for our identity.
On Scandinavian languages. It's all the more confusing, because the standard varieties of danish, norwegian and swedish are quite similar, but some of their "dialects" (or local language varieties) can have some wild variation. Especially on the grammar. So you have dialects of danish that are further from standard danish than swedish is. This is also the case in Sweden. It's especially true in Norway where the "dialect culture" has been strong.
Spanish and Portuguese are also similar,I have heard its easier for Spanish speaker in latin American to understand Brazilian Portuguese when compared to Chileian Spanish because of thick acccent
As a Swedish person, I understand standard Norwegian better than some Swedish "dialects"
"A language is a dialect with an army."
I am Javanese speaker from Surabaya which is called "Arekan Javanese", we have dialects in Javanese. But the Standard Javanese is Mataram Javanese which originates from Central Java. it has language register, ngoko (informal) and krama (formal) meanwhile in my dialect, most word is ngoko and most young people can't speak krama (formal) in my city
I always loved the old joke… a language is a dialect with an army and a language.
Someone said: "A language is a dialect equipped with a government and an army".
When I heard that a dialect should mean you can understand each other, I was like no way lol and I assume many others thought that too. There are dialects in my country that are harder for me to understand than a different related language is. It makes sense tho, because those dialects borrow a lot from other languages that are not related to the main language.
I'm finnish for the record and I do feel like I can sometimes understand estonian more than some of our dialects, which often borrow from swedish or russian or both (sometimes other languages).