What Even Is a Language?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 มี.ค. 2015
- Where do we draw the line between "language" and "dialect"?
Click here for the video of Scots:
• The Scots Language
Things from this video I didn't make:
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Intro Song:
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Outro Song:
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"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."
Old Yiddish proverb.
Vanellope von Schweetz said this: "A language is a dialect with communism."
We, the basques, have no army nor navy... And we are not actually speaking another dialect of ''Spanish'' :P but I got it
@@oiervitoria9821 yea lol
@Electro_blob it was revived when the british gained the mandate of palestine actually
but the establishment of isreal boosted it further
Languages are a lot like biological species. They evolve, split, interbreed, fill a whole niche or become extinct. Even dialect continuums mentioned in the video are analogous to ring species.
My thoughts exactly! Evolution is a great analogy for language.
Free helicopter rides, was that communicated well?
I'd contest that. There is a reproductive barrier between species that language can break. If species were like languages, we could have children with spiders and bulls so Spider-men and Minotaurs and Alebrijes and all other mythological creatures would be possible. That's what I like about languages
Edit: Recently I learned about horizontal gene transfer. So some genetic material get leaked between species, even distant ones. However, this is an active area of study in the sciences. From what I understand, most of this horizontally transfered genes are not active. Most of the active DNA still comes from your biological parents.
@@user-zw5jj2uf1p True, but certainly for the case of diverging languages the analogy works. And in biological evolution there is a similar case to what you described. Convergent evolution, who two species evolve from different ancestors and come to the same solutions to similar problems.
Granted, it's not exactly the same as two completely separate species literally merging in some sort of cross-clade chimera (dare you to say that ten times fast), but then again, convergent evolution in language isn't something that can really happen either, as the reasons that language evolves are rather different.
Although, I should note that without the ability to merge language like that, we wouldn't have any of the words we have to refer to evolution and individual species in the first place, and so we probably wouldn't have the concept of evolution at all to discuss. So you win that one.
Still, I like the idea of linguistic evolution, as a mechanically similar and interesting counterpart of biological evolution.
Even micro evolution (a giraffe's neck getting longer over generations for example (natural selection)) can be an analogy for a sound change like the cot caught merger
While macro evolution (fish turning into humans in hundreds of millions of years for ex) can be analogy for proto Germanic slowly becoming modern English through a long time or something
Lots and lots of micro evolution can lead to macro evolution
Small correction: Scots started to diverge from English during the late Middle English period, not Old English. If they had diverged during the Old English period, they'd be as different from each other as Frisian and Dutch are from English and Scots.
Well, do we sat that they're both descended from Middle English if they were different (and becoming more different) during that period? I wasn't sure, so I decided to just say they were both descended from Old English (which they definitely are) instead of from Middle English (which I wasn't sure about).
Xidnaf
You could've looked it up on Wikipedia.
TazeTSchnitzel ok, what I'm saying is that from what I read on Wikipedia it seemed like they were diverging, but still mutually intelligible, during the Middle English period, and I wasn't sure whether that ment they were both descended from Middle English or Old English. Wikipedia tends to be bad at answering questions like that.
Xidnaf
anyways, we get the point, thanks for the video dude (Y)
Rohan Zener but we are speaking the same language. Here I'm gonna prove it. Mitt namn är "insert name".Mitt navn er "insert name". and to finish this off with grandeur Mit navn er "insert name". There is 90% mutual intelligibility between Copenhagen Danish and Oslo Norwegian and Stockholm Swedish. There is 30% intelligibility between Scanish and Lapp two regions of Sweden. Those 2 dialects are the 2 most diverse dialects in Sweden, and in fact they are the most diverse in the whole of Europe. It's easier for a dutch person to understand Frisian. I mean I as a Swedish speaker have it easier to read Afrikaans than it is for me to Speak Lapp. Sure I could communicate via written text in Rikssvenska (The Nation's Swedish) as then every Swedish person has at least 80% mutual intelligibility. I as a Scanish person can walk to Denmark's Capital and Speak with them as if none of us had a dialect. Sure we both know that we are speaking differently but we have 90% mutual intelligibility and the few words we know the other part wouldn't understand we say i the others language. There is a huge difference in Dialects in the Nordic countries and literally no language barriers between us. For instance the Scanish "Ködaknyden me pantofflagröd o brunsås" differs hugely from Swedish "Köttbullar med Potatismos och brunsås" the only thing in common is brunsås("gravy") the full sentence in both dialects, being: Meatballs with Mashed Potatoes and Gravy. Here is the Scanish written in English "Meat packages with potato mush and gravy" It's like me trying to speak Scots it wouldn't be too hard as it's closer to old English meaning Norwegian than Modern English is. Yes old English=Norwegian. Same language!!!
I've actually run into partial intelligibility when I was travelling around Europe. At the time I lived in Spain, so I picked up Spanish, and randomly met this guy from Angola (I think, it's been a while) who spoke Portuguese. We spoke to him in Spanish, he spoke to us in Portuguese, and it just worked.
yes it also works with italian but its harder to understand e eu tambem falo purtugues eu sou brasileiro aqui no brasil tambem falamos purtugues nao espanhol purtugues entendeu?
It’s less common these days but my Dad is a nurse and he has to translate for some people from the north east because the southern or foreign doctors couldn’t understand them.
This is my experience when studying Spanish and Italian, but the other speaker is an Italian. I was able to understand him, but not the other way around.
As a Dutch person, I understand partial intelligibility. I can often understand everyday German sentences, and can speak very simple ones, but not enough to have a conversation with someone that speaks German but not Dutch. In the Scots language video he used Dutch-German as a comparison for English-Scots. I'd compare Bitish-American English to Dutch-Flemish. I can fairly easilly have a conversation with someone speaking Flemish with only occational confusion, as Americans would when having a conversation with a Brit.
+Huntracony For the Dutch-German part I can totally relate. Being German I can kind of understand Dutch even though I hardly speak a word and I can also read Dutch quite fluently with some minor problems now and then. I can also understand this next step in the vidoe with the German-English comparison. I mean, I speak English so I have no problem there but when I went to Norway last year by the end of my visit I would know what people were talking about in their conversations, sometimes without even understanding a single word.
Graup I speak German as a native language and if I read Dutch sentences I mostly get them, too but when y'all speak I'm SO confused.
Funny. I have the opposite problem. I can usually understand German when spoken aloud, but when I try to read German I get caught up on your long composition words, your umlauts, and the ß.
What about Dutch-Afrikaans?
@@AlexAleX-tm3hb that's quite similar to English v Scots
LOL, that fucking scots guy.
"to name a wheen" means "to name a few"
Wheen
WHEEN
That's the best word ever.
As a native french speaker, when I read other romance languages like portugese, I can get the general idea. But when I listen to someone speak portugese, I'm like : "what in the name of fuck itself is that person saying ?"
Mista Koops Which is why when Mr Campbell speaks French in US History class my brain goes "QUÉ?"
KpTroopaFR eyy koopa when will the world cup continue (yes I am that annoying guy)
+David Mapping you can harass me on TFOE Wiki.
But leave me the fuck alone on TH-cam.
also I left the wiki.
Lol so no world cup anymore?
Only if miguel does it?
Before the Soviet Union broke up, there was an absurd situation between the Turkish spoken in Turkey and the Azerbaijani Turkish of what is now the independent Republic of Azerbaijan, formerly of the Soviet aUnion and the Azerbaijani Turkish spoken my millions of people in Iran . Turkey uses the lLatin alphabet introduced by Ataturk decades ago, but the Azerbaijanis living under Soviet domination used the Cyrillic alphabet , while those living in Iran used the Arabic alphabet . So three people from each of these places could understand each other speaking, but could not read each other's script !
The independent Azerbaijanis have since switched to the Latin alphabet, which is slightly different form the one used in Turkey .
I was raised speaking Scots, or Doric more specifically and its getting more diluted with each generation. Each generation speaks slightly less Doric than the rest and the rule applies for the rest of Scots. The language is dying. For some horrific reason in many schools in Scotland young kids speaking Scots get in trouble, many people also have a stigmatism against Scots acting as if speaking it makes you less intelligent. The government for some fucking reason also feels the need to support Scottish Gaelic, which I would agree is a good thing but they do it in areas that have never spoken Gaelic, or at least havent in hundreds of years, while totally neglecting Scots. Only areas in the Highlands and Hebrides speak Gaelic while basically everywhere else speaks Scots. I suppose the problem with Scots is that it varies so much so from town to town, every area has its own dialect. In Aberdeen where I'm from people from Aberdeen are referred to as "Toonsers" and people from Aberdeenshire are referred to as "Tuechters" and even between them there is a lot of differences in how they use Scots. Its too fractured to try and formalise it into a dicationary.
We live in a self loathing hun filled shit pit my friend
Voting Yes for independence would help
well you take a lesson from the basque language. They made a special group called the Basque language Academy. The thing they did was first create a standard version of the basque language, that way they could start teaching it better and help promote it in schools. so a dioric language Academy could help.
Would that not lose some of its originality
I know what you mean with each generation speaks less and less, some years ago when i was living in Dubai I asked a few Scottish colleagues why they don't speak Scottish language to each other and they laughed at me so hard saying they are not farmers... I couldn't believe my ears for such a idiotic and disrespectful reply...
Just to let everyone know, I got the title card wrong at the beginning of the video, so I decided to re-upload it.
Couldn't you just add an anotation ?
Dave Sheik That wouldn't have fixed the fact that I had the wrong illustration on the title card. Also, it would have looked crapy.
Xidnaf true that
Xidnaf May I recommend that, for next video, you add some music in the background? It would be a nice touch for your otherwise great videos. :)
geopolitical Thanks for the suggestion, and I have thought about doing that a lot, but I've decided against it. I frequently get distracted by background music, and if I was the one choosing the music I would probably wind up making it distracting. Thanks tho!
As usual, awesome episode. It's programs about linguistics are so rare (and I've never seen one in my own language). Keep up the good work mate, your channel deserves way more visibility !
Je pensais pas te trouver là !
As a Spanish speaker, i can understand European Portuguese very well but i can;t understand Brazilian Portuguese. I wonder if Portuguese people can understand Brazilians...
Yes. And Brazilians can understand you very well.
That's cool.
+Crazily Awesome I went on a date with a girl who spoke Spanish (probably some Latin American version), and she would speak Spanish to a Brazilian waiter while he replied in Brazilian Portuguese. I don't know if the waiter actually spoke Spanish (probably not if he chose to reply in Portuguese), but apparently they understood each other just fine.
That's amazing, how the two languages are so similar tyt they can understand each other.
+Crazily Awesome That's odd. I'm Brazilian and, during the World Cup, I was approached by a group of Spanish speaking guys who asked me for directions. I don't know whether they were Spanish or Latin Americans, but I could understand them just fine.
However, when I tried talking to them to give them instruction on where to go, they couldn't understand a word I said. They all kept staring at me helplessly discussing amongst themselves trying to figure out what I was saying.
After a while, I just repeated everything again but paying close attention to my own speech so as not to reduce or nasalize my vowels (as one normally does when speaking Portuguese) and guess what, they were finally able to understand me.
So yeah, Spanish and Portuguese do share a degree of mutual inteligibility, but I'd say that it does not go both ways. And to add insult to the injury, most Brazilians have little to no trouble at all trying to understand Spanish, but are all but helpless when it comes to understanding European Portuguese. It's complicated.
Cool! I have actually heard that German native speakers can sometimes understand Scots better than you would expect. After watching the video I see why! For example, his pronunciation of "daughter" sounded very similar to the German translation "Tochter." And your example of "echt" for "eight" is also similar to the German word "acht." (maybe because of the relation of Scots to Old English which had more in common with German??)
THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE!!! A huge part of the difference between English and German is all the influence from French that English has, and Scots wouldn't have any of that. COOL!!
Thanks for the reply! Also just to clarify, I mean a German speaker who also speaks English. They understand more than you would expect a non-native to comprehend this dialect. I was on a tour bus in Scotland and the Italian tourists could not understand anything the guide said, but the Germans could!
ChrisFarmer To me that video sounded like someone throwing 70% english, each 15 % dutch and german(or maybe 30% plattdeutsch) into a blender and looked what happened.
Oh, that's why as an Austrian person I am almost as clueless as the Americans.
Hey ik I'm late on the reply here but I'm a Scottish student who has learnt both German and French and tbh the best way I've heard it described would be by my teachers who said that English has Germanic grammar and structure but with Romantic words. On a note of the Scottish dialect too we had a German aupair who came to help with our class which only contained myself and 2 other guys and we found that since I had a more French/RP dialect (since I learned French first) and the guys had more of a dorich dialect (think pure highlands Scots) she was able to understand them better in English and they had better German pronunciation than I had initially.
I showed the Scots video to my nannar (it means grandma where I live) and the difference between our understanding is fascinating to me. I'm from the north midlands of England and my nannar and her family is originally from near the Scottish border in the north east. She moved here as a child so she's lost the accent but she still uses a few dialectal words (e.g. pet, bairn, wor David to refer to her brother rather than just David) and as I result I understand those dialectal words. However, I understood little of the Scots video, I could pick out a few words but not quite enough to fully understand what he was talking about, but I suspect the speaker's thick accent complicates things further for me. My nannar on the other hand understood pretty much everything he was saying, bar a few dialectal words, but she could pretty much guess what they meant. That to me just really shows how dialect continuums happen and how even just a couple hundred miles can make the difference between complete and partial mutual intelligibility.
Sorry about the rambling, i'm kinda bad at articulating myself sometimes :/
Finnish and Estonian are also cases of this. Anyone from Finland can understand Estonian to some degree and vice versa, but after a while it becomes apparent, that the two cannot communicate extensively. Finnish TV has been visible in Tallinn since during the Cold War, so there are a number of people there who can understand Finnish. I've heard, that south-western Finnish dialects are more intelligible with Estonian than others. Presumably because a number of Estonian people moved in many, many centuries ago.
Thank you, I enjoy your videos very much. I came for the Thai script post because I am married to a Thai. However, this post has really struck a chord. Back in the '80's I was the only person in my workplace who had English as a first language. There were Indonesian supervisors and the the staff comprised of Poles, Czechs, Italians, Greeks, Koreans, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Nigerians, Ghanaians, Fijians, Papuans and Chileans. As you may surmise, it truely was the Tower of Babel situation, except they were all trying to speak the same English and technical jargon. It was remarkable to me that the Pacific Pidgin speakers were able to understand the African 'Harbour' speakers. The Asians had a lot of trouble understanding each other. The Europeans fared a little better, especially between the Slavs. Everyone used me as an intermediary because I could understand them all. It was a very interesting time.
about chinese languages.
we call them chinese for political reasons.
they're actually different languages.
for some time even korea and japan used chinese script, and we know that chinese script is pictographic in nature. it conveys meaning without writing down the sound, the phonemes from the language. you see a picture of a car and you know that it's a car, but you and i have completely different words for it.
therefore, i would say script in no way makes language a language.
Politics does decide what is and isn't a language more often than not. Case and point: the former Yugoslav republics. Remember when Serbo-Croatian was one language? Then Yugoslavia fell apart, and now both sides insist they speak different languages.
Japan still uses some Chinese characters, but the system is really complicated and kinda unnecessary when they have their 2 existing syllablaries.
Not really; Korean and Japanese are as alien from Chinese as they are from English, whereas the Chinese languages are all related. this makes it a lot easier for the Chinese languages all to be using the same writing system, where word order is the same. Try writing English using Chinese characters and you'd run into issues with word order.
You are right, though, that the "dialects" of Chinese are different languages, and are only called "dialects" for political reasons.
The fun thing is my mum is Japanese so she can read stuff in Chinese but we can't understand Chinese when it's spoken
so your channel is kind of like extra credits but about language?... cool
Even the voice matches!
+Zinouweel ^^
Spirit Science is similar to Extra Credits too except it's for crazy conspiracy theories, apparently, although I haven't watched Extra Credits yet.
Never thought about it that way. That's pretty interesting. Voice checks out, though the art is something of a different style, and it's much less professional. Other than that, though, same thing.
bon wjtn Den yodne talrne yxoe mebsxkit
It's 3 in the morning, I just can't stop watching
Is it funny that I stumbled upon this comment at 3:00 AM?
hjf
From my experience living in Czech Republic and often visiting Slovakia (My mother is Slovak) I can say, that Slovaks have no problem with understanding Czech but I can often see that Czechs have problems with understanding Slovaks. This is really weird to me. I guess this is due to the media. In Slovakia there is a lot of more Czech on TV or radio than the other way around. This one way intelligibility is weird but interesting I must say.
You're right. Czechs and Slovaks only think that these languages are that much mutually intelligible. They're not. Slovaks are exposed to Czech almost every day. There are lots of great Czech movies that will never be dubbed into Slovak. Slovaks generally like Czech dubbing. On the other hand, Slovaks from Vojvodina can't understand Czech very much, as they're not exposed to it. I would say that Rusyn language spoken in Slovakia is equally mutually intelligible with Slovak as Czech with Slovak.
It's similar with Finnish and Estonian, with Finnish TV being watched in Estonia.
I'm Jamaican. We learn English in school our official state language is English, south east British style English is what we would consider posh and we're exposed to lots of American media so we understand American English and AAVE but famously people from all these groups struggle to understand out creole when on vacation
So Slovak is the same language as Czech but Czech is a different language to Slovak?
My grandmother who is Polish once went on a vacation in Slovakia, she talked to them in Polish they answered in Slovak and everyone was happy
"Languages are dialects with armies and navies..."- guy whose name I forgot
I think it's worth pointing out that German in Germany is different from German in Switzerland, and while there both consider the same language, a good chunk of Germans can't understand the Switzerland German
I'd also say Plat is more like Dutch than standard German. I'm taking basic German so I have 0 exposure to dialects at all but hearing Bayerische made much more sense to me than hearing Plat
5:38 Just using this, I finally, after years, recognized that the word 'belonging' relates to German 'belangen'
It is so absurdly obvious that my brain, paradoxically never made the connection.
"Accent" doesn't connote anything negative whatsoever in my dialect.
Well played.
My native tongue is an Alemannic dialect, Swiss german to be exact.
Swabian Germans understand me, since they also speak an alemannic dialect, which is closer to high german. While high german speakers don't understand me at all, but understand Swabians, I do understand high german (and did so before I went to german class in school all of my life).
+Drowned God yeah, but for speakers of the most deep alemanic dialects (most Swiss dialects, Vorarlberg) there is also some sort of asymmetry there: we understand the whole German dialect continuum with relative ease while speakers of Bavarian, Platt, Sächsisch, etc, will have a *really* hard time to understand us. Even the Swabian people have a harder time to understand us than we have to understand them.
I find it very fascinating how most alemanic natives understand and speak high german without studying it. I have the feeling that at some point (due to television and newspapers being in high german) we just get how the mapping between our dialect and the high german language works. As a result, we feel that we speak German, just a dialect, but a German might consider our talk a language on its own. As an example, I have a friend who grew up in Lausanne, but is a swiss german native. He has a very hard time understanding and speaking high german because he grew up in a french-speaking area and never had this high german surrounding. Therefore, he never understood how to map his dialect sentences to high german. I spent years talking to him in french (because my french was better than his german) before finding out that he speaks swiss german.
+SinH4 I am pretty shure you, my Alemannic friend, wouldn't be able to totally undestand the old Steyr- dialect (Stoasteyrisch) or the very old remaining bits of Bavarian in Upper Austria, for the last one a short example:
Da Wiat kimmt áh her schleini,
trogt eahm d'Goaßl eini,
Loubt eam d'Scheckn guading yban Glee,
und d'Frau Wiatin nocha,
mid an freindli' Locha,
weist'n seywa auffi goa in d'Heh
So, as you can see, there are a few things we can learn from each other ;) I don't want to say you can't understand this, but i just wanted to show, that there are also others who beliefe they can understand (nearly) the whole continuum, like me. :D
Owa oans muaßi eng meydn, es hat's ma schiaga de liawan vore gonzn Dialekt! Sias!
+RobinsonCrouse24 I have to disappoint you, but I understand it without any effort :P
Alsatians too. But Alemanic isn't a dialect, it's an obvious distinct language
@@gamermapper
no it's not lol
Wait a minute, I speak both Portuguese (which is my native language) and English. Say I find someone else who also speaks both languages, then we start a conversation in which one of us speaks in Portuguese while the other speaks in English. We will understand each other just fine, does that mean we’re speaking the same language?
+QuotePilgrim Idiot.
Prow Prowsky
You’re the one taking seriously a comment that was painfully obviously meant as a joke, and *I* am the idiot? Yeah, sure.
***** Yes, you are the idiot.
Prow Prowsky
says the dumbass who can’t comprehend an obvious joke
***** An obvious idiot-joke.
Great video, man! I love the hard work and humour you put into these. I find the subject fascinating, and I am glad there are youtubers that enjoy it too. Keep these coming!
I have only watched a few of your videos and i'm already hooked. They're so clear and interesting and also you have the best outro music. I Am going to be bingeing your stuff so hard when I finish this semester of college.
Singaporean English is another cool, recent Eastern branch-off of English that might deserve a video along with Pidgin and Creole Englishes. :)
Singlish is the best language ever!!
Totally not biased :P (I'm from Singapore)
It's so cool! I hadn't even really been familiar with it until I discovered TreePotatoes.
perhaps the variety of english should be discussed as a what happened after the empire, like those mutually intelligible with british such as american and scottish, those partially intelligible like pidgin and singlish and those that are ununderstandable like swinglish and chinglish
Chinglish is partially intelligible. Its like English except with Chinese grammar, like "Why the sky is blue?" instead of "Why is the sky blue", because of how the Chinese grammar system works.
In Chinese to make a statement a question, you tack on the word for "why" in front of it and change the full stop to a question mark.
In English, the object and the word is/are/was/whatever is swapped.
It is quite understandable, you can kind of figure what the Chinese are trying to say.
Linus Cheok when i was introduced to chinglish the phrase i heard was "i'll give you some color to see see" for me that was nu intelgegeble haha
I'm from Norway, and Norwegian "bokmål" is so heavily influenced by Danish it's practically the same language... in written form. I barely understand what most Danish people say out loud.
+Wakon Music i get so confused by this sometimes, like one norwegian guy might sound like he's speaking swedish with brain injury, but then another norwegian will sound like they're speaking danish with brain injury..
Tim Stahel That was almost half an insult, but I guess I understand what you mean. We have many different dialects, and they can be really different from each other sometimes.
Hi Xidnaf, Just wanted to say that I love your channel - even as someone who has studied linguistics at university, I still find it fun, and sometimes I genuinely learn new things that I just hadn't considered before. I love the way you present the information, and I greatly admire that when you make mistakes, you go back and correct them. So thanks so much for putting this all up here: massive thumbs up from me.
There is a point that needs making about this video, however: while it's usually easiest to talk about mutual intelligibility as criteria for distinguishing languages for dialects, it's actually a lot messier than that.
Sociolinguists like Uriel Weinriecih would argue that actually, many distinctions between language and dialect are linguistically arbitrary, and that you're better off looking at the sociopolitical reasons behind the labels to get a full picture. Places like China, Italy, Ukraine, and so on, challenge the notion of a neat linguistic boundary between one language and the next.
There is some also evidence, though not well studied, that people will understand other people if they think they can understand them. That is to say: if you believe the people over there speak a different language, you won't understand them, no matter how similar their language is to yours, but if you believe it's just a different dialect AND the varieties are objectively similar enough, you will understand them.
Sociolinguistics is a massive field, and strays quite far from the neat ordered world of theoretical linguistics, but it's absolutely fascinating, and I'd love to see you do some videos delving into that a bit more deeply.
There is so much more to talk about, I can talk about this topic for HOURS.
Nice video, as usual :)
Loved this video, love all your videos, keep up the good work! Thought I would just post another interesting example of the "dialect continuum", from my home country of Ireland:
In Ireland, there are three seperate dialects of Irish - Munster in the south, Connacht in the west and Ulster in the north-west. These dialects also have cousin languages in Scottish Gaelic and Manx. The Munster dialect is the oldest of the islands, and has a very distinct sound. The Ulster dialect is another very distinct sound, and notoriously difficult to understand. The issue here comes with the Connacht dialect. While the south of Connacht sounds quite similar to Munster, the North of Connacht can be nearly indistinguishable from Ulster at times. The standard Connacht dialect that we think of actually only appears in a very small region of Connacht, including Galway city and the Aran Islands.
So! We have three dialects on a continuum, and the farther North a Munster speaker travels, the more difficult it will be to understand. Cross the Irish sea to Scottish Gaelic, which is a cousin of Irish, but more specifically it is a sister dialect to Ulster. The ancestral dialect for both these languages is that spoken by the O'Neills, who originally inhabited Ulster and ruled most of Ireland. At some point, the O'Neills crossed the sea to inhabit Scotland, in which they brought their language with them. Over time this language seperated into the Ulster dialect and Scottish Gaelic, but the two are mutually intelligible to this day. This is interesting because alot of Scottish Gaelic's grammar has become quite different to Irish, but the two sound so similar that there is usually very little in the way of comprehension.
To conclude, not only do you have a visible dialect continuum on the map of Ireland, you can physically see the border from dialect to seperate language as St. George's channel. It has always fascinated me how Ulster Irish and Scottish Gaelic, two seperate languages, can understand each other better than Munster Irish can understand Ulster Irish, supposedly speaking the same language!
P.S. one more little tidbit - the dialect spoken by the O'Neill's, as the high kings of Ireland, was the dialect that translators would use, and was also the last known dialect of Dublin and Leinster. This is why, when you see place names in Dublin that have been transliterated from Irish, they do not sound like you'd expect - for example, the village of "Raghnallach" in any other modern dialect would be pronounced something like "RAKH-na-LAKH", but the English who anglicised the name simply transliterated what they heard from the locals as "Ranelagh (RAN-uh-LAH)" - exceptionally close to how a modern speaker of Ulster Irish would say the original Raghnallach!
I must say that it surprises me that "accent" is related to cultural judgement and "dialect" is not. In Spain, I think it's the opposite in the common way of speaking. A dialect is an "inferior" form of a language, an accent is just a different way of speaking, though it sometimes can mean the same bad cultural judgement thing, but I don't think it's the case nowadays.
***** Part of it is that, at least in English, it doesn't make sense to say that someone doesn't speak a dialect, but it makes perfect sense to say that they don't have an accent. One implies a differentiation between "normal" and "not normal," while the other doesn't.
Xidnaf It's fair to assume that that dialect thing is different because English doesn't have the prescriptivism Spanish has, I once heard that you english-speakers are not used to hear "you speak wrong" just "your own way".
Javain Javakain There's no such thing as an inferior way of speaking, I hope you realize that.
@@JavainMuert Completely untrue people have very much been told they speak wrong in English. Northerners in England can tell you about it. Lower classmen in London can tell you about it. Folk from the deep South in the US can tell you about it and let's not even get started on if you're black lol
Isn't accent more about prononciation then different vocabulary
Woo! I only discovered your videos a few weeks before your latest short break and I hope you continue to release stuff no matter what the time--it's always amazing.
I just started watching your videos and am already hooked. Your presentation is thorough and very well presented intertwined with appropriately timed light humour.
Correction: Different Chinese dialects often can't communicate through the same writing system. Today, people use Simplified Chinese mainly for Chinese Mandarin, while they often use Traditional for other dialects, most notably Cantonese. However even Malaysian and Taiwanese Mandarin uses Traditional Chinese, yet it's mandarin, not another dialect. Other dialects also use the Cantonese form, such as Macau, however thsre are roughly 20 dialects of Chinese in East Asia.
Swedes can't understand Danish because not even Danish people can understand Danish ;)
Den var en dritbra diss!
Så du kan ikke forstå det her?
White Heterosexual Cis Male y
Kamelåså
That point works better with norwigian and danish cause danes understand norwegian better then Norwegians understand danish and danes and sweeds both think its very hard
VERY cool. this might be my favorite video of yours so far
That was brilliant, Xidnaf. Cool video. I am also enjoying comments of people who watched your video... double the fun...
Very interesting, thanks for making his video. I've noticed Portuguese speakers generally understand Spanish speakers better than the reverse. I think this is media exposure more than anything as you mention in your video.
Dieses Video ist gut.
Do you understand? :D
YouLilalas Nein, versteh ich das nicht. Verstehen Sie was sage ich, oder können Sie nicht?
YouLilalas At least it's not Welsh.
Indiana Smith was zur höllejdjdjd
Ja!
Yes.
Just discovered this channel and I am loving each video. Keep up the good work!
Love your videos! This helped me a lot because I'm developing a conlang, so it's pretty useful to know what a language is ;)
I've read somewhere: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy (and since the 20th century with an airforce).
I have NEVER had any experience like the one I just had watching that video you linked to. There was no way I could have anticipated it, and it is so difficult to describe, but within minutes it had me laughing out loud giddy. Having grown up in LA, I am very used to a bit of mutual intelligibility between English-speaking me and Spanish speakers, but this felt very different; instead of understanding an occasional word, phrase, or sentence of Spanish, it felt like I was understanding an occasional word, phrase, or sentence of English. Strange and fascinating. ^_^
Dude your videos are awesome. Very informative and I just love your drawings.
I love your channel, keep going and thanks!
I'm surprised you didn't throw in this old Yiddish adage: "A Language is a Dialect with an Army and a Navy". :))
Great video, one thing to keep in mind about the Chinese languages/ dialects is that while they use the same writing system, many of them use different characters than one another for the same word. For example “I am eating rice” in Mandarin is 我现在在吃饭 while in Cantonese it is written 我而家食緊飯
Excellent video, keep up the good work!
One of your best videos, really. I can relate very closely. Next video: What is even a Dialect?
Oh I love how they kept the velar fricative in scots!
They have it in Scouse as well actually, but only as an allophone for /k/ at the end of a syllable.
Would you be comfortable doing an episode on the evolution of Celtic languages that for welsh Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic?
Welsh language (Cymraeg) is not Gaelic. It's a member of the Brythonic branch of Celtic, which also includes Breton and Cornish. Although Gaelic and Brythonic languages share important features like initial consonant mutation, which make them recognisable as Celtic languages, they only share a relatively small amount of vocabulary.
Keep what you are doing. Your videos are awesome. :)
I love your videos 😄
Yes.. Czech and Slovak language are pretty much same.. :3
Like Romanian and Moldovian are exactly the same, Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian are pretty much the same or like Galician and Portugal-Portuguese are pretty close but less the same etc.....
MackoGurmaker true story. But most European languages sound similar. You guys have it quite easy in the Slavic regions there isn't too much of a difference between Czechoslovak and Yugoslavian. God I'm using old terms... Oh and who would win in a football match Austria-Hungary? depends on whom they are facing! Maybe I should go to the shame corner and sit there for a while.
livedandletdie It would be shameful to admit - but I don't catch a difference between Czech and Slovak, even thou I'm Polish, and I have about 1h by car to both countries.
However when I'm there I can communicate relatively easily. To be honest Czechs and Slovaks understand more Polish, then I their language, due to the fact that until 1989 Czechoslovakian's TV was really boring, and Polish TV was airing often good American shows/movies. And they were mostly in range (Poles love long waves - Polish radio can be still heard in Austria easily)
Yeah they are
@@japaris75, Romanian and Moldavian *ARE* the same. Both of them are Romanian.
You should explore the differences between the Norse languages more. Icelandic vs Danish vs Norwegian vs Swedish. These do not include Finnish or Sami as they are Uralic languages.
Also watch this. th-cam.com/video/s-mOy8VUEBk/w-d-xo.html
lohphat I love that video.
"I had no idea what a kamelåså was..."
Great stuff. I found that intro to the "Scots leed" as well. I understood about 95% of it, though I am from northern England and have Scottish friends from Fraserburg who speak a much more extreme dialect of Scots - that really is a different language! (I love this subject.)
I hated the ligature class thought out my schooling and I always did well. I enjoy your videos, u do into details on very interesting subjects
I'd like to share a thought experiment.
Let's say you have a time machine. Then, you arrange a family meeting. Not a common family meeting; You bring EVERY GENERATION of your family. You, your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, your great-great-grandparents... until the first bacteria.
You invite everyone to play the telephone game (the one in which a player whispers to the next, then to next, then to next...). If nothing is misheard, then you made a dialect continuum that spans from your current day mother tongue to biochemical signals. You understand your parents, they understand their parents... Speakers of [insert proto-language of your language family here] understand themselves... Homo erectus understands Homo erectus... and at one point, the only language is biochemical signals.
But you don't understand bacterial biochemical signals, Homo erectus language, or the proto-language of your language family. Probably you would be unable to understand language as early as nine generations ago. Yet, we could say you all spoke the same language. If we bring every family of every human who ever lived, the same thing would happen.
i would probably have some confusion as i live (and my family comes from) Britain and so it would make sense until the Anglo Saxon invasion/ the Gaelic invasion (England and Scotland) suddenly the language changes massively as an outside force forces their language on the inhabitants of this new land (Gaelic on the Picts and Anglo Saxon on the Briton)
Your family would have some multilingual generations.
MrNickTube1 ok
Pratchett moment
Actual we often call fries, fries. It's more like chips and fries are two different things. Chips are bigger.
This actually reminds me of biology class where we learned how difficult it was to define what constitutes a species. It seems so simple, but in reality there are so many complexities. Trying to define what constitutes a language vs. a dialect makes me think of that.
I didn't even know about the Scots language until this video! How awesome. It'd be cool to learn the non-english words just to be able to say I speak Scots haha. Also I have a video suggestion...maybe you could talk about synonyms/homonyms sometime. I think it's interesting how there can be several words that all mean the same thing, and also one word that can mean different things. Keep up the great work!
dreamybean Okay so you want to learn Scots, the easy way just imagine English without any influence from latin or greece.
Peculiar. I recognized a lot of words as sounding Exactly the same as Dutch (Nederlandse) words!
Just a note about "Czechoslovakian" language. That was just a loophole in laws to effectively reject any complaints about German not being one of the official languages, even though there were many more Germans in the country than Slovaks.
Germans were angry because they didn't see a reason why Slovak should be used in the offices and German shouldn't since there's so much more of them. So, to solve this, president Masaryk declared a Czechoslovakian language that consisted of Czech and Slovak, lowering German influence (no offense against German people, but there _were_ problems between Czechoslovaks and Germans and they had actually a pretty good reason for that, imagine you live in a country that speaks only your language and suddenly a part of that country you live in declares independence and telling you not to use your language in a state office)
And I guess they expelled the Germans after the war, did they?
@@GraemeMarkNI yes
Thank you for this video!
And subscribed, very interesting channel and fun to learn about other languages and how they compare to English.
English
No dane would understand me if you spoke to them in my dialect of Norwegian. Swedes would do better, but still.
Scots
Na Dens woods kin me if ye spoke tae thaim in ma dialect o Norse. Swades woods dae better, but aye.
My first language is Grenadian Dialect and I'm telling English classes are hell with all its grammar rules and spelling
Not a bad attempt. No would be nae, and know/understand is ken though.
@@reeyanadouglas7736 Caribbean people honestly shouldn't even try unlearning how we speak. Not worth it. Just keep developing our dialects into full languages.
Nae Dens wad forstaw me gin ye spak tae thaim in my byleed o Nors. Swades wad dae bettir, but ay.
Small correction +Xidnaf All of India doesn't speak Hindi. North India has many languages including hindi which got derived from Sanskrit, while the South India has many languages which are from Dravidian language family. Both of them are completely different and evolved independently.
***** Yes, thank you, I didn't mean to imply that Hindi was the only language spoken in India. Sorry about that.
I have watched .. about 12 to 15 of these videos.. and am only now realizing that I wasn't subscribed when I went to turn on notifications because I wasn't seeing enough of them pop up on my home page.. now I know why.
Welcome back!!!!!!!!
Jamaican Patois is another fun one to try to guess what the speaker is saying.
We don't really write the same. Cantonese and Mandarin written down can be very different. Imagine if you're a German person speaking German but learning to write in Old Norse in school. It's a bit like that for the situations in Hong Kong, where people speak Cantonese and write in the so-called Standard Chinese, which is basically Mandarin.
E.g.
English: This is a chair.
Mandarin: 這是一張椅子。 zhè shì yì zhāng yǐ zi
Cantonese: 呢張係凳。ni1 zoeng1 hai6 dang3
So they're different languages, but there's never a standard way to write it supported by a government.
More like speaking Stavanger Norwegian and writing Danish back in the days. But you get the idea
Israel Lai Norwegian and Danish are much more mutually intelligible than Mandarin and Cantonese are. But you get the idea :p
oh well it's just kinda hard to find an analogy with a common ancestor but great divergence..
Israel Lai You know, the written form of cantonese and mandarin is huge^^
Cantonese speakers use diffrent verbs compared to mandarin, and the order can change, this also make manny words to change. ex:睡觉(shui jiao) and 觉得 (jue de) 觉's reading changes depending on witch context and possision it has in a text^^ and so do many many other words^^
***** That's why I'm not particularly interested in learning a Chinese language. Although aren't most educated people in China forced to learn Mandarin anyway?
First of all and as always, awesome video! Definitional ambiguity ftw. Second, stop apologizing for every little (and completele predictable) bump on the educational road that might hold you back a day or three. We're all grateful for every video you put out there, regardless of how long it takes you :)
Oh and lastly: great job on the German pronunciation! Though you might wanna make it sound a little less... stiff... in the future xD
I love the songs you put, by the way /)
+Nikolas Powell (\ :)
Bytheway well done. Are you going to make a video about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
Martjn Mao It is on my list. My very, very long list.
Xidnaf Can you make a video of how long that list is... :P
lol you trolled us at 1:43
Great video. I jumped for joy when you mentioned scots, since I'm the only person I know that knows what that is
Thanks for the link to the scots video!
Wait, why can chinese people communicate by writing just because their writing system is the same? English has the pretty much the same letters as finnish, but they can't communicate with each other.
English and Finnish use the same signs to represent the same sounds, but Mandarin and Cantonese speakers use the same signs to represent the same words.
Xidnaf Ohhh, of course. Thanks for the clarification :)
Because we spell words differently. Chinese characters represent whole concepts, not just a sound, so while an English speaker might be able to pronounce a word in, say, Spanish, he won't necessarily know what it means. In Chinese languages, the spoken word for a symbol-for example, a symbol meaning "moon"-would be different depending on the language, but the symbol used would be the same. It goes even further when you realize that non-Chinese languages like Korean and Japanese also used to use these same characters, and in the case of Japanese, continue to use many of the same, although rather dated, symbols for a lot of concepts and words. It's the same way a French speaker would look at a dog and think "chien," but I would think "dog." Same concept, same image, different spoken word.
There are still a few letters where the sounds are the same:
l, n, m, s
The rest are different. This is not counting non-native letters in Finnish, like b, f etc.
try treat Chinese characters as a Huge set of Arabic digits.
do one on Scandinavian languages
+GroovingPict God yes!
American English and British English diverge more and more but are strongly connected thru the similarities between our writings
When ever people talk about a "British accent" I just tell them to remember that one scene in Hot Fuzz with the old guy.
Hi Chinese here
We chinese do have a lot of dialects (8 types totally), and we can hardly communicate with people in different dialect areas
But Chinese characters indicate the concepts rather than syllables, so we can share the same script while saying differently
Maybe kind of similar to Arabic?
+Asahiko Matsuda And because of that,we can all agree learning 漢字 is the WORSE,even for a chinese guy(；一_一)
Arabic uses alphabet. it's just that the Arabic alphabet is cursive .
Arabic dialects are very intelligible btw each other.
it's a matter of pronunciation . some people pronounce the Q as g other have conserved it and other omitted the constant completely .
but in general they use almost the same vocabulary and the same grammar.
an exception is when the Anglophone Arabs use English word the non Anglophone wouldn't understand but technically they don't understand English and not arabic
+ro ben Actually, Arabic speakers of different dialects can sometimes have a very hard time understanding each other. The issue I hear most about is regarding North African dialects (not including Egyptian), which other Arabs find very hard to understand.
Vocabulary can also vary a lot between different areas, different words can be used for the same concept, or similar words are used for different concepts.
My native language is portuguese, and I can understand very well spanish
Hay algunas diferencias, y a veces es difícil comprender, pero podemos comprender muchas veces. (Si mi español es malo, lo siento. Yo aprendiendo español).
There are some differences, and sometimes it's hard to understand, but we can understant a lot of the times. (Sorry if my Spanish is bad, I'm still learning Spanish).
Sometimes it's hard to understand some sentences in Spanish, not all the words are the same, but the grammar is almost the same as portuguese.
+The Fremd Dinge Guy the only thing I understood was "Yes, my Spanish is bad. Sorry" Out of your whole little...paragraph
SOmething very interesting is to see the difference between portuguese and galician or portuguese and mirandes.
I suggest you take a look at both of them.
About galician, I can understand 95% of galician, most of the words are similar and the pronounce is kinda similar also.
Great 👍🏼 I love this ❤
I actually used mutual intelligibility to learn several languages in one go, say using German as a precursor to learn the Nordic languages, or Russian to learn many Slavic languages, and finally both to map the language continuum from English to Ukrainian.
We in the Philippines tend to do this normally as well, but it's not like it's voluntarily thought; for instance, since most do not speak the national language Filipino as their mother tongue (instead using their regional language), learning it is instead more like a "fill in the blanks" game where the mutual intelligibility between Filipino languages, say for example from Ilocano/Iloko spoken in the far north to that of maybe Waray in the Eastern Central region is grammar. Filipino is supposed to also use vocab and grammar from most of these regional languages, but in practice is based on Tagalog, the language spoken in Manila and its environs. There is also an existing language continuum mostly between the Visayan languages: Hiligaynon/Ilonggo is partly mutually intelligible to Cebuano and so are either to Waray: for instance "kalayo" means "fire" these three languages ("apoy" in Filipino/Tagalog), but "dog" is "ayam" in Waray, "ido" in Ilonggo, and "iro" in Cebuano; read them all with the stress on the second syllable (BTW it's "aso" in Filipino/Tagalog).
A funny thing that happens (I personally am a witness and does this sometimes) is how we can understand Spanish through direct correlation of vocabulary - 30% of Filipino and indeed Philippine language vocabulary are direct Spanish copies - numbers, places, religious items, date and timekeeping, and so much more. Because of this we can also slightly but hardly understand the rest of the Romance languages as well.
That list at 00:46.
I see what you did there.
/)
+Strettger :)
(\
+Xidnaf Nice.
+Ingsoc MLP reference
edit: I think?
+Aj Art Yes! Most certainly xD And I've only seen one.. two episodes with my son once. So I only saw it as t was vaguely pointed out:P
+Strettger .__.
I'm kinda upset about the Czech and Slovak thing (I was kinda hoping you would mention that since I'm Slovak I have to admit).
You are right, the languages are really close, we have the same grammar structures (which we should have same with all Slavic languages) and a lot of words despite the fact that we have been under different countries for a long time (Austria and Hungary respectively) but we do sport hundreds of different words, usually it's pretty easy to figure them out from the context but that's not always the case.
Czech and Slovak is unfortunately not as easy as "official documents talk about Czechoslovak language but these days people usually talk about Czech and Slovak languages." Czechs and Slovak never considered these languages to be a single language (i.e. Czechoslovak), but the politicians trying to establish our own country (since as mentioned, we were under the influence of other countries for almost a thousand years, literally) were aware of the fact that splitting into two separate countries might not work - they played it off as "Czechoslovak language" because the languages are mutually intelligible and creating a country like this had a better chance of passing in the favor of our independence. Under Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic and Slovak Republic were always autonomous and made the decisions together (unlike Pakistan and India who don't like each other), it was never a "single country". The countries decided to break apart and finalized this change just 20 years ago in 1993 when it was established that they will be able to stand alone without needing the other (Czech Republic was, back in the day, mostly agricultural while Slovakia was mostly industrial).
The reason it made me 'upset' is that we literally spent hundreds of years proving that we're a separate country and it's being written of as a "dialect". Sure, countries are not only defined by languages but also culture and stuff, but we stand for our languages not being the same. It's kind of like the Danish and Swedish (or Norwegian for the matter) you mentioned; Slovakia for example doesn't always dub cartoons and movies so we get a lot of exposition to Czech, which isn't true the other way around, so they are mutually intelligible even though Slovaks understand Czech way better than vice versa.
To kinda ruin this point though, I have to admit that despite being Slovak I do study in Czech republic and sometimes come across this language barrier even though usually it's nothing major.
(Uh idk this got unnecesarily long, sorry.)
You have such an amazing intro
I love the fact that I found this 6 minute long video (at 3:00 am) about those things what my professor said in a one hour long voice recording. 😅😂
This is a rare event for me: I have witnessed somebody speaking about language for six minutes without even once saying anything I thought was flat, plain, basically (and probably for religious, ideological or superstitious reasons) wrong.
The guy is sensible and intelligent, and clearly lives on the same planet as me. This is unusual, since a ver-ree high percentage of what is said about language is arrant bullshit.
Incidental factoid: my long-time partner, Ajok, counts English as her eighth language. Her Pocket Oxford is in tatters, the cover held together with tape as a folder for the hundreds of loose pages. Her spoken English has an African lilt, with the tail ends of words tending to get lost, but her command of the whole is superb. She is the only person I have ever heard use the world "chiliastic" in conversation, calmly, unpretentiously, and correctly. (We were chatting about Gandhi.)
On language families, she laughs at me for not understanding Jamaican English on records which give her no problems.
Here's the factoid: fwiw, she counts Ugandan, Kenyan, and Malian Swahilis as three different languages -- in rather the same way we northerners call Romanian a different language from Latin...
-dlj.
2:10 WRONG there is simplified （门)
And traditional （門)
But you can use either with any of the Chinese Dialects.
+reeceicles_ In Mainland China you would usually use and encounter 门 (except calligraphy). This is a simple example, but if you would write longer texts in traditional characters, young people from Mainland China will have a really hard time reading it.
+NordicPerfection Young people from Mainland China have a far easier time reading traditional than some traditionalists would like to accept. My generation didn't even always have internet. So I assume today's young kids should have even more exposure to traditional characters through internet.
+E. S. Blofeld The Chinese government it staging a revival of traditional calligraphy because it it now compulsory to do it at least once a week.
And Colloquial Cantonese/ other dialects have different writing than Mandarin
Great video, really interesting about Scots.
Hey love your linguist vids I wondering as a long time celtophile can you do a video distinguishing Irish Scottish Gaelic and even Welsh, though it isn't not Gaelic at all, and it all fits in the Celtics language realm thnx great vids and happy hardcover intro 😊!
*IS* language a system of communication? You just tacitly assumed that, but what's the evidence that that's language's primary function?
Animals communicate with eachother in various ways including sound, but that's not language. In fact, language doesn't even require communication. The majority of language happens inside people's heads and is never uttered, written, or otherwise communicated to anyone.
So we should start by assuming not that language is a system of communication, but by assuming language is a system of organizing thoughts, which gives rise naturally to a better communication system.
***** This is an interesting point, but I still believe that communication is language's primary function. It's very difficult to measure people's "internal speech," so almost all of the language that can be easily studied is intended for communication. Also, the idea that language is "a system of organizing thoughts," as you put it, is complicated by the presence of language which doesn't appear to be a representation of knowledge or ideas the way most language is: things like greeting people and shouting expletives when you're angry.
Xidnaf Sorry, how do greetings and shouting expletives discredit what I was saying? I mean, neither of those are the primary function of language, and both of those are done by animals without using language.
***** Well, it discredits the idea that language is always "a system for organizing thoughts," but it doesn't necessary mean that that's not it's primary function.
***** I disagree in both directions!
Many animals, even those generally considered not particularly intelligent such as many birds, exhibit complex forms of bidirectional communication that it'd be pretty silly to label anything other than "language" just because we haven't identified "words" within them yet. In some animal languages, we HAVE discovered words. Even among those where it's fuzzier, we can see grammar, in the sense that there are structures information is organized into, rather than simply different tones of squawk. There are even clear instances of memetic spread, such as how whalesong has what is basically equivalent to pop music.
On the other hand, the language that happens in your head is best described as communicating with oneself. Although most of our thoughts become words, there's plenty our brain does beneath that layer. It's not a "higher reasoning" thing, either; even many rational thought processes never get sent to the language part of our brain, or else you'd have to actually talk to yourself about each of the boxes you're filling in when you do a logic puzzle. Talking to oneself is generally the result of metacognition, either to resolve/cope with complex/stressful emotion, or to rehearse some predicted social challenge. In order to do this, the mind must construct an "other" to speak to; you and your thoughts are always separate things. Humans tend to do so much of this that many of them can kind of forget other states of mind exist; this is why meditation guidance usually emphasizes focus on something extremely simple and repetitive, like breathing. The idea is to bring one to a state of mentally silent observation.
So, in other words, language is communication. Information has to be organized in some fashion in order to be communicable, so it's an inextricable part of the process. But even when you're talking to yourself, you're talking to somebody, and the cacophony outside my window every morning confirms that birds are very chatty.
007bistromath "the language that happens in your head is best described as communicating with oneself" well sir, you've just argued in a perfect circle.
Here's a summary of a study on whale vocalizations. It's definitely worth a read, and the short version is whales do communicate and have grammar, but it's not language.
www.livescience.com/665-grammar-revealed-love-songs-whales.html
Okay, so does that mean that Serbian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, and Croatian are really just dialects which are nationalistically exaggerated to the point of their speakers calling them actual "languages"? Because as far as I'm concerned, they're all glorified differences in Serbo-Croatian.
Yes.
+loneevergreen Pretty much. The language is usually referred too as Serbo-Croatian (although that name has obviously caused some problems) and apart from the alphabets the different nations use, they can understand each other better then high and low German dialect speakers.
Isn't it in Bosnia where street signs just show the same text three times, but they can't write it just once because their languages are "completely different"?
Yes. I've heard stories about nationalistic politicians deliberately using dialect-words to artificially increase the differences. Also it seems that Serbian is always written in cyrillics, while Croat never is
Love your videos!! Can you make a video about creole / pidgin languages? (which btw are great examples of semi-intelligent english)
My first thought when I opened this video was: he should talk about the Chinese dialects, and then I thought: he should talk about my dear Scandinavian languages.
But I all came true. You my dear sir are fantastic