Dialects and imported languages

 

Imported languages

 

The English language, as used today in Australia, can be traced to its earliest colonisers. It is known that the British stuffed the colony with criminals. This lower class English is still very much present in the local language. Australians use words like ‘mate’ which are shunned by the (upper-class) British.
Similar is the distinction between Belgian French and French French. Officially there is no distinction, but the reality is different. Belgian French has a slightly divergent pronunciation and uses some expressions they learned from the Flemish. These characteristics can be found in the respective former African colonies. Example given: the black Africans in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo – former Belgian Congo) still speak French with a Belgian accent.  My point is: when a language is imported, it can be traced to the people who imported it. 

This means that, if one supposes that English was imported by Angles, Saxons, Fries and Jutes, that those respective languages should be traceable in England. Some old English texts should resemble (pick one) Old Saxon, Old Fries, Old Norse (= also Old Danish), etc.  One can suppose for instance that the oldest texts from Sussex (= South Saxonia) should bear a resemblance to continental Old Saxon.  Perhaps one can state that the names of those old kingdoms do not necessarily reflect the majority of its conquerors. But at least , some old English texts should have some resemblance with some old texts of some regions in northern Germany. To my knowledge however, such a link never was confirmed. No one can tell which region in England was more populated by Angles, or Saxons, or Fries, etc., according to the various old texts.   At least, this is strange.

Dialects: general considerations

 

The study of dialects is a relative recent science. It’s only the last 50 years or so that it is taken seriously. Before that time, dialects were ‘not considered worth to be studied’.

As this science is so young there is little consensus even about the definition of what a dialect is, or when a local tongue can be considered as a dialect. The boundary between a dialect and another language is also not clearly defined.
Some linguists consider the major Scandinavian languages like Norwegian, Swedish and Danish as dialects of each other. Officially they are distinct languages.

The distinction has more to do with politics than with objective criteria.

South-Afrikaans was considered until 1926 to be a form of Dutch. Since then, it is supposed to be a derived, but distinct language. South-Afrikaans speaking people can understand easily official Dutch, and Dutchmen need little time to adapt to the South-African language.

Is American English a dialect of Standard English? Most scholars believe that there is little to distinct both tongues.
A softer type of dialect is ‘variant’, so American English can be considered as a variant of English.

One of the most used criteria is whether both people do understand each other without great difficulties. The fact is that Americans have no trouble at all in understanding British English. On the other hand is Western-Flemish regarded as a dialect of general Dutch. But people from Holland, for instance Amsterdam, can by no means understand what the Western-Flemish are saying to each other. They almost would understand general German better.

How much is Western-Flemish a dialect and not a separate language? Little is known about the mechanism of the emergence of dialects. Most scholars will however agree that 2 conditions are important: isolation and time. South-Afrikaans is a good example: it is relatively old (± 400 years) and was pretty isolated. But as we saw, the distinction with official Dutch is smaller than with some sub languages of Dutch like Fries or Western-Flemish. Time is therefore the most important condition. The more dialects there are within a language group, the older this group is. For Dutch with its official 29 dialects, this means: very old.

By comparison, France has much less dialects. It is true that French is a relative young language as it has originated from 'northern Occitan-Romance' (mixed with its official dialect: Latin). We can state that French is ‘only’ some 1400 years old.

We should also not confuse a dialect with a poor knowledge of the language. People who do not use English as their primary language have sometimes an accent, make errors, but this cannot be judged as a dialect.