LING 1010 Lecture 25: 11/17-11/27: Dialects and Language Death

• School: UConn
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 1010
• Professor: Akihiko Arano( T A)

Document Summary

Claim: dialects used in the same country are necessarily mutually intelligible. Colloquial definition: dialects of the same language are mutually intelligible. The dialects of chinese do not fit into this definition. Definition cont: two different languages are not mutually intelligible. Spanish and portugal are two different languages that do not fit into this definition. The colloquial definition of dialect have socio-political roots. If two communication systems are within a single country, we are more likely to call them dialects to make it clear that they are in socio-political unit. According to the scientific definition of language, you can say that there are infinite languages in the world, since everyone has a different interpretation of language and a slightly different way of speaking. We can use a colloquial definition of language to talk about languages. There are about 7000 languages in the world, in 195 countries.