An army and navy

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See, I didn't even quote the whole quip, and you already knew that this post is about Max Weinreich's ubiquitous saying:  "A language is a dialect with an army and navy".  It may well be the most frequently invoked formula in all of linguistics.  Readers of Language Log are certainly no strangers to it, since we've written a number of posts that are about the adage or mention it prominently (see Readings below), and it is often cited in the comments, even when there is no conceivable rhyme or reason for doing so.

Actually, it wasn't Max Weinreich (1894-1969), a specialist in sociolinguistics and Yiddish, who dreamed up the army-navy quip, but — by his own testimony — someone who attended a series of his lectures and mentioned it to him after one of them.  Subsequently, however, Weinreich did make a point of popularizing the saying, so it is not entirely wrong to associate it with him.

Countless pundits have adduced the army-navy witticism in support of their view that the only real difference between a dialect and a language is military power), which is to abandon linguistics for politics.

I've long wished for a thorough, impartial, informed examination of the army-navy quip on historical, linguistic, and political grounds.  Now we have it in Alexander Maxwell's "When theory is a joke: The Weinreich witticism in Linguistics", Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 28.2 (2018), 263-292.  Here's the abstract:

The Weinreich witticism, ‘a language is a dialect with an army and navy’, enjoys great popularity among linguists. This article gives a brief history of the witticism, documenting both a surprising inability to cite it correctly and an equally surprising willingness to alter the original wording. Linguists apparently take two main approaches to the witticism: a ‘dismissive’ approach which seeks to delegitimize the very notion of distinguishing languages from dialects, and an ‘engaged’ approach which highlights the non-linguistic factors at play in language-dialect disputes. Linguists from both schools invoke the joke to avoid discussing political factors in their own work.

The paper is available as a pdf from Academia.edu and ResearchGate.

I am cited on p. 273, ostensibly as belonging to the dismissive school.  If so, I am both guilty and not guilty as charged.  I am guilty of being dismissive of the saying itself since I believe that it is irrelevant to the serious study of linguistics.  It is, as the author correctly states, "a joke".  On the other hand, I am not guilty of seeking "to delegitimize the very notion of distinguishing languages from dialects", since I believe that the mutual intelligibility (or lack thereof) between forms of speech is a workable approach to the problem of dialect vs. language.  This is something that I've written about endlessly on Language Log and elsewhere.

If you want a real cop-out to the question of dialect vs. language, than you can buy into the Chinese concept of fāngyán 方言 ("topolect", almost universally mistranslated as "dialect"), which makes no effort to differentiate between "language" and "dialect".  In the fāngyán 方言 ("topolect") way of looking at linguistic variety, all we need to do is specify where a certain lect, whether large or small, is spoken.  You simply don't need to worry about scientific classification, they're all just speech forms of different places.  Fāngyán 方言 ("topolect") is a very convenient concept if you want to be linguistically vague and imprecise.

"Topolect" has often been invoked on Language Log; here are three of the more salient places:

As for Weinreich's joke, laugh at or with it, depending upon your dismissiveness or engagement.

 

Readings



16 Comments

  1. Bathrobe said,

    December 22, 2018 @ 10:55 am

    Whether correct or incorrect, “topolect” or “dialect” do represent a kind of sociolinguistic reality in China. That is, the 方言 are a kind of undifferentiated linguistic rabble compared with the written standard. They are all “Chinese” but not worthy of much more detailed classification. This is a kind of triumph for the Chinese state as a historical entity, which has always been careful to discourage any sources of identity that might threaten its unity. Cantonese might have prestige, but not as the language (with dialects) of an independent state. It’s just another “dialect”.

    Interestingly, while they are claimed to be “Chinese” politically, minority ethnic languages are never identified as Chinese dialects. That is reserved for Sinitic languages. On the other hand, there are also quite a few naive or ignorant Chinese who are ready to conclude that Vietnamese, and sometimes even Japanese, are just Chinese dialects. It’s an interesting but at times offensive mentality.

  2. Jerry Friedman said,

    December 22, 2018 @ 12:49 pm

    It's interesting that linguists who take "an ‘engaged’ approach which highlights the non-linguistic factors at play in language-dialect disputes" might still want "to avoid discussing political factors in their own work."

    Knowing nothing about Weinreich's character, I don't entirely trust his claim that he got the quip from a person who attended his lectures. Some might feel that popularizing a saying known to be their own would seem immodest.

  3. David Morris said,

    December 22, 2018 @ 3:17 pm

    Given that there are 6-7,000 languages and at most 200 armies and fewer than that navies, there must be a lot of army-and-navy-less languages out there. And that's not even taking into account that some languages (English, Spanish, Arabic etc) have multiple armies and navies.

  4. John Roth said,

    December 22, 2018 @ 4:04 pm

    Of course it's a joke, but there's an underlying fact: a standard language is one that's the dialect of a group with the political, military, social and so forth power to make it the standard within its sphere of influence, and all other related dialects non-standard.

    I live in Albuquerque, a few miles north of "Indian School Road." Most people in the US who are at all involved with Native American affairs know exactly what this name signifies. I will also point out the current issues in Spain between Spain and Catalan.

    As far as political self-criticism, I regard that as a completely different issue that's being pushed by some factions in the current political muddle in the US. Trying to conflate the two is a common political tactic to de-ligitimize an opponent.

  5. Jamie said,

    December 22, 2018 @ 5:21 pm

    Isn't the problem with the topolect approach that not all dialects are based on location? I'm not an expert, but I assume there are dialects that are defined by, say, social groups rather than geography (maybe African-American English).

  6. John Rohsenow said,

    December 22, 2018 @ 5:49 pm

    So, could one say that Taiwanese is a language, at least in the ROC on Taiwan? Would be interesting if people OUTside TW said it was, but the "government' in question itself denied it, and backed up their denial with their army and navy. ;-) Happy Holidaze!

  7. Victor Mair said,

    December 22, 2018 @ 7:02 pm

    @Jamie

    That's just one of many problems with the topolect approach, but it's intended to mirror exactly what the Chinese mean by fāngyán 方言 ("topolect"). When we translate fāngyán 方言 as "dialect", we're going part of the way to rescue them from their linguistic vagueness. But then our analytical classification gets all messed up because were imposing the taxonomical imprecision of the Chinese notion of fāngyán 方言 ("topolect") on it.

    See Bathrobe's first comment.

  8. PeterL said,

    December 22, 2018 @ 7:17 pm

    Japanese seems to use 方言 (hōgen) in the sense of "dialect" … there's a continuum of mutual intelligibility; but north-east to south-west are close to mutual non-intelligibility. The names of the dialects get -弁 (e.g., 関西弁 Kansai-ben), which is a simplified form of 辯 (辩 in Chinese simplified). Nelson glosses 辯 as speech, dialect, oratory, talk, argue ("lawyer" is 辯護士 or 弁護士).

    OTOH, the Okinawan language is (according to Wikipedia) treated as a "dialect" (沖縄方言) even though it's not mutually intelligible with standard Japanese. As in China, this use of "dialect" seems to be a political decision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawan_language#Classification

  9. Ricardo said,

    December 22, 2018 @ 10:39 pm

    While my views and sympathies on the dialect/topolect question are probably similar to @Bathrobe's, I think he states the case somewhat harshly. By which I mean that there are probably many Chinese linguists who have reached the conclusion that 方言 are topolects without necessarily being part of some state-driven nationalist agenda and it seems unfair to immediately dismiss their view as such. I also don't think that people necessarily look down their nose at 方言 as a kind of 'undifferentiated linguistic rabble' (other factors would usually have to come in to play such as the 'class' of the speaker).

    From 朱晓农's very learned 'Grammar of Shanghai Wu':

    Whether Chinese is a single language or a group of languages depends on the judgment
    criteria applied. The view that Chinese is a single language is reflected in Chinese linguistic
    literature. In the Western literature, however, Chinese is often regarded as a language subfamily containing separate languages like Wú 吴语, Mandarin 官话, Xiāng 湘语, Gàn 赣语,
    Kèjiā 客家话 (Hakka), Yuè 粤语 (Cantonese 广东话), Mǐn 闽语 (Hokien 福建话), etc. The
    linguistic differences between them are admittedly as large as those between, say, English
    and German or even larger. However, the shared culture, the uniform writing system, the
    same linguistic norm, and especially the common psychological identification by the
    speakers of these varieties make the identifying task relatively simple: Chinese is a single
    language with arguably the greatest linguistic diversity among languages.

    Wu is therefore not the name of a language, but the designation for a group of Chinese
    dialects. The term ‘Wu’ never occurs in everyday speech; it is a highly specialized technical term used only in linguistics… Shanghainese is a dialect of the Wu group.

  10. Michael Watts said,

    December 23, 2018 @ 2:57 am

    The term ‘Wu’ [吴] never occurs in everyday speech; it is a highly specialized technical term used only in linguistics…

    The spirit of the quote is correct, but it bears pointing out that 吴 comes up in everyday speech all the time, since it's also a very common family name.

    I do see 粤语 used (in writing; I don't have so much experience with speech) in more or less vernacular contexts.

  11. Ricardo said,

    December 23, 2018 @ 3:54 am

    @Michael Watts

    This doesn't invalidate your observation. But it is worth pointing out that both the spirit and the letter of the quote are correct as there is a difference between a word used as a name and a word used as a 'technical term' i.e. the author must himself be aware that the name 吴 comes up all the time, but is right to say that few people regularly talk about 吴 languages.

  12. Jerry Friedman said,

    December 23, 2018 @ 9:05 am

    John Rohsenow: So, could one say that Taiwanese is a language, at least in the ROC on Taiwan? Would be interesting if people OUTside TW said it was, but the "government' in question itself denied it, and backed up their denial with their army and navy. ;-) Happy Holidaze!

    Isn't that something like the situation with Arabic? At least some people say the different varieties are different languages.

  13. Jenny Chu said,

    December 23, 2018 @ 6:35 pm

    Have we discussed the *utility* of the Weinreich witticism? Because I think it is truly useful in explaining to a beginning student or a non linguist the fundamental concept that there no Platonic ideal of what defines a language, no heavenly Alliance Francaise telling us all that THIS is a language and THAT is a dialect – things that many people assume without ever having thought deeply on the matter.

  14. KevinM said,

    December 23, 2018 @ 9:07 pm

    And of course the observation is not just humorous but poignant in relation to Yiddish, Weinreich's area of study.

  15. KeithB said,

    December 24, 2018 @ 9:41 pm

    John Roth:
    Did you see the Indian School exhibit at the Pueblo Cultural Center?

    First nation folks really know what persecution is.

  16. Peter said,

    December 26, 2018 @ 4:40 am

    John Roth wrote

    Of course it's a joke, but there's an underlying fact: a standard language is one that's the dialect of a group with the political, military, social and so forth power to make it the standard within its sphere of influence, and all other related dialects non-standard.
    …I will also point out the current issues in Spain between Spain and Catalan.

    Unfortunately this is so brief as to elide the supposed connection. In fact, it's not even clear to me whether "Catalan" was intended to say "Catalonia". My best guess is that it is a typo and that John is under the impression that language politics are behind the recent rise in separatist support in Catalonia, but I've seen a lot of evidence pointing at other political factors and none pointing at language.
    Catalan is an interesting study in the politics of language, but the really interesting stuff happens in the next region along, where linguists unanimously say the local language is a dialect of the same language as Catalan, but politicians insist that it's a separate language. There were some very strong words fired at the authors of the Valencian Dictionary when they defined valencià as

    Llengua romànica parlada a la Comunitat Valenciana, així com a Catalunya, les Illes Balears, el departament francés dels Pirineus Orientals, el Principat d’Andorra, la franja oriental d’Aragó i la ciutat sarda de l’Alguer, llocs on rep el nom de català

    (my translation:)

    Romance language spoken in the Valencian Community, as well as in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, the French department of the Western Pyrenees, the Principality of Andorra, the eastern strip of Aragon and the Sardinian city of Alghero, places where it receives the name of Catalan.

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