What Is The difference Between Language and Dialect in Sociolinguistics?

Answer 1

There's a famous quote that goes, "The difference between a language and a dialect is a navy." To a degree, there is truth in this. Political power is often connected to language status. For example, although Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian are mutually intelligible, the political history of their respective countries have led them to be named as separate languages. Meanwhile, in mainland China, many languages are classed as "dialects" of Mandarin, many of which are completely unintelligible to one another; though they use a common writing system, some characters are not used by all "dialects." For reasons of pride in nation and writing system and perhaps as a result of the centralization of power and control of the educational system, however, even native speakers will refer to them as dialects.

On the other hand, sometimes it really isn't clear-cut. There exist dialectical spectrums in which two dialects next to each other can be understood by speakers of said dialects, but the farther you move from one point on the spectrum, the less can be understood. In other cases, a dialect may be long-established and not thought of as "odd," especially if it's written the same as other dialects, but in speech speakers of another dialect may still struggle to understand them. If you put an American in a room with a speaker of the Geordie dialect of British English, it's probably going to be a struggle for one to understand the other. Then again, sometimes that's deliberate--Cockney rhyming slang is famously tough for outsiders to understand and there are theories that postulate that it was designed so speakers could hide their real conversations from others.

In the end, sociolinguists examine the use of language by different groups, and so the opinions and history of those groups often come into play. An easy shortcut is the dictionary route: when speakers of related language varieties need to know a new term, whose dictionary do they consult? Speakers of non-standard German varieties will defer to standard German, but not the other way around, so we can say the non-standard varieties are dialects of the standard. Meanwhile, the related varieties of Dutch which have arisen nearby would consult standard Dutch dictionaries, so we would say they are dialects of Dutch despite their similarities to varieties of German.