What is considered as a language?

Question

One of my friend asked me if different dialect of Chinese is its own language. I want to say yes, but on the other hand, I don't think American English is another language.

So what is considered as a language?

Does it have to be spoken (or once spoken) by a certain numbers of people? Does it has to be officially recognized? (ex. is "Vulcan" a language?) Does it has to have its own written form?

Answer 1

The main criterion for whether something is a dialect of another language or a separate language (and what is being standardized, what not) is the relative political power of the speakers of that language/dialect. The decisions about what are "languages" and what are not, are thus political decisions. Those with enough power can claim that what they speak is a language and what less powerful groups speak are dialects. Political definitions of a language would be: "a language is a dialect with an army (and a navy)" or "a language is a dialect with state borders" or "a language is a dialect promoted by elites".

Is oral understanding enough, or should we rather use understanding of writing as a criterion? Or the opposite: is understanding writing enough, or should one also understand the oral mode? A Finn who has studied Swedish at school, understands some written Danish, but does not understand spoken Danish at all. Is oral Danish then a separate language from Swedish, while written Danish is a dialect of Swedish? And what about the deaf population?

Should the criterion be used only with language spoken by a native speaker, with normal speed, or can a second language speaker who speaks slowly also be used? Age, amount of formal schooling, degree of metalinguistic awareness, amount of exposure to the language or to other languages in general, learning styles, courage, motivation, fatigue, etc, obviously also affect intelligibility, in many situations much more than the "same language/different languages" question. Mutual intelligibility as a criterion thus discriminates well only in situations with structurally unrelated languages, as was the case with the structural linguistic criterion too.

Neither similarity or dissimilarity of structure, nor mutual intelligibility or lack of it can therefore differentiate between languages.

Answer 2

The linguistic definition of whether two speech forms are dialects of one language or two different languages is whether or not speakers can generally understand one another. There are gray areas in this definition, but it is generally workable. For example, the "dialects" of Chinese are not dialects of a single language, but different languages because speakers cannot understand one another. American English and British English are dialects of a single language because speakers can fairly easily understand one another. Danish and Swedish are often considered dialects of a single language because there is a great deal of mutual comprehension between them. But deciding whether Spanish and Portuguese are dialects of a single language is more difficult because (for various linguistic reasons) Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish speakers fairly easily, but the reverse is not true. This is how linguists decide whether two speech forms are languages or dialects of one language. As far as "officially recognized", there is no such thing. There is no international body that decides what is and is not a language. Vulcan is a language. It is a constructed language. And out of about 6000 or so languages in the world, the vast majority have no written form and are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people.

Answer 3

Linguists and socio-linguists often say that there are no languages, only dialects. English alone has spawned a dozen 'pidgin' languages all over the world, and can you really say that Cockney slang, Northern Ireland English and Texas English are all really the same? Maybe they're dialects, maybe they're interrelated languages. Language is as much a political idea as a technical one. Would Spanish and Portuguese be different 'languages' if Portugal were a province of Spain and not an independant country?

Some of the deliniations are clear, like French and Swahili, but still, it's as complicated a subject as ever, and for the record, there are dozens of languages spoken in China, the biggest being Mandarin and Cantonese.

http://www.danshort.com/ie/iecentum_c.shtml