Language Blog - Oliver Erdmann

The article that I chose for my blog is "What's a Language, Anyway?" by John McWhorter. In this article Mr. McWhorter talks about how English speaking people may think that a language is basically just a collection of dialects where speakers of different dialects of the same main language can understand each other. Cockney, South African, New Yorkese, Black, Yorkshire—all of these are mutually intelligible variations on a theme. Surely, these are dialects of some one thing that can be called a language? English as a whole, meanwhile, looks like a language that stands by itself. There’s a clear boundary between it and its closest relative, Frisian, spoken in Northern Europe, which is unintelligible to an English-speaker. As such, English tempts one with a tidy dialect-language distinction based on intelligibility. This states that if you can understand some of what is said or written, then it is a dialect of you own language. If you can not understand what is said or written then it is a completely different language.

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