Latest / Logosofia no Dia a Dia
Who Decides When a Dialect Becomes a Language?
Daniel wondered whether there's a continuum from a few borrowed words all the way to a brand-new language — and whether the world's language count is really shrinking. We trace the whole spectrum: code-switching (it's rule-governed, not confusion), pidgins, creolization, and the slow drift that turned Vulgar Latin into the Romance languages. Then we get to the uncomfortable part: the dialect-versus-language line isn't linguistic at all. It's political. Mandarin and Cantonese aren't mutually intelligible yet count as one language; Danish and Swedish are mutually intelligible and count as two…
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