English is my mother tongue. I like to think I speak it and write it correctly, too. About 360 million people speak English as their first language. Add that to the population who speak English as an additional language and you end up with around 1.5 billion. That’s a lot of people and it makes sense that it’s not the same English everywhere.
Realizing that so many people speak English got me thinking. With all the different sounding words and structures do all these people speak the English language? Or could it be that they are speaking a dialect thereof?
Dialect or Language?
When Ben was an exchange student in the States in Maryland, he had a mini-visit to Mississippi (don’t you just love to spell that word?). Some of the students in school warned him that he wouldn’t be able to understand anything they said down there. They called it an English dialect. He had no problems at all understanding it. He said, sure, he heard a difference in accent, the famous “Southern drawl” but that was all. It wasn’t a dialect of English, simply accent or coloration.
On the other side of the scale, a friend I worked with learned his English in Cameroon. Did you know there are over 600 indigenous languages spoken there? He told me he spoke Cameroonian Pidgin English, which was completely different than anything I had ever heard. Then he held a one-sided conversation that I understood absolutely nothing of. Luckily he was Swiss so we communicated in Swiss German. His English would have been impossible. Was it really English?
Dialects
I have the feeling that I’m getting into some seriously deep water here, but here goes. Some say if you can understand your language without training then it’s a dialect. Ergo, if an American goes to England and understands what is being said there, then both speak the same language. Some of the words aren’t the same and the accent is different so that makes one a dialect.
When my brother was stationed in Scotland we visited him. Ben and I got off the bus and tried to catch a cab to go to the base. I’d be lying if I said I understood anything that man said to us. Not a word, so it wasn’t the same language. Or, if he was speaking English, does that mean I wasn’t speaking English? My friend’s Cameroonian Pidgin English was also un-understandable so that wasn’t English either. Very confusing.
This doesn’t only happen in English. The Swiss look to their French neighbors to hear and duplicate as best as possible the French spoken there. More than once I’ve heard surprised Swiss wonder out loud where someone learned their French. They understood almost nothing and the accent was horrible. Then they find out the person is a French speaking native of Canada. They all say they speak French so it must be a dialect.
Just for fun, let me throw a little more oil in the fire. Swedes, Danes and Norwegians speak Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. They understand the other languages without special training so are these just dialects of the same language? Of course not, just ask them what language they are speaking. I’m sure the Dane wouldn’t say he was speaking Swedish. No, these are all official languages. Separate entities. But they understand each other. Just breaking the rules, I guess.
Written Language
The “if you can understand it without training – then it’s a dialect” theory more or less holds up in Switzerland. The language spoken in the German speaking part of Switzerland is called “Swiss German”. With very few exceptions they all understand the other dialects too. Still, someone from Berne would proudly say that they speak Bernese. I assume that only means that different dialects can have names.
I’ve seen Ben shake his head when filling out a form that asks for his mother tongue. He says that quite often his only option is to choose German. No Swiss from the German speaking part of Switzerland would write “Swiss German” on an official form. But still, German is not their mother tongue. But, if you really look at Swiss German, it is derived from the Germanic language. No getting around that one. In fact, it is about as far away from German as Danish is from German. So, why do they get their own language and the Swiss don’t?
One reason has to do with the fact that Scandinavian languages each have an official written form. The Swiss never agreed on a written form. Each dialect has an unofficial written form but German is the official written language. So, I suppose technically Swiss German is derived from German and Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are too. In that case all are just dialects of the same language: German. Politics and written forms make the impossible possible.
But if the written theory should be put to the test look at Chinese. The written language is called Chinese but Mandarin, Cantonese and Taiwanese are what is spoken. Or are they dialects? I’m in way over my head. I thought they were languages, but who knows? Are the rules being broken again?
Communicating
Very often English is the first “go to” language in Switzerland. It is simply a way to communicate. Once we invited a Swiss friend along with her Pakistani husband to a dinner party. I’m not sure what his mother tongue was, possibly Urdu but he also spoke English. Which is good because I can’t speak any Urdu. I was able to understand the English he spoke but it was quite different from what I spoke. When his wife spoke, she sounded like she had grown up in Pakistan. She was Swiss but her English sounded nothing like Swiss-English. Then again, she had learned her English from her husband.
In the end I think the most important thing is to be able to communicate no matter what language ,dialect or accent. Is there really any “right” or “wrong”? Language is changing constantly. Who really cares if what you are speaking is a dialect or another language as long as you are understood.
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