a name to their language(s). On occasion, some of these names may appear to be strange to those who take a scientific interest in languages, but we should remember that human naming practices often have a large ‘unscientific’ component to them. Census‐takers in India find themselves confronted with a wide array of language names when they ask people what language or languages they speak. Names are not only ascribed by region, which is what we might expect, but sometimes also by caste, religion, village, and so on (see Mallikarjun 2002). Moreover, they can change from census to census as the political and social climate of the country changes.
Linguists use the term vernacular to refer to the language a person grows up with and uses in everyday life in ordinary, commonplace, social interactions. We should note that so‐called vernaculars may meet with social disapproval from others who favor another variety, especially if they favor a variety heavily influenced by the written form of the language. Therefore, this term often has pejorative associations when used in public discourse. The vernacular is often contrasted with a standardized language, which we will discuss in depth below.
Haugen (1966) has pointed out that language and dialect are ambiguous terms. Although ordinary people use these terms quite freely in speech, for them a dialect is almost certainly no more than a local non‐prestigious (therefore powerless) variety of a ‘real’ language. In contrast, scholars may experience considerable difficulty in deciding whether one term should be used rather than the other in certain situations. How, then, do sociolinguists define the difference between a dialect and a language?
First, we need to look at the history of these terms. As Haugen says, the terms ‘represent a simple dichotomy in a situation that is almost infinitely complex.’ The word ‘language’ is used to refer either to a single linguistic norm or to a group of related norms, and ‘dialect’ is used to refer to one of the norms.
A related set of terms which brings in additional criteria for distinction is the relationship between what the French call un dialecte and un patois. The former is a regional variety of a language that has an associated literary tradition, whereas the latter is a regional variety that lacks such a literary tradition. Therefore, patois tends to be used pejoratively; it is regarded as something less than a dialect because it lacks an associated literature. Even a language like Breton, a Celtic language still spoken in parts of Brittany, is called a patois because it lacks a strong literary tradition and it is not some country’s language. However, dialecte in French, like Dialekt in German, cannot be used in connection with the standardized language, that is, no speaker of French considers Standard French to be a dialect of French, and in German to tell someone they speak a Dialekt means that they do not speak Standard German (called Hochdeutsch ‘High German’). In contrast, it is not uncommon to find references to Standard English as being a dialect – admittedly a very important one – of English.
Haugen points out that, while speakers of English have never seriously adopted patois as a term to be used in the description of language, they have tried to employ both ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ in a number of conflicting senses. ‘Dialect’ is used both for local varieties of English, for example, Yorkshire dialect, for various types of informal speech, or for lects associated with uneducated or rural speakers. The term ‘dialect’ often implies nonstandard or even substandard, and can connote various degrees of inferiority, with that connotation of inferiority carried over to those who speak a dialect. This is part of what we call the standard language ideology, and we will have more to say about it below.
In the everyday use of the term, ‘language’ is usually used to mean both the superordinate category and the standardized variety; dialects are nonstandard and subordinate to languages. Sociolinguists view this issue somewhat differently; every variety is a dialect, including the standardized variety, and the reason we see some varieties as dialects of the same language is based on sociopolitical, not linguistic, criteria. Although linguistic criteria do play a role in the next topic we will discuss, mutual intelligibility of varieties, as we will see this is not the deciding factor in the language – dialect distinction.
Mutual intelligibility
A commonly cited criterion used to determine if two varieties are dialects of the same language or distinct languages is that of mutual intelligibility: if language users can understand each other, they are using dialects of the same language; if they cannot, they are speaking different languages. However, there are several problems with this criterion (Gooskens 2018). First, mutual intelligibility is not an objectively determined fact (Salzman et al. 2012, 170). For example, some speakers of German can understand Dutch, while others may find it incomprehensible. Your ability to understand someone who speaks differently from you may vary according to your experience with different ways of speaking.
Second, mutual intelligibility may depend on the regional variety you speak. Because there are different varieties of German and Dutch, and they exist in what is called a dialect continuum, speakers of some varieties of German can understand varieties of Dutch better than they can understand other varieties of German! Historically, there was a continuum of dialects across the region of northern Germany and the Netherlands which included what we now call the different languages of German and Dutch. The varieties which became standardized as the languages of the Netherlands and Germany, Standard Dutch and Standard German, are no longer mutually intelligible for most speakers. However, in the border area, speakers of the local varieties of Dutch and German still exist within a dialect continuum and remain largely intelligible to one another. People on one side of the border say they speak a variety of Dutch and those on the other side say they speak a variety of German, but linguistically these varieties are very similar. There are important sociopolitical distinctions, however. The residents of the Netherlands look to Standard Dutch for their model; they read and write Dutch and are educated in Dutch. Consequently, if they speak the local variety, they call it a dialect of Dutch. On the other side of the border, German replaces Dutch in all equivalent situations, and the speakers identify the local variety as a dialect of German. The interesting linguistic fact is that there are more similarities between the local varieties spoken on each side of the border than between the Dutch dialect and Standard Dutch and the German dialect and Standard German. Thus, situations in which there is a dialect continuum make it apparent that the lines drawn between languages are not based on linguistic criteria.
The third problem with using mutual intelligibility as the criterion for status as a dialect or a language is that even without a dialect continuum, there are many examples of named, distinct languages that are mutually intelligible. Hindi and Urdu are considered by linguists to be the same language in its spoken form, but one in which certain differences are becoming more and more magnified for political and religious reasons in the quest to establish different national identities. Hindi is written left to right in the Devanagari script, whereas Urdu is written right to left in the Perso‐Arabic script. Hindi incorporates more words from Sanskrit, while Urdu draws on Arabic and Persian sources. Large religious and political differences make much of small linguistic differences. The written forms of the two varieties, particularly those favored by the elites, also emphasize these differences. They have become highly symbolic of the growing differences between India and Pakistan (see King 2001 for more details on this historical development). As far as everyday use is concerned, it appears that the boundary between the spoken varieties of Hindi and Urdu is somewhat flexible and one that changes with circumstances. This is exactly what we would expect: there is considerable variety in everyday use but somewhere in the background there is an ideal that can be appealed to, ‘proper’ Hindi or ‘proper’ Urdu. This ideal is based on a sociopolitical ideology of the language, and on different social identifications of the speakers, not on any clear and objective linguistic difference.
Another example showing the sociopolitical division of language is the story of the rise and fall of Serbo‐Croatian. In what was once Yugoslavia, now divided by the instruments of ethnicity, language, and religion, the language
