Languageness

Jichang Lulu briefly alluded to work on languages of Italy in the dialectometry thread (here [the whole comment is well worth reading, as are the comments by Jonathan Smith [here — this one on an earlier thread, here, here, and here] on that post). He also thought that Language Log readers might find of interest some comments in this paper by Mauro Tosco.

"Measuring languageness:  Fact-checking and debunking a few common myths", DIVE-IN

“Interestingly, the more traditional classifications are marred by purely sociolinguistic analyses – and quite often their accompanying political and ideological underpinnings – the more they are proven wrong when dialectometry is applied.”

(Tosco:  homepage; International Research Group on Contested Languages)

Abstract   The article critically discusses a few common objections to an intrinsic, language-internal definition of what constitutes a ‘language’ (and, conversely, a ‘dialect’). It argues that, contra postmodernism (1.), languages do exist, they can be counted and languageness can be measured independently and even notwithstanding the speakers’ beliefs and ideologies (2.). It further refutes as unsound all the common criticisms to intelligibility as a tool in assessing languageness: while deviations from common-sense assessments may be expected but are not really of concern to science (3.1.), intelligibility asymmetries (3.2.), apparent infinite graduality (3.3.) and dialect chains (3.4.) are only partial problems to be solved empirically. On the contrary, intelligibility can and is routinely measured in different sciences, and, when applied to language, it tends to dovetail with other criteria, such as dialectometry and the counting of isoglosses (4.)

Envoi (instead of a conclusion)   Just as measuring the intelligibility between, say, English and Mandarin makes little sense, also a dialectometric approach to these languages will be a colossal waste of time, because zero or a figure close to it is the result. Crucially, dialectometry, as its very name implies, is a tool to measure dialectal difference: it is feasible up to a certain limit, but when whole phonemes (and all the phonemes in a string) are different it becomes impracticable. This does not detract from its usefulness: it is exactly the intricacy of multilingual situations across the globe among a multiplicity of minorities (their ‘messiness’, for the unfortunate monolinguals of many Western countries who since generations have been the victims of the aggressive linguistic policies of the modern state) that calls for painstaking measurement.

Is this “superdiversity” (Blommaert & Rampton 2012)? Maybe. Certainly, it is the only sensible approach to an assessment of language diversity, which, in its turn, is a prerequisite to salvaging what of it is salvageable (Tosco 2017).

For the time being, we can be content with reiterating that:   • languages do exist. Beyond the veil of political and ideological narratives, languages exist because communication exists; different languages are the result of different and mutually unintelligible solutions to the communication problem. • languageness is measurable because intelligibility is measurable. • while Ausbau-ization (Tosco 2008) involves the use of linguistic tools with a view to increase the distance of a language (its Abstand level) vis-à-vis its neighboring competitors, in the end it is Abstand languages that general linguistics deals with.

(Brasca and his supervisor Mauro Tamburelli have an earlier paper on Gallo-Italic classification based on dialectometry — referenced in the thesis, and above in the Tosco paper.)

Selected readings

• Hammarström, Harald. 2008. “Counting Languages in Dialect Continua Using the Criterion of Mutual Intelligibility.” Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 15(1). 36-45.
• Kloss, Heinz. 1967. “‘Abstand languages’ and ‘ausbau languages’”. Anthropological linguistics 9(7). 29-41.
• Tamburelli, Marco & Brasca, Lissander. 2017. “Revisiting the classification of Gallo-Italic: a dialectometric approach.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 33(2). 442-455
• Tang, Chaoju & van Heuven, Vincent J. 2009. “Mutual Intelligibility of Chinese Dialects Experimentally Tested.” Lingua 119(5). 709-732.