Postby Iversen » Fri Jul 07, 2017 6:33 pm
The irony (or tragedy) of dialectology in France and other places is that its subject matter is disappearing while it is being studied, and one of the problems in this is that the last die-hard speakers of regional variants may have been influenced by speakers of the dominant language. I have never lived in France, but I have visited the country often, and all I hear is French with minor regional variations - or patois as the result is called in the local lingo. Whether the original dialects or languages in their original state are spoken by people at home behind closed doors is a big question which I cannot answer, being an outsider. But any map where France is divided into sharply limited slices according to local speech is misleading: the map should have a common background colour with minor colour variations, and then it should be indicated with dots or stripes that some individuals in some areas are bilingual, with a local variant being the most common traditional secondary one (unless you succeed in finding a Breton person whose primary language still is Breton - good luck trying!). In actual fact the most common secondary language in most places could be Turkish or Arabic, but this has not manifested itself in those dialectological maps ... yet.
That being said I would definitely claim that for instance Occitan is a language in its own right if it still is spoken in its pure and undiluted form - and one reason is that I know its medieval form and can see the development go directly to the modern examples I can find on the internet (rather than as a tourist in France) - Occitan is NOT a dialect that has developed by diversification within the French language. It developed in parallel with the Langue d'oïl, alias French, and it had its own cultural institutions which were clearly separate from those of Northern French. If you had looked at the situation for instance around 1200 or 1300 then you wouldn't even have contemplated the thought of seeing one as being a dialect of the other.
Maybe there were (or are) other languages or dialects within the Hexagone for which the same thing can be said, but I haven't studied them.
However the discussion about Occitan illustrates one fundamental weakness of the separation between dialects and languages, namely that the distinction basically is a consequence of thinking about language in terms of generalogical trees. In terms of genealogy a language or language group can be defined by a unique series of soundshifts applied to a parent language - and most likely only applied by a subgroup of the speakers of this parent language, leaving the rest as speakers of a separate language/language group.
But the reality is that languages/dialects often appear on the basis of a dialectal continuum, and then the result will be a new continuum until politics and influence from cultural centres kill some of the variants. Some traits in something we categorize as dialect may therefore be inherited directly from one variant within the original continuum, while others have originated in the another variant, namely the one that gave rise to the main language variant. This is the idea behind wave theory, which for good reasons is the common reference system for dialectologists.
In other words: the linguistic difference between languages and dialects is fuzzy even at the phonological level. Intercomprehensibility is also an unreliable criterion, so at the end of the day we may just have to find some practical division lines - logical or (most likely) not. Some linguists want to have as few languages (but many dialects) in their systems, and others operate with a lot of closely languages. And some politicians and cultural VIPs apparently want one and only one language and no dialects within their field of influence, and in some parts of the world it seems that they succeed in getting it.
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