MISUSES OF THE TERM DIALECT

© 2006 by Orchid Land Publications

[20070129]

     Many who speak on the media─and elsewhere─use the term dialect to designate what they consider the language of a socially and/or quantitatively negligible group of speakers, or even a larger group lacking whatever prestige one may consider worthy of calling the way they speak a language.  One should, however, speak of a language for most of these variants; but read on.

     Before considering what a dialect is, let it be said that there are several kinds of language, which I will illustrate from the history of the origin of English and its dozen daughter languages.

√  When conquerors like the French Normans* early in the second millennium subdue another
    people (the English in this instance) by military force, or when the overclass citizens of a
    region import foreign workers who become an underclass, the necessities of communication
    require some intermediate mode of oral communication that all groups can easily and quickly
    acquire and use, something "natural" in according with the universal cerebral structures of
    humans beings of any linguistic background.

√  This makeshift "language" starts out as a way of communicating that we call a PIDGIN
    (an attempt to say biznis, often pronounced bidnis in some varieties of US English).  Hardly
    any written records exist for the pidgin that the French used for communicating with the Anglo-
    Saxon house servants, children's nurses, farm workers, and soldiers, after the English Anglo-
    Saxons had been subjugated.  We do, however, have  writings (mostly the Gospel according
    to Mark) of many daughter language of recent English, many emerging in the twentieth century
    in Pacific Ocean locales as well as Africa.

√  As soon as children learn a pidgin as one of their native languages,** their brains impose a
    basic simple (and natural in the sense indicated earlier) grammar on the language.  Its grammar
    but not its words, are more or less the same everywhere, since the brain structures of humans
    are alike; the words used will vary from locale to locale, though, as in English, fewer words
    that make their way into the new creole language over time will come from the language of the
    underclass than from that of the overclass.  The result of this development is called a CREOLE. 
    It is one kind of human natural language.

√  Current English creoles use go for futurity and bin (or ben; both apparently from been)    
    for the past.  Anteriority may be expressed as oredi or a local word like Hawai'an pau 
    "finished").  Hawaiian Creole changed ben to wen─from went, the contrary of go.  Till
    recently, creoles were not written, their use being simply oral.   Spelling has of course always
    been a problem, a mishmash, when the orthography of an overclass is used to represent the
    diverging sounds of the underclass.

√  As time passes, the Creole develops a grammar*** with added categories for plurality,
    temporality, and so on.  These will be more like, but often less complex than the categories
   of the language of  the overclass─the Norman French in the instance of Middle English.  (There
    never was an Old English.)  As English became influenced by other factors (Keltic in Britain),
    many immigrants of different language backgrounds, including the African population in the
    Southern States; cf. the Gullah creole, which now has a New Testament; in the Nineteenth
    Century, the language of the slaves affected the language of overclass women more than
    overclass adult males, who were sent off elsewhere to college, predominantly Princeton.).

      If a DIALECT is specifically not one of the foregoing, what is it?  It is a subvariety of the language of a given region spoken by a given group defined by age, sex, and especially social class or occupation.  We usually don't call stylistic variants a dialect, unless peculiar to a specific racial or worker group of a locale; and genre is used for kinds of writing, e.g. letter-writing, Bible-translations,**** etc.
──────
     *The Normans were Vikings who creolized the Romance language of France (cf. earlier Provençal) to Norman French, just as the German Franks had creolized the same language to (Parisian) French.
   **Apparently bilinguals and assuredly polyglots are not subject to the window-closing that blocks a child-like fluency for acquiring new languages after the first year of puberty.  (This does not apply to orthographies of course; like [non-onomatopoëtic] vocabulary, alphabets are not "natural.")  Because this window shuts when it does, children should be exposed to living languages before it shuts; conversely, history and geography should be postponed till after the social window opens at the same time around the end of the first year of puberty.

   ***The few inflections of English and its sound system come from Anglo-Saxon─though the third-person singular verb ending -th could have come from both Old French and A-S.  While a few A-S formatives (e.g. -ness) remain productive in English, most productive formatives are Romance-derived.  The frequent neutralization of marked comparatives in favor of superlatives in English is French-like.  English syntax is predominately French, as is evident in non-A-S expressions like "It's me" (French "C'est moi"; cf. Me and him did it like French "Lui et moi nous l'avons fait").  The reason why we cannot grammatically say "She has lunched at noon" while nevertheless accepting "She has generally lunched at noon" is easily explained on the basis of the different pasts and anteriors of Old French. 
     These observations offer a small taste of the evidence behind what is being asserted.  Cf. Bailey, ESSAYS ON TIME-BASED LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS (Oxford University Press, 1996), Ch. 10.2.   In preparation is a long article developing what is maintained there; it title is Rethinking case and tense in English.  It is easy to show that English lacks a present simple tense; polychrome behaves is not present in "This child generally behaves but is not behaving now" or in "As soon as the child behaves, give her the piece of pie she asks for" . . . where asks is also no present.  It has also been shown that these verb forms are not a tense; they are more like the defunct subjunctive mode, many uses of which (including the use in a posterior subordinate clause) that they replace.

 ****Concerning which, see http://www.orlapubs.com/AR/R348.html.