Speech and Racism

Variants are any two consistently different forms of a language that are spoken by two different communities, in two different situations by the same community, in two different times, etc. Dialects, jargon, slang, vernacular, etc. are all types of variants. Variant is a broader category that includes all of them.

I've never been to Brazil but people who have insist that the Cariocas (people of Rio de Janeiro and nearby communities) have a distinct geographical dialect. They pronounce grande, sete, oito, as donhas as (transcribed phonetically in English) grunjee, sechee, oytoo, azh-donyash, whereas other Brazilians pronounce them somewhat more closely to the way they're spelled. Brazilian is of course a distinct dialect from Iberian Portuguese, where final E and O have become silent, e.g. sete, oito, nove are pronounced "set, oyt, nov." ("7, 8, 9.")

British and American English are two dialects (and there are sub-dialects within them, especially in the U.K.) but RP ("received pronunciation") is a variant of British dialect. It is not a dialect itself so much as a jargon, because it is spoken by most educated English people (perhaps not Scots and Irish) in formal situations and especially for broadcast. It is not even a natural variant; it was created by synthesizing various dialects specifically for formal circumstances. I suppose it's an unusual phenomenon that could be called an "un-vernacular."

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Remember that the definition of a dialect, as a specific type of variant, is based on separation by geography or social class. Therefore, the Southern American spoken in Birmingham, Alabama, and the "Brummy" spoken in Birmingham, England, are dialects. So are the Cockney spoken by working-class Londoners and the "Ebonics" spoken by working-class African-Americans.

Well there is that issue of the spectrum. There are some extreme western dialects of German and some extreme eastern dialects of Dutch that are more similar to each other than either is to the standard speech of its country. Since these are exceptions with small numbers of speakers and since the standard languages are not intercomprehensible, we do indeed call German and Dutch separate languages, but as linguists and linguist wannabes it's important to understand that the distinction is not always easy to make. If you think the decision about German and Dutch is difficult, try Danish and Norwegian, Czech and Slovak, or Catalan and Occitan (the group of cross-national dialects including Provençal).

Then they're not very well trained in linguistics. To an anglophone, Dutch and German are remarkably similar, especially in writing. Dutch, German and Yiddish are the three surviving descendants of Old German that have not strayed too far from their roots, and the similarities among them are striking. English went through wrenching changes in vocabulary, phonetics and grammar as a result of the Norman Invasion, so it looks and sounds like only a distant relative of those three, even though it is descended from the speech of the Angles and the Saxons, respectable German tribes. Many foreigners look at a page of printed English and insist that it must be a Romance language.

I haven't encountered that. But then my generation is keenly aware that the Dutch were on our side during WWII.

You must mean "euthanasia," which is the medical term for allowing or assisting a terminally ill patient to die. (In veterinary medicine it also includes animals whose owners can't afford medical treatment or who are simply homeless.) From Greek eu-, "well" and thanatos, "death." "Dying well," or as the movement in America puts it, "Death with dignity."

 

The term "African-American" has indeed been co-opted to include only those people who carry predominantly the DNA of the sub-Saharan tribes; the original Africans who did not migrate to Asia and the other continents in the great Homo sapiens diaspora around 60kya. It does seem a bit peculiar to not count Americans whose families came from Ethiopia, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, etc. in that group since all of those countries are in Africa and all of the people who live there are Africans. They carry the DNA of the people whose ancestors migrated out of Africa and then came back in later generations. Some, like the Ethiopians, have been there for so many millennia back into Stone Age that we don't really know the date; others, like the Arabs, are very recent returnees. If we count Madagascar as part of Africa then we also have to count its people, whose ancestors sailed over from Polynesia less than 2,000 years ago.

But as imprecise and confusing as this practice is linguistically, we're at least consistent in our own odd way. No one counts people whose families came over from Turkey, Yemen, Israel, Syria, Iran, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Iraq, Pakistan, etc. as "Asian-Americans."

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Please discontinue the personal insults, which are a violation of the SciForums rules. This is a place of science. If a member doesn't understand something, then educate him, as I did. Don't call him names.

If you can't articulate to someone why a word is used in a particular way, then perhaps you should look it up and educate both of you.