KIRINPUTRA writes in response to this piece:
I think Lindsay is right in using mutual intelligibility as the criterion for determining what’s a language. I also think that intelligibility can be real tough to measure, and that something should be said for the kind of situation where mutual unintelligibility is only temporary, i.e. where a week of exposure has the speakers off and running.
As Campbell puts it, “But the question remains, does one actually have to specifically pick out and learn new phrases on their way to learning or can you pick them up in passing assuming to understand?”
So languages A and B are mutually unintelligible, but speakers become able to understand each other after a week of steady contact. Languages C and D are mutually unintelligible, and speakers still can’t understand each other after months of steady contact, unless they learn each other’s language or use a third language. Do we treat both situations the same and call them different languages? I think that’s worth thinking about.
Campbell brings up another valid point: attitudes influence intelligibility. Part of this is raw, conscious effort. Part of this is psychological and pretty much subconscious.
Another point that nobody has brought up yet is topic dependency. Mutual intelligibility usually varies depending on what the speakers are trying to talk about. A “deep” Taiwanese Hokkien speaker and a “deep” Medan (Sumatra) Hokkien speaker could probably understand each other reasonably well across a wide range of household and agricultural topics, but if it came to fixing a car or a motorbike, they’d be speaking different languages, in effect.
The task of quantifying intelligibility gets harder if we wanna pin this down. Maybe a “basket of topics” concept could be advanced, kind of like the “basket of goods and services” concept used to measure inflation.
There’s a video on Youtube where two Siam Thai speakers go up into central Guangxi and try to communicate w/ Zhuang speakers speaking only Siam Thai. First it doesn’t work, then it starts working. They realize that it only works when the topic is one that’s heavy on shared vocabulary.
Based on intelligibility criteria, how many languages is Hokkien (what Lindsay calls “Xiamen”)? A lot of Penang Hokkien would go over a Taiwanese Hokkien speaker’s head at first exposure, just b/c of intrinsic linguistic differences. Typically, there would also be a lack of effort on the part of the Taiwanese speaker to understand a non-Taiwanese form of Hokkien.
Even beyond this, psychologically, both sides (but esp. the Taiwanese) have a hard time acknowledging an unfamiliar form of their familiar Hokkien tongue. Due to subconscious psychological reasons and a lack of effort, they may honestly not be able to understand each other (assuming the Penang speaker is one of the few with no Taiwanese Hokkien media intake). The shared vocabulary, collocations, idioms, etc., though, are definitely enough for them to understand each other w/ just an attitude adjustment.
Yet, I don’t think the shared vocabulary and grammar are “good enough” to establish that PngHk and TWHk are dialects of the same language. How do we really know? What strikes me as being much better evidence is having witnessed TWHk and PngHk speakers communicating effectively in their respective dialects w/o having to resort to another language – even though such encounters have typically resulted in a quick switch to Mandarin as of the last 10 or 15 years or so.
Intelligibility is tricky to quantify, no doubt; but lexical and syntactic similarity have got to be even trickier to measure in any meaningful way.
I have to take exception with a couple of Campbell’s minor points. They sound suspiciously like the stuff you read in papers by some (not all) Chinese scholars.
Campbell says, “Fangyan we have determined as topolect, but as used many centuries ago could also refer to any language of a different region. Today it has a specific use and currently applies to a “county”, notwithstanding the fangyan of neighboring counties may be the exact same thing.”
I don’t know what Campbell means by “today it has a specific use”. It’s not only common for laypeople to use “fangyan” to refer to the speech of a province or any other region, it’s also pretty common for scholars to spit out collocations like “Yue (~ Cantonese) fangyan”, never mind that “Yue” is a group of languages spoken across two provinces of China and taking in at the very, very least three mutually unintelligible languages.
Campbell also says, “It reminds me of Sinoxenic borrowings of Chinese words into neighboring Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese which all now have approximately 60% of their core lexicon borrowed from Chinese. But these languages belong to other families and developed separately…”
This is kind of begging the question. What if the North Chinese political grip on Vietnam was somehow renewed? Sure enough, Vietnamese would continue to absorb “Chinese” elements deeper and deeper into its lexicon and structures, to the point where a linguist from the “modern” linguistics tradition would say it was a Chinese language.
And indeed the evidence seems to reveal that this is exactly how Hokkien, Teochew, Hailamese, Wenzhou, Hoisan (Taishan), etc. “became” Chinese languages. The best paper I’ve seen on this was by a Chinese scholar named Pan Wuyun (潘悟云). What’s Sinoxenic? Who was neighboring what? What’s core lexicon? Who developed separate and who developed together, and where and when? These are unresolved questions, not the open-and-shut case that most linguists in the field (even many non-Chinese) seem to think it is.
Campbell is probably right in saying, “Hua is usually tacked on to a place name. The “speech” of a particular place as long as there are no others competing (for example Nanning in Guangxi has several languages).” I would add that competing languages w/i counties is the rule rather than the exception throughout tropical and coastal subtropical China.
The tendency in each area (not necessarily just one county) with competing languages is for each language to go by a two or three syllable nickname where the last syllable is usually 話 (hua in Mandarin). Cantonese (but not the Hoisan type) is usually known as 白 hua. Hokciu (a.k.a. Foochow) is known locally as 平 hua (exact same name as Tuhua). In the Leizhou area, 海 hua and 黎 hua are two distinct “Min” varieties, reportedly mutually intelligible only w/ each other or at most also w/ some type of Hailamese / Hainanese Min.
Speaking of which, a primer on Hailamese was published about a century ago in Singapore. The author (de Souza) explains in the introduction which dialect of Hailamese the book is based on, and says that dialects of Hailamese from the other side of the island are “perfectly impossible to understand”. So there may actually be more than one language w/i just Hailamese Min.
Finally, about the Chinese scholars falling down on the job. I would say that, first of all, they generally don’t think this is their job. To them, “Chinese” is basically “assumed” to be one language. U could just call that shoddy academics. Secondly, though, some Chinese scholars are doing a pretty good job, such as Pan Wuyun.
In the Anglo tradition, a guy like Pan Wuyun would come out at some point with a “come-on-and-own-up, most-of-all-y’all-is-wrong” paper. But unfortunately that kind of thing is really rare in China. And so it’s left to foreign scholars or guys like Lindsay or myself to say this, w/ the disclaimer (at least in my case) that there are many individual decent scholars in China too.
The truth is that among most linguists, mutual intelligibility is not a controversial topic. There are a few loudmouths who scream that it cannot be measured, but to most of us linguists it is a ho-hum subject, not the source of a lot of screaming and yelling. Most of the tumult comes from outside the field, amateurs or simply ignorant people who are not linguists. They usually bring up all sorts of arguments, but in the field, we do not worry much about any of these rejoinders.
Often we will do more than one study. If the results are different, we just average them together and to get a mean.
Surely attitude matters, but if you test enough people, all of that levels out. You have some that really want to understand the other language and others who just give up easily. You average them all together and get a mean for the population.
There are not many languages that can be learned after only a week of contact. And if there were, we would not say they were mutually unintelligible. Even very closely related languages like Azeri and Turkish take about 3-4 weeks of close contact before they are communicating pretty well.
I have an informant in China in Hubei Province. She said about every third city over was a new Mandarin language, and you could learn the new language after about 3 weeks of close contact.
In Africa, they have a concept called 1 day languages and 2 day languages because that is how long it takes to learn them. These would not be considered languages because they are too easily learned.
As an example, I have heard Latin Americans say that when they fly into El Salvador in the morning, they don’t understand all of what the Salvadorans around them are saying, and the Salvadorans do not understand everything they are saying. However, by the end of the day, everyone is drinking and slapping each other on the back and they all understand each other.
So Salvadoran Spanish could be considered a 1 day language. Salvadoran Spanish is a dialect of the Spanish language, not a separate language.
About topic dependency: we usually test for mutual intelligibility by playing a relatively neutral recording of someone speaking in the language. I suppose you could use a video too. You cannot use two people trying to talk to each other because then you have all of this extralinguistic coaching going on that interferes with the result and makes it higher than it is.
Due to subconscious psychological reasons and a lack of effort, they may honestly not be able to understand each other (assuming the Penang speaker is one of the few with no Taiwanese Hokkien media intake). The shared vocabulary, collocations, idioms, etc., though, are definitely enough for them to understand each other w/ just an attitude adjustment.
This has been brought up by a well-known linguist as a complaint to me against using native speaker knowledge as a criterion for mutual intelligibility. He told me we could not rely on native speakers to tell us how much they understand of another language because, well, native speakers lie. Instead we could only rely in the knowledge of linguists.
He gave the example of two groups that understand each other very well but hate each other so much that say they can’t understand the speech of the other people even though they can. In other words, they lie. Realistically, I have been studying mutual intelligibility for a long time now (in fact, I am a bit of an expert in it) and I have yet to come across this situation. This really is just a red herring.
Yet, I don’t think the shared vocabulary and grammar are “good enough” to establish that PngHk and TWHk are dialects of the same language. How do we really know? What strikes me as being much better evidence is having witnessed TWHk and PngHk speakers communicating effectively in their respective dialects w/o having to resort to another language – even though such encounters have typically resulted in a quick switch to Mandarin as of the last 10 or 15 years or so.
That doesn’t really count. You might be looking at an intelligibility situation of 80-85% between those Hokkien lects. Also we do not look at two speakers negotiating a conversation because that throws in new variables.
For inherent intelligibility, we want someone listening to a recording or watching a video. Quite a few speakers of very closely related languages (and some not so closely related) can negotiate the sort of conversation described above. Yet the fact that they both revert to Mandarin instead of carrying on in different Hokkien forms implies we are dealing with two separate languages here. They abandoned their own tongues and switched to common Mandarin presumably because there are too many misunderstandings when they use their Hokkien varieties.
Intelligibility is tricky to quantify, no doubt; but lexical and syntactic similarity have got to be even trickier to measure in any meaningful way.
Not really, we have many measures of lexical similarity and we use them all the time. We also measure syntactic and morphological differences – variations in grammar. A lot of linguists decide that two tongues are different languages simply based on the fact that they are too far apart – structurally separate languages.
