Dialect VS Language | Italian Dialects, Scots Language, Romance Languages, Greek Dialects

The debate of what makes a language and what makes a dialect is as old as antiquity. How can we determine what is considered a true "language" and what is a mere "dialect"?
00:00 Intro
00:44 A language is a dialect with an army and navy
02:00 Origin of Italian
03:13 Dante explores the Italian Dialect Continuum
07:41 Mutual Intelligibility?
11:48 Ancient Greek Dialects
15:23 Italian compared with Greek: Literary languages
16:58 Scots Language
20:06 Problem of terminology
22:51 Neapolitan: dialect or language?
24:39 Modern Greek & Ancient Greek are different languages (…right?)
27:48 My opinion
30:24 Perception guides reality
31:25 Devil’s advocate
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Ecolinguist
Romance Languages Comparison:
• Romance Languages Comp...
Latin VS Romance Languages:
• Latin Language Videos
Metatron's video on Sicilian VS Italian:
• Italian VS Sicilian - ...
Mind Yer Language? Dr. Michael Dempster's channel in Scots about Scots:
• 01 Scots - Language An...
Scots language history in Scots:
• The origins of the Sco...
Max Weinreich "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_langu...
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[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Thank you so much to each an every one of your for your comments! Reading through them these past few days has been a deeply enlightening experience, and countless people will be able to benefit from your shared life stories here and personal views. Tales of woe, of joy, of humor, of oppression, and of embraced conformity are all on display here: every word of it is important to this debate, and will allow us all to make decisions, however small, to conserve these styles of speech ("languages," "dialects," "lects," "varieties," etc.) I will be doing my utmost not just to read each of your comments but to respond to as many as I can. In response to some of your thoughts, I have talked with friends and colleagues about this issue, which centers quite a bit around terminology. A strong counter-argument to the somewhat overly zealous hypothesis "everything is a language" is that at such an extreme we necessarily divide language down to each idiolect, each person separately, which, however accurate, is untenable for second-language acquisition. Saying that there are billions of languages in the world isn't helpful. Utility is part of this. Raphael Turrigiano, whom you know from some of my videos like the Lucian Pronunciation one, is a highly accomplished linguist (for which see: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rWSTcpetf7KJl5I ) helped me clarify the issue thusly: terms like" language" or "dialect" aren't always so useful. Let's instead use the term "standard" or "style." Latin is a classic (heh, a pun!) example of this, perhaps the true exemplar. Latin, as you know from my videos, exists as a spoken and written language in a specific style of a particular register of the standardized Latin from the 1cBC, and has no native speaking community to permit language drift or change. Yet our speakers number is the tens of thousands. It's a wonderful community. Expressing ourselves with "good" Latinity could be said better like this: we conform to certain norms of style that are present in the foundation of the literature. And where we stray our style conforms less well to Latinity, the Good Latin Style. Who defines Latinity? Caesar and Cicero are by all definitions the gold standard: everything they wrote is the model for Latin for ever and ever. Many other poets and authors of all types are included, until we see them stray too far and start to question the value of imitating them. What about languages like Italian, French, and Spanish? They all have language academies that define the stylistically "pure" or at least "accepted" forms of expression. Variance from this may be called dialect, or simply a non-standard variety, which certainly doesn't make it bad or inferior; it simply lacks standardization. How can any spoken or written Italian, French, Spanish, or Latin be deemed "bad" then? What this really means is that, if a person gives a speech, for example, where the standardized language (indeed, a very specific register of speechifying language is expected), and that person's utterances deviate from established rules, the person has missed the mark. English has no academies of standardization like the three Romance tongues mentioned above, but we do have a number of style-guides often associated with major print organizations like newspapers and book publishers. These publishers will critique and possibly reject text that does not fit their style guides. It's not that these works might contain "bad" English -- they just don't conform to the rules of that particular publisher. And so in school, if we're taught "me and him go to the store" and "it's a gift for you and I" are "bad grammar" -- according to whom? Well, according to our teacher, firstly, who will make the precepts of the classroom clear. In that situation we are expected to use a language in a certain way. Thus to these less well recognised varieties, the "dialects" or "minor languages." If a group of people, like the Neapolitan speakers or the Scots speakers, recognise that their style of speech is a different, coherent entity, that makes it a language in my opinion; but more importantly, it becomes their shared identity, and thus a way to communicate information through song, poetry, speeches, and prose. So much the better when these varieties gain some degree of standardization that most of its speakers can agree upon. If the rules of Elvish or Klingon or Esperanto grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and phonology can be established, then each exists as its own entity. Natural languages deserve as much respect when they achieve such a feat. The standardization of language as we understand it today is mostly a consequence of literacy. The written word brings *style* / *standard* into crystal clear focus. My advice then, which is just my own opinion, is that language varieties like Scots and Neapolitan should seek to establish a standard orthography and standard grammar. As in any language, native speakers are welcome to differ. But it gives those of us who intend to learn these lects the chance to have a foundation. So Neapolitan of Naples can be based on the language of that great city, and updated as needed when the language drifts through the generations. Abruzzese is a part of that greater Neapolitan group, and is different enough to call itself a language of its own, likely; and even if it be a mere "dialect" of the Neapolitan continuum, Abruzzese merely requires a standardized form based on a city there, like Guardiagrele. In Scotland, Doric can be a standard for students to learn. And any variety which differs sufficiently, and whose speakers feel the need to realize in writing a standard of their own, should do so! This is the genesis of language norms. And moreover, the fact that some non-native speakers study US English and others study UK English has not hurt the English of L2 speakers. These variations in the voices of L2 speakers are just as compatible as UK and US speakers are naturally. American English, as I speak it, is probably 100% intelligible to fluent English speakers who were brought up with UK, Australia, Irish, or Indian standards. But each of these is a standard of its own; printed publications and governments have used these standards, and proliferated them into the world. Their coexistence does not have a mutual deleterious effect of any of them. Another issue: what if a person speaks non-standard English (or whatever language) and is criticized for it, being said not to speak "English" but merely "slang"? For the sake of example, "the word 'ain't' isn't English so you can't say it while speaking English." Is this true? Well, it depends on the context. If the utterances were in an environment where certain precepts were established and the person was expected to perform according to them, this is correct. People make grammar "mistakes" all the time because they are so current in every speech variety. These are not "wrong" in a community of speakers that uses these forms regularly. The "incorrectness" only becomes apparent when one uses these forms in an environment where they are not expected or, indeed, tolerated. I *do* think normalization of a language variety, of setting style guides and boundaries, is a good thing because it improves literacy to have a regular way to process information. As much as a polyglot like me might want, I can't think in every possible accent/dialect/language or speak that way simultaneously. I'll leave it there for now. I may come back to add to this later. I hope you found it useful. :)

[@synkkamaan1331]

As a Scot, I 100% agree with this video. Thinking about the Romance languages lead me to the conclusion that it is more useful to think of a dialect as a regional language; so everything is a language, but it still comes down to politics, which is whether the language is a national language or a regional language. So then, thinking of a dialect as a regional language, if we can appreciate that every language is a dialect, within it's own language family, and the question of prestige is a matter of politics, then we can look at it without stigma, and also without being over-zealous. Why do we talk about the top 5 Romance languages, instead of the top 6 ? Why is Catalan or Galician not included in the list of the top 5 Romance languages, but Romanian is ? Well, Romania is a nation, and Romanian is the national language, but at least at this time of writing, Catalunya and Galicia are not nations. If Catalunya became a nation tomorrow then we I guess we would be talking about the top 6 Romance languages. Scotland is a nation, but as is it is not independent, it is also a nation within a nation, so the Scots language being recognised by the EU, kind of bucked the trend, whereas in times past, at an official level, it was written off as just a dialect of the uneducated - just like every other regional language. Ah ! But hold on ! I have just remembered something else. Andorra is a nation; and the national language is Catalan. So, maybe the top 5 Romance languages should be changed to the top 6 Romance languages.

[@synkkamaan1331]

To talk about Scots specifically, I think that it might even be more useful if the language name were something other than Scots. Because, here's the thing, Scots relates to Scotland, and okay, Ulster Scots speakers in Northern Ireland are included in that category, but people in Northern England have dialects very similar to Scots. Those Northern English people probably wouldn't be too happy if someone told them that they are speaking a dialect of Scots, and I think that wouldn't be accurate either. Last month, after watching a video of Simon Roper which talked about the Lambton Worm, I went to read the lyrics of this Northumbrian song on the Wikipedia page, and I found the written lyrics incredibly easy to understand, as a speaker of whatever you want to call my regional language (even I couldn't categorise it properly), whether it is the Glasgow dialect of English, or the Lowlands dialect of Scots. So, here is my opinion. The Northern English dialects belong in the same language group as the Scots dialects, as they are very closely related. The Scots dialect and Northern English dialect continuum have the same base, which is the more Germanic, Danish Viking influenced form of English in the North of England, compared to the English of the South of England, which is maybe more Norman influenced. Once we group the Scots and Northern English dialects together, then the term Scots is not sufficient to describe this dialect continuum, which stretches from the Ulster Scots of Northern Ireland, through the Scots of the Scottish Lowlands, up to the Doric of the North East of Scotland and down into Northumbria and Cumbria, in England. Okay, so what should we call it ? Well, this entire dialect continuum is descended from Middle English, so it is still a sister of the English language, which shaped so much of the world today. This confusion around whether the Scots speak a variant of English or not has always been there. The website scotslanguage dot com has this to say, "Before the sixteenth century, it was usually called 'inglis' in the vernacular (i.e. 'Angle-ish' - 'Scottis' sometimes referred to Gaelic or Irish) or 'German' in Latin. From 1494 it came to be known as 'scottis' and in this, the Stewart period, it began to develop a written standard, just at the time when the East-Midland dialect of English was becoming the basis for a written standard in Tudor England." So, I think that at the official level, the Scottish and Northern English dialect continuum should have a name that reflects this, something like, Scottis et Inglis.

[@DarkoKramer]

Thank *you*, Luke. The debate you propose is very necessary, as there are too many dying languages and dialects, and also too many not getting the recognition they deserve. The Occitan language (reduced in France to a mere "patois") is also a great example.

[@Argrouk]

@@synkkamaan1331 If we can put up with it being called English, they can tolerate it being called Scots. Fair is fair.

[@synkkamaan1331]

@@Argrouk Fair is fair, by turning linguistics into political point scoring ?

[@AntonioBarba_TheKaneB]

Italian here, native speaker of Siciliano. I can confirm that even today with television, internet and all, if I speak archaic Siciliano (not the modern one, which is heavily influenced by the standard Italian) to a native speaker of archaic Milanese, the level of mutual intelligibility is close to zero. As a Sicilian speaker I find it easier to understand Spanish people and Milanese speakers find it easier to understand French people, that sounds weird but it's true!

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Well said!

[@isobellabrett]

When my Bavarian mother visited Sicily, the locals thought she was Neapolitan when she spoke Bavarian. That is not even the same language family, so that showed me how different the language must be.

[@AntonioBarba_TheKaneB]

@@isobellabrett Personally I've been exposed to the German language a lot since my dad lived in Villingen-Schwenningen for almost 10 years when he was a kid back in the '80s, so he speaks pretty much perfect german and I have many relatives who still live there and they speak German and Sicilian but very little standard Italian. So in my case I would never mistake a German speaking for Napoletano, but I can see why it could be the case for those who have never been exposed to it.

[@isobellabrett]

@@AntonioBarba_TheKaneB not sure Bavarian can be classified as German 😉

[@AntonioBarba_TheKaneB]

@@isobellabrett I'm sorry, I'm quite ignorant on the subject, I've been to Munich and Garmisch-Partenkirchen a lot but I usually met people who spoke regular German with a different accent so I assumed it was just regular german. Also, my german is very bad so probably people just spoke to me in regular German just to communicate better and eventually we switched over to english, and some folks even replied in almost perfect italian to me!

[@pouritenne8996]

the most kind hearted video on language vs dialect

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

I'm very glad you think so ! :)

[@zigababnik8780]

Agree.

[@esoel]

@@polyMATHY_Luke Totally. It’s a very difficult subject, because language is such a big part of people’s identity. But this video is beautiful, very respectful and loving.

[@TadaNoEssai]

I'm italian, from Veneto, and i heard so many stories about granparents not speaking to their grandosons just to not pass the Venetian language because the parents thought that it would be bad for their education, it's just sad.

[@MrLoris85]

My grandmother is from Treviso (Venetian) and my grandfather is from Girifalco (Calabrian). Imagine them arguing... They do it always in their own dialect when they are upset. What a mess! 🙈

[@MensHominis]

@@MrLoris85 - any idea what kind of great short stories or scenic literature that would make? It really sounds hilarious the way you depict it!

[@MrLoris85]

@@MensHominis It is. It's literally two different worlds crashing upon each other. Since I was raised in alemannic switzerland I have been told standard italian only. I only know the accent of those dialects but not the actual words. So I could understand at least the swear words but nothing else. 😂

[@MensHominis]

@@MrLoris85 - ah man, that's a shame! :D Not to your shame of course, I (German) have a friend from Switzerland who makes Zürichdeutsch hip hop and even though I'm improving, without reading the lyrics I'd get lost frequently, too. :D

[@MrLoris85]

@@MensHominis Oh yes. This is a different story. High-Alemannic dialects (swiss german) are being well-tended! We treat high german as a foreign language and use it written only. We are also very used to understand every swiss dialect for the most part.

[@conorhaggerty1365]

As a Scot, I spent most my life thinking that Scots was just an inferior way of speaking English. Only recently have I changed my mind, especially since I saw how it's status was far more to do with politics than its actual substance (e.g. looking at Scandinavia and languages which are similar but flourishing as separate languages). I remember blowing my friend's mind when I told him that Scots wasn't just modern English adapted to Scottish speakers but a rich language which had evolved separately since around the year 1000 from early/middle English. Sadly most Scots still believe that it is simply "bad english", but there is a mini cultural awakening in favour of Scots. Let's hope it leads to some justice for this marginalised tongue.

[@timurermolenko2013]

I'm ashamed to admit that I used to think that Scots is just a midway between Gaelic in British.

[@Slashplite]

Scottish Gaelic also should be revived and spoken widely in Scotland. There too many Germanic languages already xD

[@fumble_brewski5410]

Lang may yer lum reek.

[@janetmackinnon3411]

When I was a-t school in the fifties, Scots and Scottish history were barely mentioned.

[@gabrieledonofrio1612]

Hope that too, our struggle is the same. Greetings from Sardinia! (island whose languages were/are marginalized too)

[@gabrielgads]

As a Portuguese speaker myself, the only reason I felt like Spanish was another language was national identity. Any portuguese speaker can get acostumed to understand spanish so fast that you can imediatly jump into podcasts and watch the news in spanish and only remember that is another language when words are different enough. Even Italian feels so familiar, you aways known the subjet of the conversation and very rarely get lost. This kind of video make me feel lucky that I belong to such a big family. Thank you!

[@OscarRuiz-gj3mp]

I have an old memory of my childhood in Cuba,when picking up a neighborhood lady's Reader's Digest magazines in Spanish and start reading...only to realise, pages later, that the Spanish Iam reading is weird! So i look at the covers and sure enough,I am reading the Brazilian portuguese edition! To this day I find written portuguese to be a delight to read...and ALMOST completely understand. Same with Italian but to a lesser degree,at least for me.

[@rodrigodepierola]

Definitely. I am Spanish speaker and Portuguese, especially Brazilian, is very simple to understand if spoken with some care.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Thanks for watching! 😊

[@nikhtose]

One caution. As a teacher of English to Spanish and Portuguese speakers, I note that, consistently, Portuguese speakers understand Spanish, but not the other way around. Portuguese appears to have norms of pronunciation unintelligible to Spanish-speakers.

[@malarobo]

@@nikhtose For an italian like me, spanish is more understandable then portuguese in spoken form, but in written form they are both easy. It all really depends on the way in which the words are pronounced

[@Maynard0504]

an example for the Max Weinreich quote during Yugoslavia: serbo-croatian after Yugoslavia: bosnian, croatian, serbian, montenegrin

[@cieldano1223]

cool

[@jasmadams]

When I was serving in Macedonia (or whatever the Greeks are compelling them to call it this week), this was a huge deal. If you pointed out that Macedonian just sounded like a Bulgarian dialect, you were in for trouble.

[@goranatanasovski6463]

@@jasmadams To be fair, Macedonian itself is a continuum and gets more "bulgarian" to the east and more "serbocroatian" to the west. But yes, language and politics is quite fucked up in that region of the world...

[@andreasi8741]

@@jasmadams the dispute is *officially* settled the country's name is North Macedonia

[@jasmadams]

@@goranatanasovski6463 My favourite thing about the Bulgarian "grouping" of dialects is the post-positive article. It blew my mind; especially since at that time I'd only ever encountered it in Nordic languages. I had a crash course in "Srpsko-Hrvatski," but I spent most of my time in the area from Tuzla to Slavonski Brod. I never really had a hard time understanding anyone, regardless of whether they considered themselves speaking Srpski, Hrvatski, or Bosanski. Of course, I was only speaking in relatively simple conversations. My understanding is that now most people are acknowledging that they have a lot more in common than different, and that is a wonderful thing.

[@ethanpintar5454]

The usage of the terms "dialect" and "language" among German speakers today gives a great example of how arbitrary those terms can be. For example, the many varieties of the Plattdeutsch ("Low German") language of northern Germany are often colloquially referred to as dialects of German, despite the fact that they're technically more closely related to English than to modern German. While on the other hand, the language spoken in Luxembourg is almost always referred to as a separate Luxembourgish language, even though it's descended from the same High German dialect group as modern German (and unlike Low German). Similarly, the Germanic language spoken in Switzerland is called Swiss German, while the language spoken in the Netherlands is called a separate Dutch language- even though, as a German speaker, they're often equally difficult for me to understand. Really, what people today refer to as "dialects of German" as opposed to languages has way more to do with political boundaries than actual linguistic closeness.

[@tohaason]

That expression "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" (or whatever the exact original was) isn't flippant, it's the actual truth. Just think about Scandinavian. It's divided into three languages, but if you dive into it - there's vastly more variations between Norwegian "dialects" than between many dialects (including the most common ones) and "standard" Swedish (which is a thing in Sweden - there's no official spoken Norwegian, just official written Norwegian). All of Scandinavia is just a continuum of dialects, you can as well call all of it Scandinavian - but there's an army and a navy involved, three copies, so there you have it - now they're languages. But those sometimes inter-incomprehensible dialects are not.. And it's like that in so many other places, just like your examples. Edit: And then.. there's what the video describes: Some people reduce the value of the language one speaks if it can be called "a dialect". And some even believe that there's "one language, and dialects are just slang- or sloppy variants of "the language". In my own country you can fortunately hear tons of dialects in TV and radio, much more than in the past, but still, dialects are disappearing, with all their interesting expressions and even grammar.

[@SB-qo3bf]

As a Sardinian I've always felt upset when somebody called Sardinian a dialect (especially people from mainland Italy). After watching this video of yours, I guess it won't bother me much anymore.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Right! Yeah, Sardinian is a language which has its own dialects, is how I would say it.

[@pino2483]

@@polyMATHY_Luke maybe is more correct that sardinian has is own variants . Beacuse whene you are saing the dialects of Sardinians you are saing that there was a common way of talking .

[@joseg.solano1891]

@@pino2483 that common way of speaking was latin

[@pyotrilyichtchaikovskyii6638]

​@@joseg.solano1891Latin is dead, if it even were the common language at all at any point. I agree with him, right now there is no system making any kind of Sardinian dominant, right now it's a bunch of variants split into smaller dialects and some odd Corsican pidgin up north.

[@2608heinz]

The voice actor of Willy the Scot, in Italy has the Sardinian accent

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Hahah that’s great

[@2608heinz]

@@polyMATHY_Luke kzbin.info/www/bejne/jqGpZYSQn7OWf9k

[@antonelladeflorio2140]

this is because both the Scots and the Sardinians are considered to be (mistakenly, of course) the "uneducated highlanders" and, by their traditions, outside the country to which they belong :(

[@francescaballarini2500]

@@antonelladeflorio2140 but also because in both Sardinia and Scotland there are a lot of shepherds and in both there is still true wilderness...we can say that Sardinia is the Mediterranean version of Scotland

[@antonelladeflorio2140]

@@francescaballarini2500 yes, that's true. I like their way of preserve this wilderness though, every Country needs at least a place like that.

[@alebett2966]

I' m from Trieste (north-east Italy) and i' m proud to say that our dialect is maybe the only one in northern Italy that is not fading and is not spoken just by old people, it is considerad cool by the youngsters and is totally vital like the southern italiy dialects.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Sono contento

[@gabrieledonofrio1612]

Trieste is Venetian Language speaking, not "dialect"

[@SilencedButNotForgotten]

Yep, it's super controversial. Especially in Italy, where we commonly call them dialects, but they are, as you pointed out, in fact all languages. This was mostly due to the fact that we needed to put the Italian language in the center, as the Unification of Italy was a very hard process that extended throughout decades and decades. To bring the people together they always tried to create a common sense of unity, pushing sometimes traditional things in the back, while giving them importance and giving them all the respect that they rightfully deserve. That's why they are called dialects on our maps, even though they are languages. Internationally they are in fact recognized as fully fledged languages.

[@adrianirimescu988]

wow but nationalism is not in fashion anymore. so let us all go native

[@marco.trevisan]

Working at the reception of a hotel in Dublin, I included Venetian (the language of the Italian region of Veneto) as one of the eight languages guests could use with me. Only Italians noticed, and no one was indifferent. Some felt deeply offended, while others absolutely loved it. Funnily this didn't quite correlate with their specific origin within Italy.

[@edocosta92]

Dame el nome del hotel che go da vegner in irlanda l'ano che vien.. Al manco se femo do ciacołe

[@marco.trevisan]

@@edocosta92 Ah, ma vara che cuesto che so drio racontar ghe jera capità trédexe ani fa. Deso no so pi dełà. So 'nda in tanti loghi, e go finio intel'Inghiltera.

[@eduardoschiavon5652]

Brao! A son ncora drio inparar el veneto parché ła łengua no'l ze stà portà vanti nte ła me fameja.

[@timurermolenko2013]

More like precentage of open minded people vs people who learned things from school and repeat it.

[@Wyo_Wyld]

Mandi, Marco! I saw your last name and thought, " Veneziano o friulano". Bravo!

[@ThePinkus]

The funny thing is when the milanese guy understands the fiorentino, and the romanesco, figures out the napoletano, manages the spagnolo (gestures help!), and then goes 20 km from home in the wrong direction, crosses the Adda river, and they speak bergamasco... and the level of understanding drops to the level of reading expressions hoping to guess if they are going to run after You with a stick or they want to offer You a drink. Remember to smile!

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

hahahahah bravo

[@youtubeyoutube936]

La mia mam m’a dii che se capis nagot

[@gianlucazaffino]

Definitely false. Milanese and eastern lombard are pretty much the same; the only significant difference is the correspondence between milanese "s" and eastern lombard "h". I have to watch a series like Gomorrah with subtitles or I won't understand more than 50% of what they say, and only because I am a little familiar with neapolitan due to songs and its significant presence in the media. On the other hand, if I speak milanese to a tuscan, a roman or a neapolitan, they wouldn't understand more than few words here and there.

[@IlGiglioNero]

@@gianlucazaffino I’m sorry but that is absolutely untrue for most people. I have seen countless times people speaking Bergamasque to people coming from Milan, Lodi, Pavia, provinces and they could not understand absolutely anything. Perhaps you are an exception, but you should not generalize too much.

[@gianlucazaffino]

@@IlGiglioNero Because those people coming from Milan were not actual milanese speakers, like the vast majority of Milan area people under the age of 60.

[@magliesepurosangue]

There's a little error in the map shown at 12:17. Here in the salentinian peninsula we speak two kinds of dialect: a greek one, called grìko, that is essentially early greek, and a latin one. Grìko is spoken in the north-east side of Salento, while the west and the south speak the latin-like dialect. One example of grìko is "Kali nifta se finno ce pau, plaia su ti vo pirta prikò", very similar to greek, meaning "Good night, i have to leave, you have fallen asleep and I'm sad"; One example of salentinian is "Isti suntu fiji mei" very close to latin "Isti sunt fili mii", meaning "these are my sons"

[@saiyajedi]

The Ryukyuan languages are usually grouped as “dialects” by Japanese scholars, even though they diverged from home-islands Japanese before the Heian period (8th century) and are very much mutually unintelligible with Japanese (although they have imported much Japanese vocabulary over the centuries). It’s a sore point for people in Okinawa, who resent the way Tokyo treats them in general.

[@Jumpoable]

Tokyo had the audacity to classify Korean as a Japanese dialect during their short imperial fantasy, so yeah. Ganbatte Uchinaa.

[@Glassandcandy]

Japan has a vested interest in keeping them classified as dialect because if they are, that makes Japanese a single language isolate with no known related languages. This is appealing for many Japanese nationalists because it appeals to their mythic idea of Japanese being a special, uncorrupted language that is unique and above all other languages in its purity. Some scholars have argued that the extensive structural similarities between Japanese and Korean suggests they should belong in the same family. This idea will send the average Japanese nationalist into an inconsolable rage.

[@MetalforOden]

shit even dialects on mainland japan need subtitles on tv for the rest of japan to understand lol. All them mountains isolating towns and prefectures create a lot of variety and some of them are so different.

[@oivinf]

@@Glassandcandy Had it not been for politics I'm 90% sure everyone would consider Japanese and Korean to be linguistically related by now

[@timurermolenko2013]

Asian countries are on the stage of nationalism like it was a nineteenth-century in Europe. Same as Koreans would never admit Jeju language, or Chinese would never admit hundreds of their languages as separate languages. And they are obsessed with unity, oneness, conformity

Imagine how awesome it would be if there were widespread courses available to study dialects! I’ve done my best to learn my family’s dialect, but I fear it’s dying with each generation

[@youtubeyoutube936]

Strangely when I go home people remark that u still speak the old dialect rather than the more modern which is more infused with Italian. I’m probably from the last generation of native speakers

[@unutilizzatoreyoutubbicoca7749]

@@youtubeyoutube936 is there any organization/foundation that tries to archive or save dialects in your country? i want them not to die

[@vasorotto19]

@@unutilizzatoreyoutubbicoca7749 if no one speak in those dialects, why would you want them not to die?

[@unutilizzatoreyoutubbicoca7749]

@@vasorotto19 kind of the same reason why i would avoid the fire of the library of alexandria if i had the power

[@SweArdaia]

I made a focused effort of (re)learning my dialect after mostly having lost it during my childhood. It's not terribly well documented but using the few sources out there combined with talking and listening to older people helped enough to where I'd consider myself fluent again. For the aspiring learners out there I'd ask you not to give up, the resources are out there if you look and who knows, maybe you'll become an important source for someone else down the line.

[@stuartcameron320]

As a Scot, from Glasgow, I'd like to just say thank you for including the Scots language in your video! It made my heart warm. I'd also like to echo your point about Scots being subjugated...I and many people I know were told explicitly, and made aware implicitly, of the prevailing idea that Scots was a diminished, lesser form of English. That educated, successful, international people speak English, and that the uneducated, unsuccessful and parochial speak Scots. It wasn't until I started learning Italian as an adult that I realised this is a load of rubbish, and that there's nothing inherently wrong with saying "aye" instead of "yes" (for example). Now, in my thirties, I revel in the beauty and the humour of the Scots language, and any time someone tells me that Scots is "just a dialect" of English, I politely ask them why we don't say that English is just a dialect of Scots. I considered the possibility of translating La divina commedia into Scots (mostly as a little passion project), but of course, Scots isn't just one language...it's comprised of many dialects! Into which dialect would I translate it? And written-Scots depends on the English writing system which, quite frankly, is a terrible writing system even for standard English, but it's even more inadequate for writing in Scots. Anyway, thanks again for a fantastic video! :)

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Thanks so much for the comments! I’m very happy to hear from a Scot. I think you should continue your translation project! I wouldn’t worry about the varieties of Scots to choose from: choose that which you know best, and mix the varieties for literary effect. Dante’s Latin has contributions from Sicilian and other non-Tuscan languages so I think that’s appropriate.

[@firebrand9578]

The history of English and Scots is pretty interesting. If you go and read literature in Middle English, you’ll find that stuff originating from the London area to be particularly close to the English we speak today. English and Scots share a common ancestor which most people would call English for the sake of convenience, but Scots is one of the few “English” languages that isn’t a continuation of the London dialect

[@oceantree5000]

Scots was the first language I thought of when I saw this video. I was also delighted at its inclusion! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

[@jonrolfson1686]

‘And written-Scots depends on the English writing system which, quite frankly, is a terrible writing system even for standard English, but it's even more inadequate for writing in Scots. ‘ You are, of course, correct that the letters of the Roman alphabet, as adapted to represent English, should not be expected to be dispositive with regard to pronunciation. This is particularly true of manifestly inadequate set of six vowel symbols which, along with a couple of consonant symbols pressed into use as representative of the semi-vowels used in various versions of English, fail more often than not at the task of representing varyingly spoken English vowels.

[@anonb4632]

Scots is barely spoken in Glasgow. It's mostly English with a few words thrown in. Most of what passes for "Scots" these days is p- poor e.g. Itchy Coo's pathetic renderings of Harry Potter and the parliament translation. I grew up in Aberdeenshire where you could hear the real deal.. The northern bits of Glasgow were Gaelic speaking and part of the Kingdom of the Lennox (an Leamnachd) when Scotland was independent but almost no one remembers that.

[@MegaGoodmusiclover]

I'm Japanese and I must say Japanese dialects are just like what in other parts of the world separate "languages". Many of our dialects are mutually unintelligible and sound very different from each other, but just because we've been governed by the Japanese emperors and shoguns we didn't get to consider those dialects separate languages. I know Polish and Russian and Ukrainian and their differences are pretty much the same as that of Japanese dialects.

[@Faliat]

As a native Scots speaker no longer living in Scotland, I'll have to say that Scots itself has multiple dialects that are becoming increasingly more different from each other on a smaller scale . I encounter them every time I speak Scots with other speakers from all over Scotland that cross my path. One especially noteworthy person was someone from Aberdeen. There were sometimes drastic pronunciation differences such as my dialect dropping some rhotic Rs, more glottal stops and changing what she pronounced as "ul" to "oh", and yet we understood each other so much better than when I speak Scots to English speakers. And I'm from West Dunbartonshire, which is a lot closer to England geographically. And if there were words we had a bit of trouble understanding, we'd just repeat back what we heard in our own dialect for clarity. Scots dialects are frustrating too, though. Plenty of times I speak in my dialect and other people that speak nearby dialects say I'm faking it because I don't speak exactly like them, when other people in my region speak like me. I've even been called not Scottish for it. It's also another strange thing that there's not an updated written version of Scots that everyone agrees on. Because basing it in one dialect will alienate those that speak a different one. So a lot of people just write in English with Scots words with no direct translation being spelled out phonetically according to the dialect. Another problem is that there's Scots speakers that don't even realise they're speaking Scots because it's not the same as Robert Burns' Scots. Modern Scots is incredibly diverse. It's good that there's folks like Dempster pointing out some of the challenges Modern Scots speakers face like being told what they say is just "bad Scottish English".

[@janetmackinnon3411]

I was lucky as a child: I grew up near Glasgow, but knew Aberdeenshire bothy ballads. So not a bad richness of vocabulary. But when I went to Aberdeen , I quickly found that the town speech was not what I had learned!

[@ayambeamonte4384]

You could look into the use of the word "dialecto" in Mexico. I have heard it used in an almost derogatory way to refer to native languages, to the point where even speakers of these languages refer to them as "dialecto" instead of, say, "Nahuatl" or "Purépecha" or whatever language it is. I found this out when I asked a student who I knew was of Mixteco descent, if she spoke the Mixteco language, and she answered: "Sí, hablo dialecto", and seemed almost ashamed of that fact.

[@diegoberaldin7888]

I’m from the north of Italy as my “strange” surname reveals.. I’ve witnessed children being yelled at and severely punished at school for speaking the dialect they were familiar with at home. And I’ve also often seen dialect speakers ostracize and exclude Italian speakers for being too “posh”.. Far from uniting the country this has divided us even further, and in the future there will probably be consequences for it..

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Wow that’s such a shame! I’m sorry to hear that. These are difficult problems

[@pompei1968]

when was this country ever united ...and never will be

[@serenissimarespublicavenet3945]

Mia madre fa di cognome "Gavagnin", ma molto spesso se deve partecipare a qualche convegno all'estero, anche se lei spiega sempre che il suo cognome è "Gavagnin", appena dice di essere italiana tutti la chiamano "Gavagnini".

[@youtubeyoutube936]

Yes when I went to school in the mid 60s we were not allowed to speak Cumasch in school. From your surname at are you from Venezia Giulia

[@diegoberaldin7888]

@@youtubeyoutube936 Yes, I’m from central Veneto, actually not far from Venezia-Giulia..

[@padmeteratai3658]

I totally agree with your opinion and I'm a Asian. This phenomena is also present in the Chinese world too where Mandarin has become the prestige language while others variants which are historically much older are considered as dialects. The oldest dialect of all which is 閩南話 (Min dialect) has much influence onto the Japanese language (not sure about Korean) like for example 運動 (うんどう) in the Min dialect is Un4 Dong3, 遊戲王 (ゆぎおう) in Min is Yu3 Hi4 Ong3, 世界 (せかい) se4 kai3, 學生(がくせい) hak3 seng1, 感謝(かんしゃ) kam2 sia3, 了解 (りょかい) liao2 kai1 and seriously many more. And in fact the Chinese nihaoma 你好吗 actually came from the Min which is 汝好乎 (lu ho bo) in old Chinese written form. But sadly people are calling this dialect vulgar and the people speaking it uneducated and this makes them speaking the Min dare not to speak in public because it will lose face and etc... Its all about prestige and not how old the language and historically accurate is..

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

A great example! I hope these important historically relevant languages in China can again enjoy respect.

[@cestakou357]

There is no such thing as one type of Mandarin and one type of Min. Northern, Eastern and Southern Min are at least three Min dialect groups and their respective speakers can't understand a thing when speaking in their local varieties. This is due to the mountainous terrain that used to isolate them. Just as some Mandarin dialects are impossible to understand if you only know standard Chinese based on Beijing Mandarin. Every city and even district has a distinctive form of speech, more on that in my long comment under Disney em pt-pt's. Linguistically, varieties can't be older than one another. They can have more conservative characteristics than others, but you can't just assume that everything stayed the same for 2000 years and deduct that Old Min had influence on Old Japanese just because modern Min (which dialect exactly?) and Chinese loanwords in modern Japanese sound similar. Japanese borrowed from Chinese in three waves and from different parts of China. The readings are called go-on, kan-on and tō-on. None of them were borrowed from the Min area. Whatever China's capital back then was, it determined the official language and maintained linguistic exchange with Japan through scholars. The Min area never had political significance. Also, standard Chinese 你好吗 isn't derived from Min 汝好乎. The fact that some dialects use words that seem bookish in modern standard Chinese just means they've fallen out of use. It doesn't make Min older or even a non-Sinitic parent language to standard Mandarin. 你 is a phonetic variant of 尔, a second-person pronoun attested in Old Chinese. Understandably, there is the desire to preserve seemingly marginalized varieties because they somehow deserve pity, but one shouldn't make up stuff to justify and glorify it. Min can't be more accurate either. Accurate in terms of what? More authentic and thus better Chinese? These are just subjective labels. Dialects never lost respect in China. You obviously can't use Southern Min outside of the Quanzhou-Xiamen-Zhangzhou cluster, which itself is a result of dialect leveling. You can use it with friends, in shops or on local TV, but you can't speak it when interlocutors from other regions participate. With today's freedom of movement, you simply can't expect everyone you meet in your city to be a local. After all, you hold conversations with the intent of understanding each other. This diglossia has always existed. The official language served as the lingua franca and as a Dachsprache, it contributed to the literal pronunciations of the dialects. Today's dialectal landscape is precisely what it is due to the people's movements throughout history. For example, the Hangzhou dialect has had a Wu base with Mandarin elements for 1000 years. Phonetic changes have been documented and are continued to be documented. Chinese television has recently even released documentaries in different local varieties.

[@ohmightywez]

One of my best friends speaks Suzhouneze, which to me is so soft and lovely. It is rapidly dying out, which is a tragedy. My sister in law (really my sister, since she married my older brother when I was 4) is from Hong Kong and speaks Cantonese. I love to hear her speak her own language because I love her, but it sounds so much more harsh to my ears now. I feel badly for China in so many ways, but especially because connections with history and traditions are not encouraged.

[@timurermolenko2013]

@@ohmightywez I have heard that language and I was shocked How Sweet It Is. It turned out to be even much sweeter than Cantonese or Hokkien, despite this being farther north and presumably more influenced by a rough pronunciation of Pekingese aka 🍊

[@timurermolenko2013]

Hokkien (Mean) is probably the closest one to old Chinese so that's why all the borrowings by others resemble it the most.

[@marcosmoritz1957]

One interesting aspect that wasn't mentioned in the video is the contemporary development of mixed varieties at border zones and cities with high immigration levels. My native language, for example, is Portuguese (Brazilian), but I have had contact with Spanish since my childhood because at that point I spent all my summer holidays in the south areas of the country and it's pretty common to find Argentinians and Uruguayans there. Later, I lived in Buenos Aires for some months and have been married to an Argentinian for almost a decade living in Brazil. I also shared apartments with other Spanish-speakers in São Paulo when I was studying at the university. The point is I was always in contact with people who were able to speak both of these languages and usually we were consciously mixing them. Because of that, the language that I feel most closely connected is not Portuguese or Spanish (even if I can easily speak the standard version of both), but the so-called "Portuñol", a kind of interlingua. Unfortunately, there is enormous prejudice against this variety because people associate it with a lack of education or ability to speak these languages properly, even if this phenomenon occurs all over the Brazilian borders since we are surrounded by Spanish-speaking countries. There's a beautiful documentary about this subject called La frontera imaginária/A fronteira imaginária (The imaginary border): kzbin.info/www/bejne/epDLhWaAbr-UfNU Another family case is my grandmother, who was a native Friulan speaker. During the II World War, Brazil was fighting on the allies' side and all varieties of German, Japanese and Italian languages were forbidden in the public space here. Because of that and also because Italian languages were associated with poverty at that period, my grandmother developed a negative sense of her own identity and did not teach the language to my father. Today, I'm using KZbin videos to learn this language to try at least to honor her memory and legacy in a symbolic way.

[@esoel]

That’s beautiful. Try to learn Italian and Friulan, they are beautiful Languages. I will try to watch the documentary if I can understand it, it sounds very interesting.

[@ludmilaianulov5516]

Similar situation we have here in Moldova , most of the people are bilingual and speaks well Russian and Romanian( or better said Moldavian that is a dialect of romanian), and they mix this two languages ( that are quite different) .

[@eliassestu6694]

"a language is a dialect with an army and navy", that sentence is actually pretty accurate in describing what happened to Sardinian language. During fascism the Italian government severely limited the use of Sardinian, and Italian had been so strongly imposed that parents wouldn't even talk to their children in Sardinian, so that in less than a hundred years the amount of Sardinian speakers in Sardinia is so low that we could say that the language is almost dead. I don't want to get political here, but it really saddens me to see that a different culture could be weakened like that, depriving it from one of its fundamental parts, which is the way people communicates, just with "an army and a navy". Sardinian here, of course.

[@_blank-_]

I'm French and I have the same feeling regarding regional languages in France. The state has been murdering minority languages for almost two centuries. The worst part is that it's done under the guise of equality when it's nothing but forced assimilation. Absolutely disgusting. I'm Parisian so you'd think I wouldn't care about it, after all it's my dialect that has been forced upon the rest of the country. Yet I still feel incredibly sad for these languages. Corsican, Occitan, Basque, Breton, Alsatian, Arpitan, Picard and so many others all deserve to thrive. Both French and regional languages can coexist. They are part of our cultural legacy, we're sacrificing so much linguistic wealth because of rotten nationalism.

[@lucasansone6825]

Godo, tanto il sardo è una lingua di merda per niente musicale. 100mila volte meglio l'italiano

[@tjsato5026]

I grew up speaking a Lombard dialect but it makes me sad to think that dialects are still perceived as the spoken language of "ignorant" people and there is a big stigma on speaking dialects. My grandma kept telling me during my childhood "parla italiano" even if she spoke mostly dialect but they were pressured to speak Italian because dialect was for people that didn't go to school (my grandparents didn't go further than elementary school). Now I've forgotten most of it, and I live in another region so I can speak it only if I make an effort in remembering the words, even if I can still understand it if I hear someone else speaking it. Anyway, I love all languages and It's a pity when they are lost. Thank you for your videos!

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Thanks for watching and commenting! Yeah, it's a tough situation. I don't have an immediate solution.

[@Malaestro]

My partner used to speak standard Italian,plus a variant of Sardinian, and he claims he could never speak Piemontese; only understand it. I managed to shock him by pointing out he sleep talks in Piemontese sometimes. He can't consciously speak it, or this other dialect (which he learnt holidaying many months of the year each year as a child), but he obviously still speaks standard Italian, and was shocked to find he still has 100% comprehension of written and spoken Piemontese. The situation with Piemontese makes me a bit sad really, since it is so much in decline amongst younger people.

[@PEriani67]

Di quale provincia lombarda sei? I vari dialetti di quella che io definisco la lingua lombarda sono abbastanza diversi. Io sono di Varese ed anch'io ebbi lo stesso problema, anche se negli anni '70 si potevano ancora trovare anziani che parlavano fluentemente il dialetto e forse per questo me lo ricordo ancora abbastanza bene.

[@sohoris5461]

I live in Piedmont, close to Turin. Our dialect is Piedmontese (which is classified as a language) and my grandfather used to speak "patois" when he was young, a dialect that mixed up French and Piedmontese. He told me that each valley close to where he lived (my land is filled with valleys) spoke a different kind of patois. There was an impressive number of almost isolated communities there not too much time ago, it's astonishing if you think about it. Nowadays he keeps speaking Piedmontese with my grandma and Italian with me, I kind of regret not being able to speak Piedmontese properly, but almost all my friends have southern origins so they can't speak it and young people in general lost that dialect tradition here in Piedmont.

[@LiaBruna]

@@sohoris5461 same thing for me, I am from Cuneo - did you notice that the Alps there in the map are not colored because of occitano? That's not French neither Val D'Aosta patois, and certainly not Italian... But it's there nonetheless, on the continuum :) :)

[@derekjparnell]

We lost at least one language of Italy - Etruscan. I love that my friends in Napoli can swap between Italian and Neapolitan, except that while I can almost follow them in Italian, but when they swap, ... oh well. I wait a bit until they swap back.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Great point! Emperor Claudius is the last person known to be able to speak Etruscan. He wrote great books on the language, which have been lost.

[@alessandrasoso2099]

Etruscan heritage actually persists in many terms of Italian and especially in people's and locations' names. The problem is that we don't know much about the original Etruscan roots of those terms so we can't properly study it. I suspect that latin borrowed a lot from other pre-latin languages of Lazio and the rest of the peninsula, but we can't know for sure as we lack sources for those languages.

[@budibausto]

Also Osco.

[@lisaparoni1411]

Thank you Luke for this beautiful video! I'm Italian and I don't speak my "dialect" or regional language (varesotto) because of what I call undisclosed linguistic repression: my grandparents and my mother were brought to think that you had to speak Italian in order to speak properly, so they only spoke Italian with us. What I wish happened in Italy is bilingualism: I wish we could speak our regional language AND Italian. Still to this day, when my friends tell me they don’t want to speak their beautiful regional language because it is degrading I feel a sting of pain. We are losing a huge linguistic variety and richness in Italy and that’s sad. This idea that "dialects" or regional languages are just a rustic and unrefined version of Italian is not only linguistically wrong but a straight-up lie.

[@biagio177]

I am an Italian from Campania (provincia di Benevento) and I can understand the dialetto Napoletano, but I can't speak it. I only learned Italian because I always thought that Napoletano was inferior, but now I know that it is a respectable language and I think that your view is right: I think that it would be good if every "dialect" was socially accepted

[@shelookstome8727]

Gah your comment made me feel sad :( I'm in Australia and my boyfriend is Italian (born here but both parents migrated from Southern Italy). My bf mainly knows Italian - his parents come from Calabria and Basilicata respectively and neither of them understand each other's regional language, so it was easier to speak 'standard' together. My bf was exposed to Calabrese through his mum's family though, as her parents would speak it and her elder sister married a Calabrese man and he mainly speaks that at home. Once I was visiting the extended family and recognised when they were speaking Calabrese as opposed to Italian; even though I only know a little Italian I recognised the difference, it was pretty cool to hear. I've been exposed to some Sicilian through watching Commissario Montalbano and listening to Sicilian music and it's beautiful. Nobody should be ashamed of their regional language.❤️

[@Amup500]

The many italian Dialects (Regional Languages) of Italy should be saved, used, remembered, respected and acknowlegged. Im happy to see that todays young people are open to learning more about dialects. I grew up learning both my parents italian dialects and standard italian. However, there was a stigma of speaking dialect when not in family company. Im glad to see the stigma weakening; and it will weaken more with the help of education and young ppl and social media... Great work!

[@MrHistoryGame]

Ti devo dare ragione. Per tantissimo tempo ho stigmatizzato il mio dialetto (Veneziano) perché l'ho sempre considerato da "povero" o "ignorante". Sono arrivato perfino a lavorare sulla mia voce per togliere il suono che il dialetto mi aveva dato, come ad esempio la famosa "R" Veneziana. Solo ultimamente ho riscoperto questa lingua tramite le commedie del Goldoni, canzoni ecc...

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Sì, e riguardo alle preferenze, dē gustibus nōn est disputandum; se preferisci lo standard secondo DOP ovviamente è una bellissima lingua, e necessaria per essere un cittadino. Ma sì, secondo me, tutti i dialetti sono degni di rispetto. 😊

[@malarobo]

Io invece sono tenacemente legato alla mia "s" romagnola che non ha nessun altro in Italia

[@serenissimarespublicavenet3945]

Pensa, c'è anche di peggio. Io ultimamente sto cercando di parlare sempre più in dialetto (veneziano) anche con i miei amici e con gli sconosciuti, per evitare che vada dimenticato. Ebbene, alcuni miei amici con una r "di Marghera" fortissima, mi hanno ripreso dicendomi di parlare italiano, perché "il dialetto è brutto e volgare". Beh, io onestamente preferisco parlare dialetto ed italiano bene, che parlare italiano male.

[@ltubabbo529]

@@serenissimarespublicavenet3945 fai benissimo, io parlo perugino il 99% del tempo, poi se l'altro ha difficoltà o la situazione richiede l'italiano allora parlo italiano. Tanta gente come dici tu mischia le due cose. Non capirò mai perché nell'immaginario comune una persona può alternare e parlare perfettamente italiano-lingua straniera senza mischiare, ma non può alternare italiano-lingua regionale "perché poi non ti controlli, non sei abituato e fai brutta figura"

[@damianocolla3156]

@@serenissimarespublicavenet3945 dighe ai to amighi de cagarse dosso 😆 . Varda che scherso.

[@Faustobellissimo]

I just need to say something about the origin of standard Italian. Dante is NOT the only creator of Italian. Italian was born in the 13th century from the union of two different sources. One source is the language of Sicilian and Tuscan poets (including Dante). The other source is the language of officials, traders, bankers, notaries and jurists. While the first language was formed by contact with Occitan Troubadours, the second one was uniquely of Italian origin, because Italy was the country where capitalism was born. (This is what the late Philippe Daverio taught in his lessons)

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Absolutely correct! :) Like I said in the video, I gave a simplified description for the sake of clarity. I appreciate the comment.

[@Faustobellissimo]

@@polyMATHY_Luke And I like your comparison between Old Florentine and Old Attic. Furthermore, as a lingua franca, Old Florentine was eventually replaced by English, just as Old Attic was eventually replaced by Latin.

[@asinglebraincell6584]

Our family is calabrian, from the southern part, and my grandma gets so excited to teach me words from that "dialect" as opposed to Italian. I asked her to do it too. She was sort of skeptical at first but now she gets excited and so expressive, and you can see it makes makes her so happy. Those of us who still have access to family that can pass it down to us, learn and ask! Not just because it's interesting but because of the connection to your family and your region! And plus, if you understand the basics already, learning the specifics, and the obscure terminology online or wherever, it's very interesting. Now I've always wanted to know, where does Sicilian/Calabrian "Unni/Aundi" come from exactly??? "Dove" in Italian, "Donde" in Spanish, so why do these words stick out so much ;_;

[@Reazzurro90]

When we moved to the US from Sicily, my father insisted on us kids speaking Italian at home. My brother and sister, being older, always were able to speak Sicilian fluently. I've never thought about it until the past few years in which I've tried teaching it to myself. Now my father as he's gotten older, he's transitioned to almost exclusively Sicilian. I asked him why one day. And he just responds: "My purpose over the years was to ensure you spoke proper Italian. You do. Sicilian is my language."

[@PhantomKING113]

Hello grom Spain, specifically from Asturias. My grandparents speak in "Amestao", which is Spanish mixed in with Asturian, and... they're basically the largest source of exposure to Asturian for me, or, more specifically, they were, as my paternal grandma passed away several years ago. While I now try to learn as much Asturian as I can when I hear it, it is becoming increasingly rarer (I wish I had started caring earlier), though I did learn some words and stuff from listening to it, but I'm not in any way fluent speaking it, I have to stop and think, I'm only decently fluent at understanding it. Honestly, your comment did kinda touch me, it reminded me of my grandma asking me, from time to time, if I knew what x words meant in Asturian. Ig small children just don't appreciate language enough. As for the "unni/aundi" problem, I think it does come from "donde", or whatever the original latin was. See Spanish, "donde", or "dónde" for the question word, and Asturian "onde", or "ónde/ó". Dropping an initial d (hehe) in such a commonly used word is probably not that rare. I could see the following happening: donde → dombe → dobe → dove donde → onde → aundi/undi → aundi/unni (I do wonder why unni and aundi but not aunni or undi survive xd) Thank you for reading, to anyone who did. Oh, and thank you to the oc (A Single Brain Cell 6584), for sharing your experience, I hope you find mine interesting too. Disclaimer 1: misspellings are likely, I'm not a native speaker of English. Disclaimer 2: don't worry about the tilde or lack of it in Spanish donde/dónde, it reflects the difference between two words that are pronounced the same (although, generally, with different amounts of emphasis): "donde" is the "where" in "He was where I last saw him." or "The hill where the lions sleep.", which both serve to join to sentences, whereas "dónde" refers to the "where" in sentences like "Where were you?", "I wanted to nkow where you were.", or "Where he may be I do not care.".

[@joebar52]

Probably one of my favorite videos I’ve ever seen. I’m Italian from Genova and I’m fluent in English and Spanish, studied both German and Russian (to a very basic level) and enjoy learning about languages and their roots. When it comes to my own dialect though, I hit a brick wall, like a mental block and just can’t get a grasp of it, and I really believe it’s due to the constant “reminders” that dialect is for ignorant people. It’s a shame and it seems like a lot of Italians experience this stigma. It’s really a pity when you discard some of your roots, especially when it comes down to such an interesting dialect that has a ton of outside influences that came from trading.

[@matteomagurno3068]

It’s even worse when so much people still engages in this malicous rethoric. I see this all the time in Italian school teachers who at the slightest possibility never fail to remind you of how embarassing, uncultured and lowly it is to use dialectal words in your speech or the language itself.

[@leonardomontauti7072]

This is truly sad. I am from Abruzzo and I'm both a native speaker of italian and pretarolo, a dialect wich is risking death, due to a lack of new speakers. It's really sad to stigmatize dialects and relate them to ignorant and illetrate people. For example, my dialect is full of albanian and strange terms, wich can remind of older italian words, it would be a true shame if it dies, like all the other dialects of our country, they are a truly important cultural aspect of Italy, and even if you'll be labeled as ignorant, keep speaking your dialects!

[@tziuriky86]

Even though the Sardinian language has always had the "luck" of being recognised as a language of its own, given how distant it is either from Italian or Spanish, the "inferior dialect" rhetoric that was used in Scotland and Campania was used also in Sardinia, to discourage the use of Sardinian, increase the usage (and prestige) of Italian and ultimately boost Italian nationalism.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Which is a shame, because the languages in Sardinia are remarkable.

[@anonb4632]

I wish people would learn the history... Even back when Scotland was an independent country, mediæval writers in Lowland Scots referred to the Englishman Chaucer writing in "our tongue". The real language of most of Scotland is Gaelic and that was displaced over the course of centuries. Many places that now speak Lowland Scots were Gaelic speaking (Galloway, Moray, western Caithness) when Scotland was independent, and it expanded into these areas either shortly before England annexed Scotland or after it (i.e..17th and 18th centuries). In Orkney and Shetland, which are not Scottish, it only really took over in the 19th century as Norn died out.

[@tziuriky86]

@@polyMATHY_Luke Thank you :-) If only people would value culture as much as they value money....

[@synkkamaan1331]

@@anonb4632 I wouldn't say that Gàidhlig is the real language of Scotland. It is descended from Old Irish, just the same as the Irish Gaeilge is, but don't get me wrong, they are beautiful languages. The state of today's Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Breton, Manx, really is the final dying breath of the Celtic language family.

[@anonb4632]

@@synkkamaan1331 It is the real language of Scotland. The concept of Scotland or the Scottish nation wouldn't even exist without Gaeldom. No Gaelic = no Scotland. It also has the longest continuous history of any of the languages still used in Scotland except perhaps Latin, which doesn't really count.

[@zmaja]

"It is all one giant continuum... ". Yes, full of beautiful diversity. Erasing and suppressing it kills the beauty and makes us all weak and poor.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

I agree! Thanks for watching, Maja! 🤠

[@zmaja]

@@polyMATHY_Luke Thank you for sharing your knowledge and insights. In the most considerate way 🤠

[@Adhjie]

@@zmaja just imagine the suppression of west taiwan and ethnic cleansing i wonder chinese of xia dynasty, we progress together if we re atleast on lvl 0 on the kardashev scale the culture will follow, the last things would be to recreate alexandrias library and golden age against a common enemy tahts decadence and ignorance of conquest to the stars and deciphering indus valley rongorongo minoan or mycenaean linear writing *sad linguistics or Elucubrator of etymology scriptoria noises*

[@anonb4632]

The most homogenous generation in history is the most obsessed with "diversity".

[@LucasMartin-im5ub]

@@anonb4632 Who would that be?

[@lukatsito]

Hi! Italian linguist here! Amazing video, I loved the scientific approach you used. What I usually say is that "the criterium linguists use to draw boundaries between language and dialect is the same that biologists use to draw boundaries between species". Simplyfying, the purpose of life in a biological sense is reproducing, two separate species cannot reproduce; in the same way, the purpose of language is communication, speakers of two separate languages cannot communicate.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Assolutamente! Grazie mille, Luca, per il tuo commento. Infatti! Hai ragione.

Actually, that criterion to draw lines between species isn’t of common use in modern times. For instance, coyotes and wolves can and do reproduce in the wild with each other and engender fertile offspring, and yet, they’re considered separate species. There’re numerous examples of it. In plants, fertile hybrids of wild species are very common, some of them are hybrids of distantly related species. On the other hand, other organisms that technically don’t reproduce sexually (bacteria, archaea, some fungi, some algae, many protists, some plants, some animals, viruses) are clustered together in species even though the members of each of those species don’t reproduce with other individuals of that same (or other) species.

[@esoel]

@ So it’s a confusing, arbitrary mess, like the difference between Language and Dialect? :-D

[@helgaioannidis9365]

As a Bavarian native speaker who later learned some other European languages and lives on a Greek island where you meet binational couples from all over Europe I never understood, why Bavarian is considered a dialect and Dutch a language. Your video made things much clearer for me. Fun fact, I live on the island of Rhodes and the villages Archangelos and Lindos speak dialects that are pretty similar to ancient Greek. People from the mainland can not understand what they say, but people from Cyprus can.

[@GiulioImparato]

also, more or less before Dante The dialect spoken in Rome was more akin to Neapolitan, but then it diverged becoming more similar to tuscan dialects (also in part to the contribution of Florentine nobility and popes coming into Rome)

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Affascinante!

[@mariotinnirello1484]

ciò, invero, mi era ignoto

[@albertofarfesani3801]

Also, after the Sack of Rome in 1527, Rome was repopulated (Fanciullo 2015: 61-62)

[@GiulioImparato]

@Darth Brino ti metto un esempio nel quale trovi un sacco di dittonghi (secondo me la cosa piu tipicamente campana) ed assimilazioni che oggi rimangono nei dialetti campani ma sono quasi scomparse nel romano: dai capitoli della "Cronica" dell'anonimo Romano: Prologo e primo capitolo Dove se demostra le rascione per le quale questa opera fatta fu. Cap. secunno Como Iacovo de Saviello senatore fu cacciato de Campituoglio per lo puopolo, e della cavallaria de missore Stefano della Colonna e missore Napolione delli Orsini. Cap. III Como fu sconfitto lo principe della Morea a porta de Castiello Santo Agnilo, e como fu trovato Guelfo e Gebellino, e delle connizione de Dante e que fine abbe soa vita. Cap. IV - De papa Ianni e della venuta dello Bavaro a Roma e della soa partenza e dello antipapa lo quale fece.] Cap. V Dello mostro che nacque in Roma e dello legato dello papa lo quale fu cacciato de Bologna. Cap. VI Como frate Venturino venne a Roma colle palommelle e dello campanile de Santo Pietro lo quale fu arzo. Cap. VII De papa Benedetto e dello tetto de Santo Pietro de Roma lo quale fu renovato. Cap. VIII Della cometa la quale apparze nelle parte de Lommardia e della abassazione de missore Mastino tiranno per li Veneziani. Cap. IX Della aspera e crudele fame e della vattaglia de Parabianco in Lommardia e delli novielli delle vestimenta muodi. Cap. X Della morte dello re Ruberto e della venuta che fece la reina de Ongaria a Roma. Cap. XI Della sconfitta de Spagna e della toita della Zinzera e dello assedio de Iubaltare. Cap. XII Como fu cacciato de Fiorenza lo duca de Atena, e como morìo papa Benedetto e fu creato papa Chimento. Cap. XIII Della crociata la quale fu fatta in Turchia alle Esmirre. Cap. XIV Della sconfitta de Francia, là dove morze lo re de Boemia e·llo re de Francia fu sconfitto dallo re de Egnilterra. Cap. XV Dello grannissimo diluvio e piena de acqua. Cap. XVI Della galea sorrenata e derobata in piaia romana. Cap. XVII - [De Leonardo de Orvieto tenagliato per Roma.] etc etc.

[@budibausto]

Perhaps Roman dialect is the most comprehensible dialct in Italy? I mean everyone north and south can understand Roman dialect.

[@LandgraabIV]

35:02 it's especially striking when you consider that Romance languages can have higher degrees of mutual intelligibility than the so-called Arabic and Chinese "dialects".

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

That's very much the case! I don't know Arabic well enough to comment, but I understand that Moroccans and Iraqis can't understand each other at all unless they modify their speech with Fusha.

[@hellophoenix]

It’s true Arabs of the Levantine, the Gulf, and Egypt have a very hard time understanding the North African dialects but from someone who speaks French and I’m learning Portuguese, I You just can’t compare the differences between the Romance languages and the Arabic dialects. From my experience , it only took me few weekends in Tunisia and asking questions about vocabulary to be able to understand them. And yes my French helped me with my learning of Portuguese but one must learn the language and take courses in it and not just listen and ask questions. So in short that was not a fair comparison.

[@LandgraabIV]

@@hellophoenix that is true. But I'd say French is the odd one out in the West. Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan and Italian are way more mutual intelligible than that!

[@joshadams8761]

@@hellophoenix I understand that most educated Arabic speakers can communicate using Modern Standard Arabic.

[@hellophoenix]

@@joshadams8761 Yes, they would speak with a some form of MSA and their regional dialect. They will also modify their speech pattern and speak what some might call “ white accent.”

[@andrewcomerford9411]

A teacher of my acquaintance once suggested to me that his students were bilingual, speaking Scots amongst themselves and English in the classroom. Certainly as a wise man once said; "Ae day, ye'd get a prize for recitin' the wurks o' Burns - the ither three hunner n' sixty fower, ye'd get beltit fur talkin' his language." It was more than my life was worth to say, "Aye," to a teacher.

[@calibribody6776]

I'll never forget coming home from school in Australia. Having learnt a bit of Italian in Italian class. And I said something to my Siciliano grandmother that she did not understand. It was Italian, just not an Italian word she recognized. Dialects are very interesting. I seriously hope we don't lose them. We have plenty of conservation efforts for animals, but I believe we also require conservation efforts for languages. Maybe there are many and I don't see them but still. All languages sound uniquely beautiful. And it'd be amazing to keep them forever.

[@baldinggrey5368]

The diversity of Italian dialects in both phonology and grammar is quite astonishing and calling all these varieties simply dialects masks a lot of that diversity. A more extreme case of this, in my opinion, is that of the Sinitc languages. Most Chinese immediately recognize Cantonese as a completely different beast but in a way it is not considered another language. Same goes for the extreme diversity of Fujian or Min languages that are usually not mutually intelligible with each other. In this case the common wrting system that is only indirectly related to actual spoken sounds helps to unify this mesh of languages and dialects as one in the minds of the Chinese

[@zebimicio5204]

ITs all politics in the end of the day. Castillan (aka spanish) and portuguese is literally under the same "romance dialect" family which is western iberian, but due to political reasons, it's not considered the same language.

[@Jumpoable]

That's because we "Chinese" all write with a pictorial script, basically hieroglyphics, which isn't alphabetically spelling out a word phonetically. So the character 飯 meaning "rice" or "meal" is understood by all, but pronounced differently as Cantonese [faan], Shanghainese [ve], or (Southern Min) Hokkien [bng] or (Eastern Min) Fuzhounese [buing]. China is still one political system like Imperial Rome, not split up into different nation states like in Europe. We also differentiate spoken language 漢語 (華語 overseas) from written language 中文. So the vague term "Chinese" in English pertaining to nationality/ culture/ written & spoken languages isn't even applicable when speaking linguistically. Everyone speaks different languages & we know it, despite the fact that we still group it all under the vague umbrella term "Chinese".... Upon meeting someone, we will ask one where one is from (city, and then ultimately ancestral village) & what your mother tongue is (if it's not Putonghua which literally means "common speech"). & people will say Guangdonghua or Shanghaihua or whatever city/ town/ village + hua (speech) they're from. The term "dialect" in Chinese is fangyan which just means "regional language"... a bit different etymologically from the Western term "dialect"... but of course fangyan also has pejorative connotations ranging from neutral to rural/ uneducated speech nowadays. It depends on your level of education of course. The less educated one is, the more you would think that your non-Mandarin mother tongue is inferior, because you or your parents adhere to some gross outdated party rhetoric in regards to language. In the north, with steppes and fairly flat plains, Mandarin languages rule supreme, so speakers of Putonghua (based on the speech of the capital Beijing since the Ming dynasty) will feel that everyone around them speak dialects of Beijinghua/ Putonghua (although there is a phonological difference between local Beijing language & the toned down official language of Putonghua ). In the south, with a lot more hills, mountain ranges & rivers criss-crossing the region, the languages are far more diverse. So Wu, Min (Fujian) & Yue (Cantonese) languages are definitely perceived as different "beasts" as you put it, since the languages sound completely foreign to Putonghua speakers. For exampleotherspeakers of Sinitic The Sino-Tibetan language family is as fascinating as the Indo-European one.

[@marcmonnerat4850]

This is the fascinating part: you have a **continuum** both in space and time. Knowing only "classical" ancient greek, I was able to read Byzantine text up to Anna Komnene (12th century CE).

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Absolutely! Anna Komnene is famous for how beautiful her Attic is. That is to say, she learned the language so well as to be able to write in it like Thucydides hehe.

[@TheZenytram]

spacetime continuum of languages ha.

[@nicholasbakos]

@@polyMATHY_Luke Absolutely. that's the point I was going to make. Greek was pretty much two separate but concurrent languages until the twentieth century. The tendency to archaicize in order to score cultivation points was always very strong and explains why Anna Komnene wrote perfect Attic in the 12th c. A weird experience of this comes when you're in a Greek church; a hymn, or any form of ecclesiastic poetry, written in say Anna's time is usually more difficult to understand because of its consciously archaicizing language, than the Gospels themselves which are more than a 1,000 years older but were written in the vernacular koine to reach a wider audience and are often startlingly modern.

[@andykline]

You should investigate the Arabic dialects (لهجات) and the diglossia with Modern Standard Arabic! That dialectology would be so fascinating to see in this format

[@LoeZack]

I speak a dialect from Brescia, which is part of the Lombard language. Because I speak fluently the Spanish language it’s amazing how these two languages help me to understand quite well the Catalan one!

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Esatto! Grazie per il commento.

[@youtubeyoutube936]

I’m a native Cumasch speaker. But alas after 50 years with an English accent. Ma so sempre Cumasch

[@MANthe93]

BRESA SUNÌ

[@fgaze72]

'dulce stil novo' sounds like an italian smooth rap/rnb hybrid genre

[@xxmodgamer2908]

Well their sonnets are as good as rap😂 I highly recommend reading Dante's Vita Nova and Guido Cavalcanti's sonnets

[@slowmolife4289]

"Dulce stil novo" had also his own disdings, called "tenzoni" 😂

[@xxmodgamer2908]

@@slowmolife4289 God they are amazing! I mean, everybody ought to read Dante's tenzone with Forese Donati! It is beautiful and funny

[@slowmolife4289]

@@marcofk bruh, im italian. Do you really think i don't know it's "dolce" in italian?

[@NicoLavarini]

@@xxmodgamer2908 Here's your original 1300 sonnet made into a song around 1970 : kzbin.info/www/bejne/f16reIGgYtV3gdE

[@EnDabuwya]

I think this is why so much in my Linguistic education we've often referred to "language varieties" when being precise, rather than dialect/language

[@thelobsterperson]

This is super refreshing to hear! I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the difference between language and dialect (with a focus on andalú/andaluz spoken in southern Spain). I feel like this condensed something like 100 hours of research into a half hour video!

[@EuropaPhoenix]

As you probably already know, at the end of the 19th century and especially after 1918, the French state did its best to eradicate the linguistic diversity of France. Now, more than a century later, there are almost no young people able to speak Provençal, Alsacien, Occitan, Breton, etc. (Corsican being the exception to the rule). These languages are almost extinct. But, for some reason, we never use the word "dialect" to talk about them. the official term is "regional languages" (langues régionales). Personally, even though I love my mother tongue, I consider them as important and legitimate as the standard "French" language. As a French Italian (my mother's family is from Udine), I find your reflections about your heritage quite interesting.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Well said! While I love French very much, it hurts to hear how these minority languages in French have been so diminished. I hope I get the opportunity to study them.

[@barkasz6066]

Didn’t the eradication of those regional languages start much earlier? Like the 17th and 18th century with absolutism and then French nationalism? Breton got the worst of it, since it wasn’t even a Romance language, followed by Burgundian and Occitan/Provençal.

[@EuropaPhoenix]

@@barkasz6066 Well... one could argue that the Albigensian crusade (13th century) was the first step toward a monolingual country. It destroyed the brilliant Occitan culture, which was the main opponent to the French dominion. I'm no expert, but according to what I learned, it is the Republic who really decided to unify France on political, cultural, scientific and linguistic levels. The Kings of France, including Louis XIV, were more interested in a political and religious unity (which explains the war between the Catholics and the Protestants). The problem of the linguistic diversity wasn't that important to them (the Aristocrats, the ones who mattered, already spoke French). Since its apparition, the French Republic had the desire to be a universal model whose mission was to spread the Human Rights everywhere on earth, even by force if needed. It started in France with the slaughtering of the Vendéens who were loyal royalists; and then, later on, it continued with the French colonialism who tried to share "the enlightenment", expressed and written in French, with other peoples of the world... at least, that was the moral excuse for it. Of course, in addition to that, the horrors of WW1 convinced the military that they needed soldiers to be able to understand orders yelled in French. At this moment, the state used all its power to turn France into a monolingual country once and for all... successfully. Everybody in France, outside of Paris, can tell stories about their great grand parents having been beaten by their teachers because they dared speak "patois" at school... it is quite sad.

[@CapitaineGMC]

@@EuropaPhoenix I'm French Spanish myself from the Pyrénées, and you are so (and sadly) right. My grandparents' first language is not French, but Béarnais, which as you probably know is a variant of Gascon, which in turn is a variant of Occitan lol - There are so many variants that sometimes just from one village to another, you can spot quite a lot of notable differences in the grammar and the vocabulary. Maybe Basque could be added to the list of 'survivors' - I'm also half Basque on my mother's side, who's from the French Basque Country, and you can still find young people who speak it, although it's not a Romance language. Now in my region there are still a few, very few 'Calandretas', which are primary schools where everything is taught in the 'dialect', but it's still not as much of a big thing as it is with our Spanish or Italian neighbours unfortunately. What's nice about all this though, is how your local French vocabulary is influenced by the local dialect: I can think of a lot of words I'd use in French which are not really French, but rather imported from our Béarnais. Anyway it's a shame really, because to me France is also a very regional country, as in, lots and lots of different 'sub-cultures' with their own traditions, food, beliefs etc. Sadly this is not promoted or encouraged, and the country is fairly misknown as a result, at least that's how I see it.

[@tanet]

Another interesting thing is how Gallo dialect has completely disappeared in Brittany due to linguistic policies made by the region of brittany for many years to save the breton language because it is what they considered as the original language since it's a celtic language and has nothing to do with other regional dialects, whereas gallo is just considered as a french patois or a dialect. Breton hasn't existed as a standardized form for centuries so the diwan schools had to modernize the language and created a new written system to teach it, thus considering the two "KLT" and Gwenedeg variants of dialects as the wrong way to speak breton. So today you will have young or ex-diwan school students speaking a modern language with a horrific french accent without any stress (accent tonique) telling older maternal breton speakers that their breton is not the original language.

[@TonyFuel88]

Your explanation of how history and geography shaped Italian dialects would definitely help italians to understand them. Saluti

[@takashi.mizuiro]

Tony Riga is saluti like salut in french

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Grazie 😊

[@almaximos1]

@@takashi.mizuiro saluti means greetings or salutations in French. Salut would be ciao in Italian. but of course saluti and salut have the same latin origin..

[@TonyFuel88]

@@almaximos1 The other way around, in fact. Saluti in Italian means greetings, in french salut means hi.

[@almaximos1]

@@TonyFuel88 i wrote the same-;)

[@microit]

As i was born and live in northern italy, i have really difficulties in understanding people from the south while speaking their native languages at a level that it is necessary, in a tv show eg, to use subtitles in order to let the audience understand what they're saying. Moreover there's to say that catalan, occitan, sardinian, ladin and friulian are recognised ex law 482/99 as languages, while others unfortunately aren't.

[@tommasobarcherini8790]

I speak the "ternano" dialect from Terni and I can say that the "perugino" from Perugia is almost totally different...mostly in pronounciation. It's a fantastic thing because the two cities are only about 80 km apart! I would like to congratulate you on the video and the infinite time you have devoted to it!!!

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Grazie mille per il tuo commento, Nero!

[@LoeZack]

“This note is called Do#” “It sounds similar to Do, you mean they are basically the same note?” “No, they are not!”

[@kirklingthegypsy8068]

that was good

[@conraddaubanton1662]

It can also be called "Re b" (or D b for those who use the ABC music notation)

[@erickr404]

The case of Portuguese also has some interesting implications. You'll often find translations of stuff specifically labeled as Brazilian Portuguese or European Portuguese, which don't differ much more than some Brazilian accents among each other. However, European Portuguese sounds foreign and weird to someone living in some remote Brazilian countryside, but the Portuguese from Rio, which they probably even make fun of, is acceptable in the media in general.

[@ricardopontes7177]

I know right, there is no such thing as Brazilian portuguese, there is a shit ton of dialects, and some are much closer to peninsular portuguese

[@borgheis]

I speak the Canavesano (Canavzan) dialect of the Piedmontese language, a dialect I've been exposed to since I was a kid by hearing it spoken by other people but that I've started learning only in the last few years. Unfortunately here in Italy minority languages have a very hard time and I don't expect they will survive the next 100 years. The damage has been done already and you can see it clearly between my generation and that of my parents: my parents' generation still mostly speak Piedmontese alongside Italian, though very seldom and usually not with their children, whereas my generation is fully Italianized and only a few of us have learned it. Our parents as kids were told by teachers in schools and sometimes even by their own parents not to speak "dialect" because it would be "rude" and it would make it harder for them to learn Italian (which is actually absurd considering that there are people in the world that grow up speaking up to 4-5 languages, if not more); this led to a process of homogenization that pretty much destroyed entire cultures in the name of alphabetization and uniting all Italians from north to south. No language/culture deserves to be suppressed only because regarded as "inferior" to another.

[@a.c.1839]

And might I add, even when efforts are made to preserve regional languages, they often get flattened out in one single "official" dialetto, which ends up erasing all the different variations from area to area, or even from town to town. And I think that's a shame too

[@Wyo_Wyld]

Thank you so much for this content. My family grew up amidst numerous languages, Friulian, High German, Pennsylvania Dutch, Italian. My closest friends were also the descendants of "immigrants", Poles, Lithuanians, Sicilians, Neapolitans, Armenians, Black Americans from the south, Japanese. Many times it was difficult to understand their parents or grandparents so friends needed to translate. I do remember that all of these older folks treated us kindly, probably because they're not faced so many difficulties in their lives. They all enriched our lives.

[@vinzora]

Video meraviglioso Luke! Come sempre dettagliato e ricercato! I'm neapolitan, so to me it was very interesting to see a non-italian perspective, supported by clear evidence and opinions without the regional racism that is deep rooted in our country. PS: Neapolitan is still widely spoken, really, REALLY a lot. In most situation it completely surpass italian as the common lenguage. In recent years, our city has seen a rising cultural awakening. So now, gladly, most of those who were reluctant in the past, like you said, now proudly spread the neapolitan lenguage.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Grazie! I’m happy that my presentation was welcome. 😊 I lived in Salerno for a short time and became very fond of Neapolitan.

[@vinzora]

@@polyMATHY_Luke This is wonderful! Big love and support. Have a nice day!

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Aw thanks! 🥰

[@ruralsquirrel5158]

As an American too, I find Neapolitan a wonderful language and hearing the folk songs melts my heart. Even though I speak standard Italian rather well, Neapolitan is just TOO different for me to understand much of anything. I really hope Neapolitan makes a comeback.

[@vinzora]

@@ruralsquirrel5158 your Experience really give me hope and joy. Being recognized as an indipendent culture and not as a minor italian tradition is truly a dream. I'd like to point that the differences beetwen italian and Neapolitan are similar to the ones beetwen italian and spanish: Easy to understand in the writtten form, beside some Word that has nothing to do with italian, (es. Orange fruit in italiano Is Arancio, but in Neapolitan is "Purtuall"), the real struggle comes in the spoken form, that Is more similar to spanish ad arabic in some situation than an italic language.

[@antoniotorlentino5949]

Quick story about mutual intelligibility. My dad grew up in Sicily, was educated with standard Italian, and since living in the US has spoken English, Sicilian and Italian everyday. My mother, on the other hand, came from Sicily to the US with her parents at only 3 years old, and therefore was never educated with Standard Italian. She grew up speaking Sicilian and English, completely isolated from the Italian media and school systems that extended the popular usage of Standard Italian in back in Sicily. This lead to mild mutual intelligibility issues with Italian speakers as an adult. One such instance that sticks out to me is with a family friend visiting from Sicily. She was much younger than my Mom, and grew up speaking only Standard Italian. My mom tried using Italian with her but ultimately communicated predominately in Sicilian. When the two had a conversation alone, my mother could easily understand 100% of what the other was saying, but the other would get lost quickly in my Mom's vocabulary and struggled to understand much of the conversation.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Very interesting! I suppose all this convinces me that it's important to get a broad sense of the languages used by people in one's own country, especially if they know those languages natively. Feeling isolated due to language differences is a great shame. This of course is the reason why people have sought to encourage a correct or standard common language in a place: it increases connexion. I really don't know what's right, except that becoming a polyglot solves almost all of these issues -- but that's not for everyone.

[@antoniotorlentino5949]

@@polyMATHY_Luke Agreed, though I still advocate for the conservation of regional languages at the basic education level. Intelligibility issues like this are minimal and will die out completely with the next generation of Italian students, but that doesn’t mean regional languages should die out as well. Some would say you cannot teach Sicilianu or Napuletano because of a lack of standardization, but I feel even just the characteristics of what makes these languages unique and beautiful should be encouraged in schools. Maybe then, the next generation will have a more positive outlook on the language than many youth do today, where it is seen as an improper way the elderly talk. The perception that the regional languages are incorrect has damaged the status of many, and I hope many in the next generation will look to their own and think, “This is very interesting, I want to study this and practice with my parents just as my ancestors did.”

[@isobellabrett]

My friend was born to a Sicilian family in England, when he went back as a teenager he had to learn standard Italian to be able to attend school. When he came back to England he had to relearn English as his vocabulary was that of a child.

[@theokaraman]

True, in Greece the connection between Ancient and Modern Greek is stressed in schools and in public to reinforce a glorious national identity. The level of intelligibility of Ancient Greek in modern Greece varies with level of education or dialect, but the ancient language is not really spoken or written. That's why the struggle to make the Demotiki ("the people's language"/modern Greek) official vs. the Katharevousa ("the clean (language)"/Archaic greek with modern accent) was very bitter. In fact people used to die in riots for translating to Modern Greek the Bible or ancient plays! Modern Greek became an official administration and written language only after 1978.

[@luizcarlosdiasjunior]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/bIncaIqXndiGbas

[@luizcarlosdiasjunior]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/p5aTkHWBoMuabMk

[@luizcarlosdiasjunior]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/p3Kqd4V3iq59fbM

[@mariostsam]

The fact that the "greek" state presents "modern greek language" as "ελληνική γλώσσα" pretending that it is similar to "ελληνική φωνή" influences the perception of the greeks about their language. Maybe rumca or romeika is more appropriate to motivate a new ancient greek teaching course in schools. It is frustrating that modern greek students finish 6 years of ancient greek language and they cannot translate simple phrases in that language from modern greek.

[@cakeisyummy5755]

A little over 85% of Greeks think that their Culture is better than every other Culture. That's because of ancient Greece and it's Many, Many, Many, MANY, Achivements.

[@SweArdaia]

I live in Sweden and dialects here have had a very rough history. A lot of people are probably aware of the mutual intelligibility between Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, but all three languages lie on a dialect continuum where, when you start getting used to it, every one of those languages can be understood by native speakers of the other languages, with differences becoming very fuzzy near the borders, for Swedes especially towards the Norwegian border. For a very long time dialects here were supressed in an effort to "purify" the language into the mishmash of dialects called Standard Swedish, which was all that was allowed to be spoken on radio and TV. While that policy has since been abolished it struck hard towards dialectal plurality and achieved a great deal of homogenisation, and I still can't remember hearing any regional dialect in the media outside of a variety of Scanian, which has, due to a variety of factors, become the most recognisable non-standard way of speaking the language. Outside of the media dialects are often seen as local curiosities, something to joke about, or in, and something spoken by the lowly educated. There is actually a very interesting class/gender divide in Swedish society, where dialects are spoken more by the working class, and less by the upper class, as well as more by men and less by women. Personally I speak "Skaraborgska", a variant of West Geatish which in turn is a part of the Geatish (Götamål) dialects that are quite distinct from "regular" Swedish and its dialects. Historically the western Geatish dialects served as a middle ground between Norwegian and Swedish and if left alone could very well have grown into a distinct and fully fledged language of its own. As it stands now it's heavily assimilated into Standard Swedish and very few actually speak it regularly. Sorry if this comes off as long and incohesive, I just needed to ramble about this for a while.

[@Bolpat]

It's fine to ramble around sometimes. I found your analysis interesting which is a great compliment because I have no connection to Sweden or Nordic languages at all.

[@SweArdaia]

@@Bolpat Thank you for letting me know! Linguistics is something I could discuss for hours, but it's also one of those topics that are very boring to listen to for most people, so I appreciate your comment a lot.

[@Bolpat]

@@SweArdaia I like talking about languages, too.

[@dorteweber3682]

it makes perfect sense. I grew up with a school system geared towards standardizing our spoken language to something they liked to call Standard Danish, which was an artificial dialect based loosely on the Arhus dialect with all the juicy Jutlandish bits removed. I grew up on the east coast of Jutland in a town with a distinct dialect, but we were not allowed to speak it at home. Neither of my parents was from that town and they disdained the dialect as low class. I remember being mocked as a child for having once pronounced words with the local drawl/rock intonation. I was one year old at the time the offence was committed:) After 45 years in Canada, Danish is no longer my dominant language, and my speech is now a mash-up of different dialects, but somewhere, at the bottom of it all, I still speak Danish with a bit of drawl/rock, and an attentive listener will know immediately that I am from Jutland.

[@marze5919]

Lo stesso Dante affrontò questo problema nel "De vulgari eloquentia" e le sue tesi furono riprese secoli dopo per definire l'italiano "moderno". Scommetto che già lo conosci ma se ti fosse sfuggito te lo consiglio: è un testo molto bello ed è in latino (medievale).

[@ObvsCam93]

It's interesting that when he have British English and American English we call them 'varieties' of the same language. Dialect denotes something 'unofficial' or maybe even 'common' despite some of them having their own dictionaries, institute (institut d'estudis occitans for example) but the damage to their reputation has already been done. I used to think Scots was a dialect of English and found it odd that it was called a language because it shares a lot of vocabulary with Northern English dialects. After some studying (and Ecolinguist videos lol) it opened my mind up a bit about language and dialect.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Well said! Yeah, today few people would say the way I speak English is a non-standard dialect of the British language; the power of entertainment, music, and the obvious other forms of power, allow American accents and idiomatic usages to appear as *the* form of international English today to most L2 speakers, whether subconsciously or otherwise. I don't personally feel this way -- just 15 years ago when I was studying abroad in Europe, it was much commoner to hear Europeans attempting British accents or nailing them perfectly, and this was incredibly charming, since most Americans adore UK accents (I certainly do!). I'm used to it now, but in the intervening years I now count nearly all my non-native-English-speaking friends as having a more American accent, if not a perfect one. I can't help but admire how well they do the accent, and also feel disappointed that it's not more British. :D Our subjective, emotional reactions to these things are sooo weird haha.

[@David-cm4ok]

Very good young man, no one should be offended by your eloquent way. As a Scot, it was interesting to hear what you had to say on the subject.

[@davidesoresina4420]

I'm sixty-one, from Milan, Italy ("Will you still need me, wille you still feed me, when I'm sixty-four?!", sang John Lennon). I don't know why the Italian public television network (RAI) began to broadcast, end sixties, beginning seventies, plays by the great Eduardo de Filippo, in Neapolitan. I couldn't understand a word, and I'm sure that every Italian living north of Florence also didn't. There is when I first fell in love with "foreign" languages: I could understand Hochdeutsch ("with a little help from my friends") better than Neapolitan. Good video, as usual. Thanks.

[@PodcastItaliano]

Great video, as always. And thanks for the plug!

[@z120p]

Ti voglio bene Davide! I’ll be clicking on your channel next 🤣

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Thanks for being here, bro! 🇮🇹

[@ubuntuposix]

As a Romanian i'm shocked when i hear Vlach presented as a separate language, when its the same "dialect" that my grandparents or people from the countryside use.

[@ionut5367]

As a Romanian I require a dictionary or at least a translation to (standard) Romanian, when listening to Aromanian/Vlach songs. I get the gist of it, but the details are lost which is a shame... I see it as a different language, not a dialect.

[@a.s.7936]

@@ionut5367 I understand a few of the words but most of it just unintelligible for me.

[@ubuntuposix]

@@ionut5367 You're referring to Aromanian (from Greece, Macedonia). Indeed, they have a lot of loan greek words and influence, and its only 50% understandable. But there's also a "Vlach language" (from Serbia, Croatia). kzbin.info/www/bejne/mGKaiquLj9pjaac

[@ionut5367]

@@a.s.7936 Somewhat similar in my case; I understand more when it's written. I usually have to look up the lyrics in say, youtube comments, in order to understand what the singer is saying. It's quite weird; some words have one meaning in Romanian, but in the context they mean something slightly different. Take 'vreari' for example: i understand it in Romanian as 'wanting', because of a similar form in Romanian of the word 'vreau' ( I want), but the translation I'm usually getting is 'love' which is close but not really... Or take the word "mușat"... You don't really hear it in Romanian except as a surname (Stephen The Great was a Mușat, for example), but in Aromanian is the (standard) word for "beautiful".

[@a.s.7936]

@@ubuntuposix That is just old Romanian. I spoke with a guy before and we understood each other pretty perfectly, he was from Timoc. And no, both Meglenoromanian, Aromanian and Istroromanian are hard for me to understand.

[@johnshields3658]

A friend of the family and his grandfather used to wind up his father (who was educated in England) by conversing at dinner only in Doric that they'd both leaned at local schools on the NE and the father never had.

[@missfashionator]

Your videos are so educational and profound. I always find myself actively seeking out more about the subjects for weeks to come.

[@eduarddumitru250]

00:46 so interesting to see Hebrew script with (almost) German pronunciation. All languages are living organisms. Great job, Luke!

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Haha thanks! I need to find a Yiddish speaker to see if I pronounced it right.

[@jaromir.adamec]

Or listen to a song. I assume her pronunciation be correct.. :-) m.kzbin.info/www/bejne/j4Ozk3x8eaeejM0

[@sozinho1]

​@@polyMATHY_Luke Your pronunciation was quite good and very understandable. A couple of comments -- Yiddish r's are (most often) uvular, not tongue-trilled (alveolar flap); "armey" should be accented on the second syllable (arMAY); and the sh of shprakh could be a bit stronger (it sort of sounds like sprakh to me). Otherwise, it's great. And a great video! Thanks! A similar situation exists with German dialects, especially in the South. In the North, Low German dialects have been largely lost to standard German, at least among most younger speakers. But for those who still maintain their dialects, there is a continuum going from East to West right into the Netherlands, where it becomes Dutch and uses different spelling conventions. North to South is a little more interesting because you switch from Low to High German. Where they meet in the middle, there is a kind of mixture of the two variations. Below that Central German area, the continuum goes all the way into Switzerland and Austria. The Swiss often consider the way they speak a separate language, although there are several dialects in Swiss German, too, and no standard spelling. (They use standard German spelling and grammar rules.) If Swiss German ever did become a separate language, I often wonder what they'd call the South German dialects that are spoken on the borders of Switzerland. They're essentially the same dialects as those spoken in Switzerland. Another language vs. dialect argument exists in the three continental Scandinavian languages. Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes can usually read the language of the others with no problem. Speaking and understanding is a little more complex, especially with Danish. But there's usually a high degree of mutual comprehension even when each one speaks his/her own language. But no one refers to them as dialects.

[@isancicramon0926]

When you discover Yiddish in 2020 🙄

[@sehabel]

@@sozinho1 I'm from the southwest of Germany and my local dialect is dying rapidly. There are some words and phrases that remain in our daily speech, but we mostly speak standard German with a near "perfect" pronunciation.

[@tiagoghilli8668]

I loved the way you told everything with accuracy and precision, despite the enormous amount of things to say. I miei più grandi complimenti.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Grazie mille! È molto difficile visto che questi sono argomenti molto molto complessi e degni di ore e ore di conversazione solo per fare un inizio del discorso! 😅 Ma se questa è un’ accettabile introduzione all’introduzione sono contento. 😃

[@tiagoghilli8668]

@@polyMATHY_Luke I completely agree with you ahah, there are infinite bibliographies and many (maybe too many) different points of view on this argument

[@PC_Simo]

Of course; defining ”Language” and ”Dialect”, just based on mutual intelligibility, will lead to inevitable contradictions, when we’re dealing with dialect continuums: A = B = C, but A ≠ C.

[@paulfaulkner6299]

Thank you for that Luke. What a sensible, sensitive as well as educated chap you are. Educational and respectful of others. Well done you.

[@ReneChiqueteGaming]

I am Mexican, and it took me 33 years to hear a native language. In part it is great to be able to understand everyone in Mexico by speaking Spanish, in the other hand, I feel that so much is lost when a language/dialect is lost.

[@aaronblygh4719]

One of the people I used to work with was a linguist who was working with a Mayan group, helping to write down and translate their language to help people learn it. Apparent a lot of indigenous people aren't teaching their kids the native languages, because Spanish is the Dominant language, and people look down on the native languages. I don't know how accurate that is, but it's definitely sad if it's true.

[@ReneChiqueteGaming]

@@aaronblygh4719 I can tell you that natives are looked down indeed. It is because they are seen as marginalized, poor and uneducated, and since they usually live in small communities that are far from developed areas makes this even worst.

[@aaronblygh4719]

@@ReneChiqueteGaming I've heard some pretty racist terms for native people who live in the villages. I don't really understand it though, so many of Mexicos national heros where from the Pueblos. It's a weird cognitive disinace I've noticed.

[@ReneChiqueteGaming]

@@aaronblygh4719 My theory is that after the conquest, the caste system made natives the lowest of the low, and nobody wanted to be associated with them, and even after independence, these ideas are still ingrained in the social collective (consciously and subconsciously)

[@aaronblygh4719]

@@ReneChiqueteGaming Oh I think you're definitely right there. I heard Porfirio Diaz used makeup to appear paler than he actually was. (Apologies if I misspelled the name)

[@Matfer345]

Finally I've found a video talking about this! 😂 In Uruguay we have Portuñol which some say it's portuguese with many Spanish loanwords and others say it's a separate language from Spanish and Portuguese. It can be controversial depending on whom you're talking to. Greetings! ^^

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Greetings to you! And that’s another point: people might say it’s a different language in order to diminish its value in the society.

[@Matfer345]

@@polyMATHY_Luke Who say that are the speakers themselves (mainly), the liguists say it's just a Portuguese dialect. Besides, there's a certain anti-Brazil sentiment which, I guess, it's because of the several invasions during colonial era and the Imperial Brazil period. There's been attempts to teach in Standard Brazilian Portuguese at school and so on, but it led nowhere. My paternal family used to speak it but my grandparents stopped using it when they came to Montevideo, a pity... :/

[@TheZenytram]

wait what, it is a propper language, i always thought it was just a dumb way for brazilian trying to speak spanish with ours hemanos. i even thought that it must be ofencive for spanish speaker some how.

[@Matfer345]

@@TheZenytram Well, it's rather a dialect of Portuguese than a separate language and it's mainly spoken by Uruguayans, on the other side Brazilians speak Gaúcho dialect, I guess in Santana do Livramento they speak portuñol, too.

[@anonb4632]

I read up about it some time ago. I see it even has its own literature. It probably has a few features which are distinctly Latin American rather than European too, I'd imagine.

[@petra1995]

This guy's voice is so calming 😍 Amazing video! As soon as I clicked I knew he'd bring up the army and navy quote, I just didn't expect it to be delivered in Jiddish!

[@notyourgirl5352]

This video is really underrated!!! You totally opened my mind to things I had absolutely no idea about❤️ Thank you

[@AHAuwuOK]

Silesian vs Polish can be a spicy discussion, especially with a growing local national identity. It's much more consolidated now, as the former outer reaches completely switched to Standard Polish (which has very small regional differences), meaning the shift is much more drastic and de facto the only dialectal continuum that exists there is within Silesian (also leaning towards Czech behind the border). imo it's on it's way to becoming recognized as language

[@AHAuwuOK]

+ it has an ISO language code (szl) and wikipedia

[@polskiszlachcic3648]

It's mostly because of their pro-German attitude and being heavily influenced by them. Kashubian was seen for a long time as a dialect of Polish but it's a separate language closely related to Polish. Generally speaking, literary Polish itself is a mix of Greater Polish dialect, Lesser Polish Dialect and Masovian Dialect with influences from other languages.

[@3kcozadurnylol]

I have always mixed feelings about Silesian. I heard natives talking with each other and for me it was way easier to understand (besides germanisms) than the speech of Gorals from Podhale which is considered not even as a dialect, but a subdialect. Another fun fact is that the medieval Silesia was very important centre of reunification efforts of the Kingdom of Poland. If they succeeded, it is possible that the Standard Polish would be more similar to Silesian dialect than the Mazovian one.

[@kacperwoch4368]

@@polskiszlachcic3648 Ah yes, anything Silesia must be pro-German.

[@a.m.bluerose2568]

As a speaker of sicilian dialect. I agree with you 100 per cent. In Sicily each town has its own dialect according to its former inhabitants.

[@mygetawayart]

you hit the nail in the head. Since childhood we are taught about our Italian "dialects". We grow up disempowering our own culture without even realizing it. Calling Sicilian, Sardinian, Friulan, Neapolitan, Milanese, Roman and all our other local languages "dialects" serves only to disempower them. You explained very well how they're not dialects of Italian, they evolved from vulgar Latin and many other languages' influences on their own, they have a degree of mutual intelligibility that becomes less and less as soon as you move away from where you are. It's also very true how it's considered "rude" or "poor" to speak in a local language/dialect. The "Italianization" of Italy has devastated the diversity of our culture.

[@marcelolopezcapel430]

I loved your video. "A language is a dialect with an army behind"... absolutely true. I really enjoy your videos and learn a lot with them. Thank you so much!!

[@EUrgell]

Thank you for such a wonderful and mind-opening explanation! In a future video you might want to talk about the radical (to put it mildly) linguistic policy in France, where things like "Soyez propres, parlez français" were frequent arguments against the different "patois". Warm greetings from a Catalan speaker!

[@saidtahin4475]

I come from a small village in Campania and I speak a variety of Neapolitan language. When I was a child, I was taught to not use dialect and speak only Italian, but when I started to study Latin, my biggest surprise was to discover that many expressions and words that we normally use are maybe even closer to Latin than Standard Italian (Neap. "Jamme ja">Latin "Eamus jam">It. "Andiamo"; Neap. "mo">Lat. "modo">It. "adesso"; Neap. "Testa">Lat. "Testa"> It. "Vaso"; Neap. "Cerasa">Lat. "Cerasum">It. "Ciliegia"; et cetera). I think that redescovering our dialects would help to better reconnect to our past and understand that Latin is not a dead language but it has arrived to us in a different form.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Ciao! This is exactly the reason I love to study the dialetti

[@DonnieKreyden]

Greetings from Latvia! 🇱🇻 We have Latgalians in our country, they are pretty much eastern Latvians and they speak the Latgalian dialect. However, historically, Latgalian is older than standard Latvian and it is a bit closer to Lithuanian than Latvian... So, technically, Latvians speak a dialect of Latgalian, but officially, it's the other way around, because Latgalians don't have an army or a navy :)

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Very interesting!

[@docjanos]

This is a wonderful, wonderful video. Going crazy with thoughts about it. Here's a starting comment. Looking at the respective evolution of Greek and the Romance languages into their modern form reveals considerable historical geographic differences. Once the Alexandrian Empire faded there was less need for any form of Greek to be a regional lingua franca and it shrank back to its hearth, although it also remained as an important liturgical language. This contributed to its evolution being more in situ. Even a language with little outside contact will evolve over time as people develop new technologies, economies and social structures. Thus modern Greek gradually drew away from the Attic and Doric. Since the Roman Empire was more territorially expansive for a longer period of time and it interacted more consistently with non-Latin based peoples the movement away from Latin was more long-lasting. The most obvious example is French, made up of assimilating Germanic Franks and Celtic Gauls into the Latin base. Interestingly, while Romanian certainly has adopted some Slavic influences, it remains closer to Vulgar Latin than are most styles of the Peninsula. Besides the political basis behind each of the Romance languages, this "early creolization" has contributed to lessening mutual intelligibility. Yes, you are correct that a native Portuguese and a native Romanian speaker could, by slow careful enunciation, achieve a fair amount of mutual intelligibility. Ignoring the fact English is now the lingua franca, I would argue a native English speaker and a native Dutch, German or Swedish speaker could achieve similar results within their language family sets. So does that make the various Germanic languages actually dialects?--probably not. You are 100% correct that measuring whether some pattern of difference of over x % reveals two distinct languages is ultimately a subjective matter (as long as armies and navies don't tag along). Might I offer another metric, also innately subjective. It would be an "ease of understanding" between speakers. It necessarily falls on a spectrum and is contextual. At one extreme is an emergency. For example, there stand two speakers of distinct Romance languages , confronted by an accident or an injured third party. To communicate what to do, they will seek out the simplest common demoninator of nouns and verbs to solve the problem. Now, if those same two sat down for a friendly glass or two, they will increasingly take a more opposite tack, exploring the limits of their mutual intelligibility.

[@lcolinwilson8347]

This is full of good understanding and insight. I speak NE Scots ("Doric") in my home life.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

That's so cool! I am using a book and CD which is based on NE Scots. Doric is wonderful! I think you'll see more support from abroad in the coming years.

[@lcolinwilson8347]

@@polyMATHY_Luke I hope you're right, and I hope there are still some speakers left by then. The book you're using: is it the one that I wrote, by any chance?

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

@@lcolinwilson8347 🤩 L COLIN WILSON! It’s you!!! 😃 Rare tae see ye! Whit like? I’m so sorry I didn’t recognise your name immediately, sir! Yes, Luath Scots is the wondrous book I have been enjoying; I’m on my second read through, just having listened to Ch5 a few minutes ago. Are you also the main narrator of the CD? It has been a rare pleasure to gain a beginner command of Scots thanks to you! I would love to promote your book and the CD if you’re happy with me doing so. Please write to me if you’re inclined: ScorpioMartianus at g mail dot com (I write it oddly like that so that the internet bots don’t send me spam; hopefully you can decipher it).

[@lcolinwilson8347]

@@polyMATHY_Luke Thank you for your kind words. It's a pleasure to receive such appreciation from an accomplished linguist. To be honest, the book is showing its age. I wrote it through the second half of the 90s. It's a good enough effort from an amateur working in his spare time, but my hope now is that someone will write a better one, ideally a professional linguist or linguists with access to a real recording studio. I speak some of the "bit parts" on the CD, but I'm not the narrator. That's Ian Leith. I appreciate your suggestion about promoting the book, and I'll send you an email about this. Thanks again.

[@lynneaddison4980]

Colin I feel the same. I was really ready to be triggered but he got it completely accurate. This is HUGE. We Doric speakers often get forgotten about even in Scotland.

[@mariaeugenia4826]

Hi! I usually don't interact much with youtubers, but I NEEDED to come here and congratulate you. I am a classic languages freak. I have an underdegree in Linguistics and my former intention was to be a philologist, which is why I studied Latin throughout my whole course, and also a bit of Greek. I always get bothered by people who speak only the "popular" eclesiastic or law forms of latin, because O know that there is way more than that. KZbin recommended your channel to me two weeks ago, and it was with a bit of suspicion that I opened and watched the first one. I was always telling myself "I doubt he's going to talk about X or Y or Z". And then, a second later, there you are, explaining exactly what I was thinking. And I say that more as a linguist than as a latinist. Your video explaining the wrong pronounciation proposed by non-latin-languages speakers was SO great! It reminded me of my classes of Historical Linguistics and the Development of Portuguese (I'm brazilian). And then, crowning it all, there is this very video here, of dialects and languages. The quote with which you opened the video was one of the first things we learned in the Linguistics course, and this discussion is always present. So, as a Linguist, I want to tell you how deeply I came to admire your work with only a few videos. Your care, your accuracy, your pronounciation, your historical considerations. Everything is amazing and well done, and it's hard to find good linguistic content available online. So, really, thank you a lot for your work. It is great, and you are great!

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Oi! 🥰 Muito obrigado por seus generosíssimos comentários. 🤗 I am very flattered by your kind words. There will be more videos like these soon. I hope you enjoy them! You are most welcome here always, especially when you have any thoughts you’d like to share. We have other folks like yourself in my Discord: Luke’s Discord discord.gg/u4PN2u2 You will be most welcome! 🇧🇷 ♥️

[@rossanabiancani20]

Thank you so much for your incredible help to understand all the differences of these beautiful languages. I really enjoyed so much

[@MountainMitch]

This is a fantastic piece, Luke! My opinion is that any language that allows people to express support for one another deserves respect. At the same time, having a national language that transcends regions and international languages that transcend countries are extremely useful. It's worthwhile to create a balance of "let's all learn this standard language" and "let's preserve what we talk here."

[@BobbyBermuda1986]

Other notable examples: -Arabic is actually several different languages (curiously enough, Maltese is allowed to be called a separate language) -The different "dialects" of Chinese are languages which are largely not mutually intelligible (Mandarin vs Cantonese vs others) -The Scandinavian "languages" can generally be argued to be dialects. Swedish and Norwegian especially, with Danish perhaps being too divergent from either of the others -Swiss German is not understandable to speakers of High German

[@torterrino]

As a sicilian speaker (and i'm currently studying Arabic for historical reasons) i can quite understand Maltese because as a lot of sicilian words with an arabic phrase structure... i found the idea that i can understand this language for pure luck kinda funny...

[@eugeneng7064]

For the Chinese varieties, it really depends on which you compare. If you take two from high divergent branches of Middle Chinese, i.e. 'Cantonese' and 'Mandarin', you'll not get much mutual intelligibility. Compare say Sichuanese and Mandarin, mutual intelligibility shoots up significantly.

[@jeupater1429]

The Italian languages are dialects of Vulgar Latin, not Italian. They are dialects, just not dialects of Italian. Great video! I live in Italy and my impression is that the difference is even stronger than you present here. Most Italians know a few basic words in different dialects, but it depends if you're talking about a few basic words in dialect between the interlocutors or if you're talking two truly native dialectical speakers communicating with each other. A Florentine might have understood a few basic words of Napoletano and vice versa, for example, but if got two native Napoletani speaking to each other, a Florentine would probably understand very little indeed. When communicating between linguistic systems there's a desire to use basic language to make yourself understood, which as you demonstrate is of course possible, but it's another discourse when you're trying to understand two native speakers of a different dialect using their native forms. That very much feels like a different language Great video though.

[@antoniousai1989]

Not correct, or better, it's a generalization.

[@matheustonettomuniz6344]

In Italy the regional languages are called dialect for political reasons. All the so called "dialects" are in fact older than standard italian.

[@jeupater1429]

@@antoniousai1989 Allora, spiegami come mi sbaglio. Non so se hai afferrato proprio il concetto che vorrei dire. Ad esempio l'altro giorno guardavo un filmetto nel dialetto Emiliano con degli amici Emiliani "doc" che per altro parlano anche in dialetto con i loro nonni. Spiegami perché ai miei amici servivano i sottotitoli in Italiano per capire questo film? Nel loro dialetto tra altro. Perché c'è una differenza tra capire dialetto ed essere proprio madrelingua. Non è la stessa cosa. Capire un discorso di due ore non equivale a capire un paio di barzellette.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Very well explained! Thanks

[@federicodallari5608]

@@jeupater1429 Perché in Emilia ogni provincia ha il suo dialetto e per ogni provincia ci sono 3 dialetti: montagna, città e bassa. Per le conversazioni base di tutti i giorni ci capiamo bene o male tutti, mentre mi sembra scontato che nelle 2 ore di film se non becchi proprio il dialetto della tua zona è molto difficile seguire senza sottotitoli, sia per l’accento diverso sia per il lessico.

[@ericscavetta2311]

I feel the sadness directly. My great-grandparents spoke the tiny language (dialetto) of Accetturese which lies on the continuum between Napoletano and Barese. When they emigrated to the US, they chose to only speak English with their children, so the language was lost. I was very excited to connect with the 80-year old linguistics/poetry Prof. Luigi Volpe, an Accetturese in Bari, who wrote a dictionary of the dialect with a short grammar. A delightful person!

[@kirklingthegypsy8068]

incredibly eloquent as always! awesome video!

[@WTF3585]

Great video as always, just wanted to add for Greece that the modern dialects surviving in Greece and Anatolia to this day are not all descendants of Koine, some like Pontic are to some extent but also have different characteristics and Tsakonian in the the Peloponnese is is descendent of the Doric dialect you spoke of used in ancient Sparta, not Attic like standardised Hellenic and Koine.

[@davidemasiello8020]

Awesome video! I am from Formia, Italy, and as such I speak the "Formiano" dialect of the Neapolitan language (which I was super happy to spot on the map in your video XD). Growing up, teachers in school have always called us down for speaking the dialect, often implying it was a sign of poor education. As a result, my knowledge and confidence with my local language is less than my parent's and even less when compared to my grandparents. I believe this is deleterious and it will eventually cause the disappearing of some of those minor dialects, and that's a shame considering not only the loss of beautiful poetry and literature that comes with them, but also the possibility of expressing complex concept and feelings with one or few words. Neapolitan is full of such expressions, which in fact are almost impossible to directly translate to standard Italian. Fortunately, there are small groups of people trying to limit this phenomenon (it may interest you to know that, a few years ago, the University of Naples "Federico II" has uploaded an online course of Neapolitan language). It was a pleasure to hear you have Neapolitan origins and I really enjoyed listening you talk with such great passion. Moreover, I live in Scotland, so this video was extremely relevant to me XD. Thanks and keep up the good work!

[@anthonyjones7609]

Excellent, well-informed discussion. A pleasure to watch.

[@TheOriginalChurch]

Great video - at the end you touched on something so important, that the language(s) we speak also affects/influences how we think. And I've also experienced that it can affect our dreams. I'm sure many people can relate to the experience of beginning to dream in a language you're learning to speak. Thanks for your videos!

[@omiumn.7829]

Native Yiddish speaker here of several Yiddish dialects (diverse Yiddish speaking family). The Yiddish pronunciation was 👌. You did a Russian Yiddish pronunciation. One thing though, the word armey meaning army should be /aʁˈmei/ according the Yiddish accent you were going for

[@anonb4632]

How different are the dialects? I heard a form of Yiddish the other day on a video and everyone was saying how like German it was, and I could understand it. I said I thought the eastern dialects were far less like German. I have heard varieties of Yiddish which weren't very German sounding at all.

[@omiumn.7829]

@@anonb4632 Some of them can be very different or similar to German in different ways. For example, the dialect I speak turns what's in German "u" into "i" while others don't. So I'll say inter instead of unter (to mean under/underneath). On the other hand, take for example the word for "I know," I'll pronounce the vowel like it's in German while other Yiddish speakers will pronounce to rhyme with race. The biggest differences in Yiddish dialects in the pronunciation. Sometimes it's the vowels that make all the difference in intelligibility.

[@anonb4632]

@@omiumn.7829 Vowels seem to be the first things to change between accents, long before consonants or anything else. I take it there is a lot more Russian/Polish/Hungarian words in some dialects. I know there used to be a kind of Scottish Yiddish dialect a few generations ago. A sort of weird mix between Scots and Yiddish. As far as I know it is extinct now.

[@omiumn.7829]

@@anonb4632 For some languages, for example Spanish, the differences in accents lie in consonants and not vowels. But yeah, differences in vocabulary of other languages also exists amongst the dialects. Also, some registers use different vocabulary, like formal registers using more Hebrew and Aramaic words. Interesting, I never heard about Scottish Yiddish. That would be interesting to look into.

[@MariaTeresa-zi4eh]

Thank you so much for this video. I’m from provincia di Caserta, more or less 50 km from Naples. I’ve always thought Neapolitan to be a language and I’ve always considered the version of Neapolitan I speak to be a sort of dialect of it. As someone who’s always been deeply interested in languages, I’ve always tried to practice it with my grandparents and relatives, because I think that every single language and dialect on this earth is unique and extremely important. Most of the time it just comes out naturally in conversations, but I’ve got some friends who think it is kind of uneducated. And I can’t deny it, this makes me mad. I don’t understand why I should be ashamed of speaking the “dialect” I speak. I’m happy to call Italy my home (even though I tend to feel more like a “citizen of the world”) and I love the italian language, but I really wish people could stop being ashamed for something that is not a shame at all! One of the things I love the most about languages is that each one of them gives you a different perspective on life. And I wonder why speaking a “dialect” is seen as a sign of ignorance, instead of richness.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Caserta is beautiful! I miss it. Thanks so much for your comment! Un abbraccio dagli Stati Uniti. :)

[@MariaTeresa-zi4eh]

@@polyMATHY_Luke ohh so I guess you've visited la Reggia✨ ricambio l'abbraccio!

[@languagemugscom7244]

Thank you Luke! What a wonderful and insightful video! It was a pleasure talking to you.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Thanks so much, brother! The pleasure is mine. ☕️😃

[@ledojuniorrocchi2297]

Here from Castelli Romani, we love you my man. It's always a pleasure to watch at your videos. Languages are a very powerful tool and probably the best way to start know each other. We are not soo far apart after all. Very well done and thumbs up from Rome 👍👍 my old Latin professor would have simply loved you, we do love you 🤗 Than you for what you are doing in this channel. Rome welcomes you.