Gerry Reinhart-Waller asked:
> I know I've mentioned Burushaski before. And I actually discovered
one
> of the last Burushaski speakers who lives in Texas. My question to
the
> group is reasonably simple: why is Burushaski, that extraordinary
> language in the Karakoram Mountains, considered to be a language
rather
> than a dialect?
I understand it related to degrees of mutual intelligibility. If
someone does not understand another speaker, they are said to be
speaking different languages. If they can, then they are said to be
speaking the same language, but perhaps with a different dialect.
The
situation that makes it more complex is the existence of a dialect
chain, where neighbours can understand each other (eg. Flemish,
Dutch,
Lowland German, Saxon, Bavarian, Swiss Deutch etc.) but the Swiss
cannot understand Flemish. Where then do you draw the line?
There are similar dialect chains between all the Scandinavian
languages, the North & West Slavic, the Romance languages, and South
Slavic. The fact that Spanish is considered a different language to
Portugese, French and Italian, in the European case is due to
political, rather than linguistic considerations. I cannot
understand
someone speaking the Gorbals "dialect" of Glasgow, for instance, yet
for political reasons they are considered different dialects of
English rather than different languages.
I found this pattern interesting when I was working with the people
of
the Southern Highlands, a population of a quarter of a million people
with what was said to be 22 different languages. But Angal Heneng,
Kewa, Erave and Samberigi could be considered a chain of dialects, or
different languages, depending upon who was doing the classifying and
where then the lines were drawn.
As for Burushaski I understand it is a language with a number of
dialects (Hunsa, Gilka and another I do not know). But as an
"isolated language" having no other cognates, it is generally spoken
of as if it were one language not two or three.
Hope this helps
John