[tied] Re: Franco-Provençal

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Arnaud Fournet"
<fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:

[...]

>> "Dialects" of Italian -- and, as I suspect, also what
>> you "nationalistically" refer to as mere "dialects" of French,
>> Spanish etc. -- are historically languages by full right (in
>> certain cases even endowed with distinctive literary productions
>> that date from many centuries ago). I fully concur with the
>> following remark made in the Wikipedia article entitled
>> "Italian dialects":

>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_dialects

> There's no "I suspect" and "nationalistically".

> The issue is about the use and misuse of the word "language".

And it's the sort of argument that I expect to see among laymen,
not linguists. In the cases of interest the choice of 'dialect'
or 'language' is fundamentally a sociopolitical choice, not a
linguistic one. Picard, Veneto, and Schwiizertüütsch are what
they are, whether you call them languages or dialects of French,
Italian, and German, respectively.

Brian