Dialect continua

The distinction between language and dialect is ever more hopeless when we see that in many parts of the world, one dialect shades into another one from region to region until people on one end of the chain speak a different “language” than the ones at the other, but there has been no single point along the chain where a new language can be seen as beginning.

A. Gurage. Gurage is the name of a dialect continuum of the Semitic family, spoken in Ethiopia. Here is “He thatched a roof” in several of the varieties, shading gradually from one “language” to another.

He thatched a roof in Gurage dialects

People speaking one variety can converse with people speaking the one next door, have a harder time with the one spoken two regions away, and so on. Soddo and Endegen seem easily identifiable as “languages,” but whether, for example, Chaha in the middle is a different “language” from either of them is as arbitrary an issue as whether purple is more red or more blue.

B. Turkic varieties. Turkish is one of a litter of languages stretching from Turkey east across the new “stan” countries into western China. These “languages” vary in the same way as what are called “dialects” of many other languages and form a continuum. Here is the word for eight stretching from west to east.

eight in Turkic languages

Yet the Gurage varieties are thought of as “dialects,” while these are “languages”—the terminology is arbitrary, based largely on the fact that the Turkic ones are spoken in separate political entities.