One language, many grammars

When we are collecting linguistic data to study, we are usually collecting data from a particular language. But it turns out that the notion of language is very messy. The notion of language seems straightforward because we are used to thinking and speaking of “the English language,” “the French language,” “the Swahili language,” and so forth. But these terms are actually much vaguer than they seem at first glance because they cover a large number of varieties, including ones that differ enough to be mutually unintelligible. For instance, Ethnologue distinguishes 32 dialects of English in the United Kingdom alone. In addition, distinct dialects of English are spoken in former British colonies, including Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States, and many other African, Asian, and Caribbean nations, and many of these dialects have subdialects of their own. Similarly, Ethnologue distinguishes 11 dialects of French in France and 10 dialects of Swahili in Kenya, and there are further dialects in other countries in which these languages are spoken. Moreover, we use terms like “the English language” to refer to historical varieties, which may differ profoundly from modern-day varieties. For example, present-day English differs from Old English about as much as modern English differs from German.

Although the most salient differences between dialects are often phonological (that is, speakers of different dialects often have different accents), dialects of a so-called single language can differ syntactically as well. For instance, in standard French, as in the Romance languages more generally, adjectives ordinarily follow the noun that they modify. But that order is reversed in Walloon, a variety of French spoken in Belgium. The two parametric options are illustrated in (1).

(Bernstein 1993: 25-26)

In this example, we have two different dialects of “the same language”, French, differing with respect to a language parameter. The opposite is also possible: two “different languages” that are basically the same. For example, the same linguistic variety spoken on the Dutch-German border may count as a dialect of Dutch or German depending on which side of the political border it is spoken, and the same is true of many other border dialects as well. This is called a dialect continuum, where each adjacent language variety is quite similar, but the extreme ends of the continuum are quite different from each other.

According to Max Weinreich, “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” A striking (and sad) confirmation of this aphorism concerns the recent terminological history of Serbo-Croatian. As long as Yugoslavia was a federal state, Serbo-Croatian was considered a single language with a number of regional dialects. The 14th edition of Ethnologue, published in 2000, still has a single entry for Serbo-Croatian. In the 15th edition, published in 2005, the single entry is replaced by three new entries for Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian.

As the previous discussion has shown, the notion of language is based more on sociopolitical considerations than on strictly linguistic ones. By contrast, the term ‘grammar’ refers to a particular set of parametric options that a speaker acquires. The same language label can be associated with more than one grammar (the label “French” is associated with grammars that have adjective-noun order and ones with noun-adjective order), and a single grammar can be associated with more than one language label (as in the case of border dialects). In other words, one particular E-language might be a mishmash of many different I-languages, as discussed in Section 3.2.

Mutual intelligibility

It is important to distinguish the concept of shared grammar from mutual intelligibility. To a large extent, standard English and many of its nonstandard varieties are mutually intelligible even where their grammars differ with respect to one parameter or another. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible for two or more varieties that are mutually unintelligible to share a single grammar. For instance, in the Indian village of Kupwar (Gumperz and Wilson 1971), the three languages Marathi, Urdu, and Kannada, each spoken by a different ethnic group, have been in contact for about 400 years, and most of the men in the village are bi- or trilingual. Like the standard varieties of these languages, their Kupwar varieties have distinct vocabularies, thus rendering them mutually unintelligible to monolingual speakers, but in Kupwar, the considerable grammatical differences that exists among the languages as spoken in other parts of India have been virtually eliminated. The difference between standard French and Walloon with respect to prenominal adjectives is another instance of this same convergence phenomenon. Here, too, the adjective-noun order in Walloon is due to language contact and bilingualism, in this case between French and Flemish, the other language spoken in Belgium; in Flemish, as in the Germanic languages more generally, adjectives ordinarily precede the nouns that they modify.

One speaker, many grammars

Finally, we should point out that it is perfectly possible for a single speaker to acquire more than one grammar. This is most strikingly evident in balanced bilinguals. Speakers can also acquire more than one grammar in situations of syntactic change. For instance, in the course of its history, English changed from an object-verb order language to a verb-object order language, and individual speakers during the transition period (which began in late Old English and continued into Middle English) acquired and used both parametric options. Speakers can also acquire more than one grammar in situations of diglossia or stable syntactic variation. For instance, English speakers who speak a non-prestigious dialect of English at home might acquire the prestigious parametric variants at school, and switch between them depending on context.

Check yourself!

References and further resources

Attribution

This section is adapted from the following CC BY NC source:

↪️ Santorini, Beatrice, and Anthony Kroch. 2007. The syntax of natural language: An online introduction. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook

Academic sources

Bernstein, Judy. 1993. Topics in the syntax of nominal structure across Romance. Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York.

📑 Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2023. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Twenty-sixth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com.uml.idm.oclc.org

Gumperz, John J., and Robert Wilson. 1971. Convergence and creolization: A case from the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian border in India. In Dell Hymes, ed., Pidginization and creolization of languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 151–167.