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Dialect refers to two distinctly different types of linguistic relationships.
Southern Min, Minnan or Banlam, is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Chinese languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian, most of Taiwan, Eastern Guangdong, Hainan, and Southern Zhejiang. Southern Min dialects are also spoken by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora, most notably in Southeast Asia, such as Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Southern Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Southern and Central Vietnam, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City. Minnan is the most widely-spoken branch of Min, with approximately 48 million speakers as of 2017–2018.
The Dogon are an ethnic group indigenous to the central plateau region of Mali, in West Africa, south of the Niger bend, near the city of Bandiagara, and in Burkina Faso. The population numbers between 400,000 and 800,000. They speak the Dogon languages, which are considered to constitute an independent branch of the Niger–Congo language family, meaning that they are not closely related to any other languages.
In sociolinguistics, an abstand language is a language variety or cluster of varieties with significant linguistic distance from all others, while an ausbau language is a standard variety, possibly with related dependent varieties. Heinz Kloss introduced these terms in 1952 to denote two separate and largely independent sets of criteria for recognizing a "language":
The Ladakhi language is a Tibetic language spoken in the Indian union territory of Ladakh. It is the predominant language in the Buddhist-dominated district of Leh. Though a member of the Tibetic family, Ladakhi is not mutually intelligible with Standard Tibetan. Ladakhis and Tibetans usually communicate with each other in Hindi or English as they do not understand each other's languages clearly.
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an important criterion for distinguishing languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used.
The Dogon languages are a small closely related language family that is spoken by the Dogon people of Mali and may belong to the proposed Niger–Congo family. There are about 600,000 speakers of its dozen languages. They are tonal languages, and most, like Dogul, have two tones, but some, like Donno So, have three. Their basic word order is subject–object–verb.
Escarpment Dogon is a continuum of Dogon dialects of the Bandiagara Escarpment, including the standard language. There are three principal dialects:
Serer, often broken into differing regional dialects such as Serer-Sine and Serer saloum, is a language of the Senegambian branch of the Niger–Congo family spoken by 1.2 million people in Senegal and 30,000 in the Gambia as of 2009. It is the principal language of the Serer people, and was the language of the early modern kingdoms of Sine, Saloum, and Baol.
Dogon country is a region of eastern Mali and northwestern Burkina Faso populated mainly by the Dogon people, a diverse ethnic group in West Africa with diverse languages. Like the term Serer country occupied by the Serer ethnic group, Dogon country is vast, and lies southwest of the Niger River belt. The region is composed of three zones: the plateau, the escarpment and the Seno-Gondo plain.
Naŋa dama, also known as Naŋa tegu, is a Dogon language spoken in Mali that is only known from one report from 1953. Roger Blench reports that its nearest relative is the recently described Walo–Kumbe Dogon, "with which it shares both lexicon and the feature that many nouns have a final -m." Hochstetler thinks they may be the same language. It may be close to Yanda Dogon (Blench) or Jamsai tegu (Hochstetler).
The Dogul language, Dogul Dom, is a Dogon language spoken in Mali. It is closest to Bondum Dogon, though not enough for mutual intelligibility.
The Bondum language, Bondum Dom, is a Dogon language spoken in Mali. It is closest to Dogul Dogon, though not enough for mutual intelligibility. Dialects are Kindjim and Nadjamba.
Ampari Dogon, also known as Ambange or Ampari kora, is a Dogon language spoken in Mali.
Mombo Dogon is a Dogon language spoken in Mali. Helabo and Miambo are dialects.
The Toro language, Tɔrɔ tegu 'Mountain speech', is a Dogon language spoken in Mali. It is closest to the prestige variety of Dogon, Jamsay tegu, though speakers deny they are related and understand little of it. Hochstetler report difficulties in comprehension between Tɔrɔ tegu and one of the western Plains Dogon languages, Tomo kan.
The Dogon dialects of the western plains below the Bandiagara Escarpment is Mali are mutually intelligible. They are sometimes called the Kan Dogon because they use the word kan for varieties of speech. The dialects are:
Mahasu Pahari is a Western Pahari language spoken in Himachal Pradesh. It is also known as Mahasui or Mahasuvi. The speaking population is about 1,000,000 (2001). It is more commonly spoken in the Himachal Pradesh, Shimla (Simla) and Solan districts. It is to be known that Shimla and Solan were parts of the old Mahasu district. Himachal Pradesh State on 1 September, 1972 reorganised the districts dissolving Mahasu district. The Solan district was carved out of Solan and Arki tehsils of the then Mahasu district and tehsils of Kandaghat and Nalagarh of the then Shimla District of Punjab.
Hungarian has ten dialects. These are fully mutually intelligible, and do not differ significantly from standard Hungarian except for the Csángó dialect. They are mostly distinguished by pronunciation; although there are differences in vocabulary, these are usually small and do not hinder intelligibility. Due to increased internal migration and urbanization during the 20th century, most of the characteristics of the different dialects can only be observed in smaller towns and villages, and even there mostly among the elderly; the population of the larger cities and especially the capital has been mixed for generations and the dialectal differences have been lost. A notable exception is the Western Transdanubian pronunciation, which is distinctly noticeable even in Szombathely, the largest city in the region.
Pangwali is a Western Pahari language of Himachal Pradesh, India. It is spoken in the Pangi Tehsil of Chamba district, and is threatened to go extinct. Pangwali is natively written in the Takri script, but Devanagari is used as well. It is very similar to the Padderi language of Padder, J&K.
References
- ↑ Jamsay at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
