HONG KONG: How a dialect differs from a language

HONG KONG'S education department caused a furore last month by briefly posting on its website the claim that Cantonese was “not an official language” of Hong Kong. After an outcry, officials removed the text. But was the claim correct? The law says that “Chinese and English” are Hong Kong’s official languages. Whereas some people say that Cantonese is a dialect of Chinese, others insist that it is a language in its own right. Who is right—and how do dialects differ from languages in general?Two kinds of criteria distinguish languages from dialects. The first are social and political: in this view, “languages” are typically prestigious, official and written, whereas “dialects” are mostly spoken, unofficial and looked down upon. In a famous formulation of this view, “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. Speakers of mere “dialects” often refer to their speech as “slang”, “patois” or the like. (The Mandarin Chinese term for Cantonese, Shanghaiese and others is fangyan, or “place-speech”.) Linguists have a different criterion: if two related kinds of speech are so close that speakers can have a conversation and understand each other, they are dialects of a single language. If comprehension is difficult to impossible, they are distinct languages. Of course, comprehensibility is not either-or, but a continuum—and it may even be asymmetrical. Nonetheless, ...

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