Roofless dialect

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A roofless dialect is a language variety that can be linguistically called a dialect , but to which no corresponding high or standard language exists (yet) or whose speakers have no relation to it. As a rule, the reference was made in the past, unless the separation took place before the codification of the standard language. Before the emergence of (modern) mass media, roofless dialects were more common; In our time, most speakers of dialects consider themselves a high-level language and have a greater or lesser command of it. The speakers of roofless dialects usually have a command of the standard language variety of another language. So speaking Roma of Slovakia usually next to their roofless variant of Romani and Slovak . A dialect is therefore roofless if the speakers do not speak the language from which the dialect originates.

Variations

There are basically three variants:

  1. The corresponding standard language is not (yet) codified. Examples: Macedonian until the 1940s, Romani until today.
  2. The corresponding standard language is codified, but the dialect, e.g. B. by geographical distance, separated from it, so that it develops independently. Due to modern communication channels, this variant hardly exists today. Example: Albanian in southern Italy until the beginning of the twentieth century.
  3. The corresponding standard language is codified, but the speakers of the dialect do not accept it as their standard language. Example: the Arvanites in Greece who speak a dialect of Albanian but are only vaguely aware that their language is related to standard Albanian.

An important criterion is that the dialect was not developed as a standard language. Accordingly, there are basically two ways in which a roofless dialect can get a "roof":

  1. The roofless dialect is assigned to a related standard language as a dialect.
  2. The roofless dialect is expanded into a standard language and thus forms its own "roof" (see: Expansion language ). For example, the Afrikaans of the Boers in South Africa followed this path after losing contact with the Dutch at the time .

The decisive criterion as to whether the dialect can be assigned to a “roof” of a standard language is the acceptance of the “roof language” among the speakers of the dialect. Roofless dialects often mix with other languages ​​because they are not carried by a standard language.

A current example of the expansion into a standard language is Romani; the language commission of the International Romani Union in particular is trying to promote standardization. To this day, Romani has not been codified as a standard language due to the strong dispersion of its speakers over a wide area, great regional differences and the lack of cultural and administrative centers. The regional variants must therefore continue to be called roofless dialects.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Linguistic sociological studies on multilingualism in the Aosta Valley: With special ... - Roland Bauer, p. 220
  2. ↑ Lukas D. Tsitsipis, William W. Elmendorf: Language Shift among the Albanian Speakers of Greece. In: Anthropological Linguistics. Volume 25, No. 3, pp. 288-308. ISSN  0003-5483
  3. ^ W. Näser: Definitions: Dialekt v Language (Collection, W. Näser 10 / 2k). University of Marburg, December 15, 2010, archived from the original on May 23, 2012 ; accessed on May 12, 2014 : “BARBOUR / STEVENSON define in [11] roofing as“ a phenomenon that often defies national borders: wherever a form of standard German is accepted as the 'highest authority', the dialects concerned are varieties of the German. ""
  4. ↑ Maintaining language and changing language as problems of interlingual ... - Harald Haarmann, p. 36