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This book explores the intriguing and complex history of the language/dialect distinction, a puzzle which has long fascinated linguists and laypeople alike. It takes the reader from the prehistory of the distinction in antiquity, through the crucial early modern period, up to the approaches to language and dialect adopted in modern linguistics.
List of contents
- 1: Introduction
- Part I: Prehistory, 500 BC-1500
- 2: A dive into the prehistory of the conceptual pair
- 3: The exception to the rule: Lingua and idioma in Roger Bacon's thought
- Part II: The origin of the conceptual pair, 1500-1550
- 4: From dogs and hounds to languages and dialects: The conceptual pair in Conrad Gessner's work
- 5: Lingua and dialectus: From synonymy to contrast
- 6: Hellenism, standardization, and info-lust: The genesis of the conceptual pair in context
- Part III: Consolidation by elaboration, 1550-1650
- 7: Space and nation: Greek definitions transformed
- 8: Aristotle's legacy: Substance, accidents, and mutual intelligibility
- 9: A subjective touch: Language beats dialect
- 10: The conceptual pair and language history: Language generates dialects
- 11: Consolidation by elaboration: Drawing the balance
- 12: The conceptual pair in transition: The case of Georg Stiernhielm
- Part IV: Systematization and rationalization, 1650-1800
- 13: Putting the conceptual pair on the scholarly agenda: The orientalist Albert Schultens
- 14: Lexicostatistics avant la lettre: The historian Johann Christoph Gatterer and the conceptual pair
- 15: Classes of variation: How do languages and dialects differ?
- 16: Between systematization and rationalization: The conceptual pair through the Enlightenment lens
- Part V: From silent adoption to outspoken abandonment, after 1800
- 17: From Jones to Gabelentz: Silent adoption and renewed suspicion
- 18: Schuchardt the iconoclast
- 19: From Saussure to 1954: Structuralism and the language/dialect distinction
- 20: Mutual intelligibility: The number one criterion?
- 21: Between two extremes: Generative and sociolinguistic interpretations
- 22: A gentle goodbye? Dialect stripped for parts
- 23: Language, dialect, and the general public-or how not to popularize knowledge
- 24: Language and dialect between past and future: Terminological success, conceptual failure
About the author
Raf Van Rooy is affiliated with KU Leuven as a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO). He was educated at Leuven, Thessaloniki, Louvain-la-Neuve, and Ghent, and obtained his PhD in Linguistics in May 2017 from KU Leuven and the FWO. His research focuses on the early modern study of the Ancient Greek language and on the reception of key linguistic concepts of Greek origin. He has been awarded a number of grants and prizes for his research, which has been published in journals such as Language & Communication, Glotta, and Journal of Greek Linguistics.
Summary
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
This book provides a historiographic study of the distinction between language and dialect, a puzzle which has long fascinated linguists and laypeople alike. It offers a comprehensive account of the intriguing and complex history of the language-dialect pair, and shows that its real origins can be found in sixteenth-century humanist scholarship. The book begins with a survey of the prehistory of the language/dialect distinction in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Raf Van Rooy then provides a detailed investigation of the emergence, establishment, and development of the conceptual pair during the early modern period, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, when linguistic diversity was first studied in depth. Finally, the much-debated and ambiguous fate of the language/dialect opposition in modern linguistics is explored: although a number of earlier ideas were adopted by later scholars, many linguists today question the notion of a seemingly arbitrary and subjective distinction between language and dialect.
Additional text
This is a bold, enjoyable and enriching conceptual history, warmly recommended both to historians of linguistics and to anyone who uses the terminology of dialect, language, variety and the like today.
