"A speaker of Norwegian and a speaker of Swedish usually have no trouble communicating..." Of course, both have trouble communicating with the Danish. The Danish language being, of course, a dialect of toddler babbling.
@@ethanodell8044 True, but if a speaker, speaks slow and both have a genuine willingness to understand eachother then it'll be all fine. But of course, there are words that differ but they are pretty easy to catch up with and just a little bit of exposure to the other languages and you'll be able to understand :) (Dane living in Sweden)
If you ever make a part 2 of this, you should consider including Malay (Bahasa Melayu) and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia). These two languages are so similar that a Malaysian and an Indonesian could effortlessly have a full conversation without any proper education of the other's language. It's like the linguistic equivalent of Hindi and Urdu-historically a single language, but split into two later on. The split happened in 1928 during the Second Youth Congress (Kongres Pemuda II), when Indonesian nationalists decided to adopt a standardized form of Malay (specifically the Johor-Riau dialect) and renamed it to "Bahasa Indonesia" to forge a distinct national identity for the new nation. Even though the two languages have grown apart a bit, especially in vocabulary due to the influence from local languages in Indonesia (e.g. Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese), they're still practically identical. I was born in Malaysia and never formally learned Indonesian, yet I can still understand nearly every single word they say. To us Malaysians, Indonesian often sounds like the formal standard Malay we're taught at school, just a little bit more 'unique' sounding, especially by how they pronounce some words.
@@noname-vp6vf Definitely! Most of the time, Indonesians and Sabahans pronounce the words like how they're spelt, so it's really not that hard to understand each other. On the other hand, most Malay dialects like Central Malay (K.L, Selangor, etc.) and Southern Malay (Johor, Melaka, etc.) have weird pronunciations on certain words. 😁😁 For example, whenever a word ends with 'a', they pronounce it as a schwa.
Malaysian mix Indonesian here! Up! Yeah, Malaysian and Indonesian language is merely political. Just like Serbs, Bosniaks, Croats and Montenegran (or whatev), we Malaysians and Indonesian will make sure you know the language is distinct🤣 If Sabahan, Kelantanese and (Strait) Malay can adopt one language, If Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, Acehnese, Buginese can adopt one official language, I know Malaysia and Indonesia can!
Afrikaans doesn’t exist. I remember researching Wikipedia for school and the first option for language was Afrikaans. I always thought it was some sort of joke because it’s literally Dutch but the words are spelt like how a 4 year old would spell it.
I have been speaking Afrikaans my whole life. It's a distinct language that's been developing separately from Dutch for centuries. Many Malay, Portuguese, and Bantu influences. The grammar is pretty different (for example, we almost always use perfect past tense), and Afrikaans has gone through a significant vowel shift.
@@aspookyeel I don't have any problem with Dutch people. Most of them are really nice. It's English people who should watch out when making fun of Afrikaans.
for Chinese, it's funny because now Taiwan is calling their dialect of Hokkien (southern Min) as Taiwanese, and considers it a distinct language that deserves a separate name from Hokkien, when it's just Hokkien with small differences.
Literally Hokkien exists on Fujian too legit Taiwanese Hokkien is a word it's basically Hokkien but Taiwanese and Fujianese Hokkien would be called Fujianese Hokkien. Also we gonna mention Teochew or Hainanese Min?
I think OP mixed things up here. 1) What OP is trying to say: On the identification of name: Progressive(?) linguists are arguing it should be called "Taiwanese" instead of "Hokkien" due to its vocabulary differences and loanwords, but does not deny the fact that it originates within Hokkien. This can be mirrored to how Latin Spanish/Brazillian Portuguese wants its own recognition instead of being simply called "Spanish/Portuguese", but never denies that it is from Spanish/Portugese. 2) As @hayabusa1329 has said, on the identification of dialect/language: They are calling it a distinct language from "Chinese(漢語)", and not from Hokkien. This can be seen as before, Hokkien is considered inferior to Mandarin Chinese, where Mandarin is a 'language' and Hokkien a 'dialect', now they are put to the same status, hence now BOTH are not a dialect and a "national language" status in the ROC. You can see OP mixed up concepts 1 and 2. I hope this clears things up, and prevent further misinformation.
That's an (ab)used quote from the linguist Max Weinreich, describing languages in a European context and his Euro(centric) worldview. It doesn't account for a country like China, which fits roughly nine Europes into it and was an empire much like Rome with many different ethnolinguistic groups even within the Han. The assertion that you need military to form a language is an outdated scholarly and academic concept. It's an anachronism because many West African states and native American tribes have separate languages, the modern definition is based on mutual intelligibility. US English is not a separate language from UK English or Australian English. There are 7,100 to 7,164 languages and only 206 UN recognized nation states. How do you account for that? You can't, because the quote was made by an ignoramus.
My Hindi and Urdu friends speak to each other in their tongues and have no trouble understanding each other. They even talk to Punjabi and Gujarati people and seem to have no trouble understanding them despite not using the same language.
gujarati and punjabi are much harder to understand but we get like 50% of it lmfao when we speak to other hindustani speakers as long as you don't use big formal words it's very easy to communicate
@@FlagAnthem i did not say otherwise. What I said is when millions of people say that their dialect should be treated as a language we just comply with it.
@@FlagAnthemthere's a language spoken by 5 people and nobody's calling it a dialect (that could also be because it's a language isolate wildly different from anything else nearby)
you said it was "merely" the case. no it's not no, that's not the case in linguistics, nobody in any serious setting uses political definitions for languages. There are nearly dying languages with 5-12 people left which are isolates spoken by a few angry people who hate each other because they're humans.
My grandparents can't even understand Mandarin and they're native to Guangdong (where Cantonese is spoken), it gets even crazier when neither Cantonese nor Mandarin are mutually intelligible with Hakka, Teochew, Shanghainese, or Min Taiwanese
4:52 actually that's incorrect, Serbian (and Montenegrin which, unlike the other varieties, has no official recognition anywhere outside of areas of Montenegro) is written in the latin script as well, these days it's actually more common to read serbian texts in latin than it is to read them in cyrillic since most signs, books, websites and messages online are written in latin for convenience, out of the habit of the writers (why switch to a cyrillic keyboard if you wanna write sth in serbian and then back to the latin one for English when you can use the latin one for both) or for inclusivity with the other ex-yugos. This last one is usually done by writers since standard serbian in latin barely has any differences compared to standard croatian, they're comparable to the differences between British "colour" and American "color" and how British people use "pavement" while Americans use "sidewalk". Tho I must note that this only applies to STANDARD serbian and STANDARD croatian which are both based on the SAME Shtokavian dialect, aka. the east Herzegovian sub-dialect, there are other Nashki/Serbo-Croatian dialects that are not nearly as mutually intelligible as the standard varieties are such as Chakavian, Kaikavian and Torlakian of which the last one, Torlakian, is a transitional dialect between standard Serbo-Croatian and standard Bulgarian and Kaikavian is a transitional dialect between standard Serbo-Croatian and standard Slovene. Basically The language is called Serbo-Croatian (colloquially called "Nashki") and is based on the Shtokavian dialect. Its varieities are: Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. Its dialects are: Shtokavian, Kaikavian, Chakavian and Torlakian.
Never seen Štokavski Kajkavski and Čakavski written in English. Also I thought Serbs use Kajkavian not Shtokavian? Also for foreigners Nashki or Naški (might aswell write "Нашки") is kinda translated as "Ours"
@rigidchalice1252 Oh that's not how they're written in English, but I wanted people to be able to read "Kajkavski" as it's pronounced in Serbo-Croatian instead of reading "Kađkavski" since their J is our Đ. Also no, Serbs use exclusively Shtokavian, same goes for all of Bosnia, all of Montenegro, Slavonia, Dubrovnik and the inner parts of Dalmatia (basically Lika and areas along the Bosnian border). Only areas around Zagreb use Kaikavian, while the coastal cities in Dalmatia, as well as Istria and the Adriatic islands, use Chakavian. And yea, I again went with the mentality of "oh well, at least they'll be able to read it" so I wrote "Nashki/Naški/Нашки" tho it basically means "Our (language)" with the 'language' part being implied so it's not mentioned out loud.
In the case of Portuguese, there's the complicated topic of Galician and Portuguese being either dialects of the same language (Galician-Portuguese/Galician/Portuguese) or seperate languages due to the Spanish influence on Galician in recent years. However, mutual intelligibility between both dialects is over 95% or even 98%, with both Lusophone and Galician people having no issues communicating. The reason they became classified as different languages was, ultimately, for political reasons. The current official writing system for Galician is based off of Spanish, a seperate language, to the point sometimes it might be unnatural speach wise, and the organisation that rules over the language has even claimed certain words are incorrect due to them being "Portuguese loan words", while the Spanish loan words are accepted. However there's a "reintegrationist" writing system based off of the Portuguese Orthographic Agreement, with characteristics exclusive to the Galician dialect like "polo/pola" while in Portuguese "pelo/pela", "cançom" instead of "canção", and so on, and words closer to the Galician spoken before the heavier Spanish influence (sometimes adapted from Portuguese).
2:05 there is NO SUCH THING as emilianromagnol, it's a linguistic classification of close languages (the Emilian languages, Romagnol and, arguably, the Gallopicene). Saying it's a language is like saying you speak Anglofrisian instead of English 3:00 apart that we are talking about 1300s Florentine which is totally not the same as MODERN Florentine (no,, Dante did not say "la hoha hola hon la hannucia horta horta" and would totally feel more at home in Corsica), Italian was already around as a standardized language since 1600.
Well, as a person from Taiwan, I can say that the map at 0:15 is largely wrong about the situation in Taiwan. We speak Mandarin in everyday life, only an extremely small group of the people refuse to speak Mandarin to communicate with others. And funnily enough, the same group of people will also be very offended by the fact that the map implies "Taiwanese" (mostly Hokkien) has anything to do with China.
Another example similar to the Hindustani one is Bahasa Melayu (Malaysia) and Bahasa Indonesia. Both are derived from the Johor-Riau Melayu which was a common trade language in the region. Really the reason why they are considered as 2 separate language is because of political reasons (Indonesians revere Bahasa Indonesia as a part of their national identity). Unlike Hindi and Urdu where the standard form is different and the vernacular form is similar, it is the other way around for Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu.
Thanks for pointing this out. I’m Otomi from central Mexico. The early Spanish colonial period was when my language was still one dialectal continuum. The 300,000 speakers we have today, can actually be split into multiple language groups with low intelligibility between each other.some linguists have declared them all variants, but they themselves cannot understand early Otomi colonial texts. The Otomi language of precortesian times of 1518 has become to these modern variants, what Classical Latin is to the Romance languages .
Philippines has a very similar situation with China but with the Filipino language. It is literally just the Manila dialect of Tagalog, one out of 11 widely spoken PH languages, and out of 130 total PH languages in the country. Filipino and English both act as lingua franca, and in some places you may find people who know more English than Filipino.
You can also find a similar situation in the Malay language. In Malaysia, the Malay language is known as "Bahasa Malaysia", with more of modern English loanwords whereas in Indonesia, the language is known as "Bahasa Indonesia" (with more of Dutch loanwords). But both of these languages are actually "Bahasa Melayu". The separation in this language is due to political influence.
This happens with Catalan too, many people in Valencia will crucify you if you dare to say that they speak the same language as Catalans even though there are no many differences between one another and that "valencian" is actually spoken in Catalonia too (they speak the occidental branch of the language that it's also spoken in inner Catalonia). In the Balearic Islands the same thing happens with some people telling you that they speak Mallorcan (or their respective insular dialect) rather than Catalan. The same case can be done with Portuguese - Galician.
As a native speaker of Cantonese, I thank you so much for highlighting the importance of calling those Sinitic languages. Unfortunately, due to political reason, in particular the authoritarian dictatorship of Mainland China, many Mainland Chinese people who have been brainwashed by the communist regime for over 7 decades, believe that all those Sinitic languages are inferior to Mandarin Chinese and they look down on them as mere dialects. Politics should have nothing to do with linguistic science. But, of course, in Mainland China, politics is everything. They even rewrite history, archaeology, anthropology, and even geography.
Re. Croatian, Serbian etc. As for the tensions, I went to Serbia about 10 years ago, spoke to everyone in my Croatian accent, and had no problems at all... everyone was massively polite and kind, hospitable etc. there. As for the language, I have the impression outsiders don't really get this but that doesn't stop them from having an opinion. The thing is Croatian, Serbian, Bosniak and Montenegrin are (1) four distinct standard varieties all based on a dialect group called Štokavian; (2) four collections of various dialects some of which are very similar, while some are quite divergent and incomprehensible to anyone except those who speak them. Anyway, the four standard varieties differ in pronunciation, and quite significantly in technical vocabulary - and this wasn't made up in the 1990s, at least in the case of Serbian and Croatian, as anyone can see by having a look at a few books printed in the 1970s. However, being based on the same dialect type, purely linguistically these four standards constitute a single language. The problem is that since they're spoken by four nations, there isn't and has never been a single name for this language. Serbo-Croatian is an artificial name, made up in the 19th century. In everyday life, everyone refers and has always referred to their own language by their ethnic / national name. Of course, some people claim these are different languages - but I suppose 'different' means 'not identical' in this case.
@@Heartstopper90 See... more evidence these are different languages :D :D :D To me, 'bosanski' (Bosnian) refers to anything from Bosnia, while 'bošnjački' (Bosniak) refers only to Bosniaks. In other words, when I hear a Bosnian accent, that's 'bosanski' even if the speaker is a Bosnian Croat or Serb, or whatever else, but if they say 'kahva' (coffee) or 'sahat' (hour), it might be 'bošnjački'. In fact, for me, 'bosanski' refers only to Bosnia and its inhabitants, i.e. not to Herzegovina, and definitely not to people who live in places such as Sandžak and identify as Bosniaks nowadays, etc. Welcome to the Balkans :)
@davidmandic3417 bošnjački ne postoji. There's only Bosnian and that's it, bošnjački jezik is not something that exists in the realm of other languages only serbs and croats from serbia and croatia use this word but it has no meaning and it also belittles us. Also only Bosnian is recognized around the world. Bosniak is not an all-encompasing word rather it's just an ethnicity. But then again you're probably going to go full keyboard warrior now so I'm just gonna end it here.
@@Heartstopper90 Look, it's about how people speak where I'm from. In Croatia, I presume most people would describe any Bosnian accent as 'bosanski' (Bosnian), regardless of the speaker's ethnicity. That is, a Bosnian Serb's accent would be perceived and referred to as 'bosanski', rather than 'srpski', which is a word that we associate with the accents of people from Serbia. Similarly, all people from Bosnia are referred to as 'Bosanci' (Bosnians). People from Herzegovina are called 'Hercegovci' and their accents are referred to not as 'bosanski' but rather 'hercegovački'. On the other hand, 'bošnjački' (Bosniak) is used to describe specifically anything related to the 'Bošnjaci' (Bosniaks). That's as logical as anything and I don't understand what may be belittling about it. (I'm not a warrior of any kind, since this isn't a war - I'm just sharing my opinion, which - I believe - is also the opinion of many other people.)
My favorite example is Persian. Dari, Farsi and Tajik are just one language. Far more similar than how Hindi and Urdu are similar (a lot of nouns and verbs are very different in the two languages, with Hindi being much more heavily influenced by Sanskrit as opposed to Persian). Dari, Farsi and Tajik are essentially indistinguishable.
I heard that Dari is more conservative than Farsi and Tajik, and Tajik undoubtedly has Russian influence due to Tajikistan being a former Soviet republic.
The fact that there's actually more basis for American English and British English to be considered different languages than there is for Croatian and Bosnian is WILD (the former is actually more divergent than the latter)
That’s the interesting thing about languages and dialects: they’re determined by arbitrary boundaries. Take a Latin speaker in Roman Hispania and draw a lineage all the way to their Spanish speaking descendant in modern day Spain. There was never a time when a Latin speaking mother gave birth to a Spanish speaking child. Almost just like the process of speciation in biology, language development is so gradual and blurry that the boxes we try to draw around them are necessarily arbitrary.
This is false. Established modern conventions put language separation as different orthography (in Europe) to mutual intelligibility. Any attempt otherwise is a play at semantics or an attempt to degrade the metaphysics between languages and dialects in a way that does not reflect reality. The issue is that the Sinitic Languages are further apart than Latin languages are from each other by leaps and bounds from a sound perspective except for rhyming schemes and are much further apart geographically. They are not mutually intelligible and even have separate non intelligible orthography (many linguists use these as speciation points). The line being arbitrary is entirely wrong; the line exists in a fuzzy medium gray between a very obvious white and black - for example, calling English a dialect of Chinese or Chinese a dialect of English would be absurd. These are even from a philosophical perspective languages in the sense that they stem from Middle Chinese and the branches are brother and sister to one another instead of mother and father. Latin gave birth to Spanish and the other romance languages. This is not true for Chinese. Mandarin and Cantonese are siblings, and Middle Chinese has been extinct for a thousand years. In terms of Koreans to China, Joseon and the Qing state, were still using a form of written Chinese Koreans could not speak to talk to the Qing, because the language was a written cultural tradition Cantonese, if it were counted separately, has by some metrics more speakers than multiple of the popular languages speakers.
@@shinybreloom4027 Metaphysics doesn't concern me at all. "Established modern conventions" establishing language separation is still just a convention. The existence of white and black still doesn't remove the fuzzy medium gray. If you want to take a Jordan Peterson-esque prescriptivist approach in a descriptivist field, I don't know what to tell you.
For the last one: As a German who speaks both Norwegian and German I can tell you the languages are pretty similar. Learning Norwegian was quite easy as you can guess a words meaning with like 60% accuracy at the start and when you know more about the language it will get easier.
FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT! This is one of my biggest frustrations. People call languages dialects either for selfish political reasons or just out of convenience. This is so ignorant! When people tell me “I’m trying to learn Chinese,” I instantly look at them and I sometimes can’t refrain from asking “Which kind of «Chinese» are we talking about, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Gan?” And they just stare at me like I had just summoned a demon. Plus when I hear ill informed people say stuff like “the Indian language.” This makes my blood boil.
This topic hits home. I have family that speaks Urdu, and insists that it’s not Hindi, when really, it damn well is. Spoken forms are nearly identical. On an other note, I studied Arabic and discovered that the reason it’s so damn hard, is because it’s not spoken by anyone, and each spoken dialect is so different from it and each other it’s hardly the same language. It was codified out of Quranic Arabic. This is exactly like pretending that Castilian, Catalan, Tuscan, Sicilian and Romanian are all Latin. Study it, then try to speak Spanish. You can’t. You have to learn a whole different spoken language. The “language vs dialect” dispute is entirely political, and born out of nationalism that really only started to come about in its modern form around 100 to 150 years ago.
The accent is significantly different. Most people I know (Galician, from Costa da Morte, i.e. northwest) would describe it as "needing to speak slowly" in order to understand each other. The official grammar, regulated by the Real Academia Galega, is different and and unfortunately it robs us of our historical grammar (with letters such as ç).
@@IRONIKSHITFUN there are pros and cons. I think the structure is the same: Portugalego, but we dont need to interfere on each others grammar, then you need to have a grammar for Brazilian, a grammar for Portuguese, a Grammar for Galician etc.
The difference in scripts between the Hindi and Urdu languages occurred due to Islamic rulers who ruled in India, which caused the people (mainly soldiers) speaking different languages to try and communicate with each other, leading to a same language which was spoken, but due to each community not knowing the other script, they wrote in their own scripts, causing the nearly-same language to be written in two scripts, Arabic and Devnagri, even when in practice it was the same language. The main divide between the both languages happened when the Mughals decided to keep Urdu as their court language and removed Persian, which angered many scholars and poets, so they started using more and more Persian and Arabic words instead, causing the two languages to differ a little, mainly in words used in higher classes.
The name of the language shared by Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia is "Shtokavian", which is later tagged differently in the four countries. Funny enough, Croatians could adopt their own separate language if they wanted, that being Chajkavian.
The Croatian language is split between 3 dialects: shtokavian, chakavian and kajkavian(which aren't intelligeble to one another). Standard Croatian is based on the shtokavian dialect because it has the most speakers.
I love the way Arabs across countries insist they are speaking variations of the same language even though they can't understand each other whereas Croats and Serbs who understand each other perfectly insist they are speaking separate languages. Even though the Croat from Zagreb can understand the Serb from Belgrade more easily than he can understand some of his fellow Croats speaking "Croatian" dialects. The encouraging thing though is that although you do occasionally come across the odd nationalist online mostly younger people from the ex-Yugoslav countries are more chill about this point and are happy to admit they are more dialects than languages. As a native speaker of English when I first started learning Serbo-Croat or BCS as it's often called now I realised quickly that the differences between the two languages were not as big as the differences between various forms of English and Spanish or even French if you include Québec French. However, speakers of these dialects have no problem referring to them as English, Spanish or French because it's a recognition of where the language originated. With Serbo-Croat you can't pinpoint the name of a country and/or people where the language first developed so each nation as they went their own way just called it 'our' language and named it after themselves.
That's because South Slavic dialects are grouped into languages based on their speakers' ethnicity, since purely linguistic criteria simply don't work here. That's why a Croatian dialect can be completely impenetrable to other Croats, but they can understand most Serbian dialects (almost) perfectly. And the other way round. The differences between Croatian and Serbian standards aren't as small as people think. I'd say, lexically, there are more differences than between standard American and UK English... even though the situation is complex, because you get various standard Serbian words that are also used in certain Croatian dialects, or some words that are common in Croatia but they sound archaic or bookish to Serbs, etc.
European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese are increasingly different. A Brazilian from the northeast and a Portuguese from Madeira would probably have a hard time understanding each other in spoken language. I think it’s still the same language, but given another 500 years of divergence and they will definitely be distinct languages from each other.
They're still understandable (even though we brazilians usually have a hard time because we aren't really exposed to eu. portuguese in media, but after 10min. talking we get used to it) , but the way the portuguese speak can sound very unnatural / book-ish depending on the brazilian dialect / sociolect. Some brazilian dialects aren't that significantly different from the standard language, while others don't really match at all and there can be a huge gap between writing- speaking. Because generally we tend to use extremely analitical constructions in informality, especially in verbs, sometimes using 2/ 3/4 verbs when you'd only need 1 in the standard language; and also eliminating any redundant agreement (ex: only indicating plurality by the article / elominating any person conjugation except 1st Person Singular). Portuguese was spoken here since the begining of colonization, but it wasn't a uniform proccess, so some regions were forced into assimilating more recently. Some brazilian dialects also preserve some Old Portuguese archaisms (ex: Rhotacism, more nasal vowels). Tecnically they could be considered different languages, given that there are languages w/ less differences than this, but it's more benefitial for Brazil to keep econonic ties with the lusophone world.
From my amateurish learning of Sinitic/Chinese languages being called dialects, I think this is just how common people perceived them as Chinese linguist also recognized them as separate languages within sinitic family. But it didn't helped that within these languages there are dialects that unintelligible to the prestige dialect speaker (like how both Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong speaks Mandarin but with their thick local accent that makes them almost unintelligible for modern speaker). Since China is continuous and the border between these (unintelligible) dialects often blur with the language border itself, the dialect misnomer stuck within the common consciousness.
You skirted around this but it's often political in nature if it is a 'language' or a 'dialect'. From North America here are two examples: Inuktut (Inuit language collective term) is a dialect continuum of languages with many dialects getting their own language name. So is Nehiyawewin (Cree-Y dialect spelling) a dialect continuum without different dialects getting their own name. The Ryukyuan languages of Japan are considered dialects of Japanese and are another case of the languages dying out. There are a lot of other ones around the world. One last language example to consider: Low German (means so many different things) and High German. Or how German and Dutch dialects near their borders are more mutually intelligible to each other than they are to the standard of their respective language.
im a native urdu speaker and yeah thats pretty much the case a native hindi speaker probably cant understand urdu literature and vice versa but in normal everyday conversation we have 0 problems especially these days considering that theres a major influence of english which further bridges the gap
Cool video, but you forgot to mention forgot mention two dialects of Bengali which couldn't be any further from the original language - the Chittagong and sylhet dialect. Bengali is spoken in Bangladesh and parts of India. But these two dialects are spoken in the Chittagong and Sylhet regions of Bangladesh. if you make another video on this topic in the future, make sure to include these two dialects.
I went to class with a Bosnian guy for some time. He once spoke in his native language from Bosnia, so I asked him what it was. He simply called the language "Yougoslavian", so apparently there are some people who don't care as much, at least among people I've met who don't live in the region.
It's quite unusual to refer to the language as Yugoslav... we either use our ethnic names, or just 'naši' or 'naški' (ours). As far as I can remember, that was so even before 1991. The term 'Serbo-Croatian' was official back then, but artificial and, I'd say, uncommon in everyday speech.
The modern Sinitic languages have not developed separately from Proto-Sinitic. The ancient Chinese dialects did, but the modern languages have all developed from what is known as middle Chinese. In fact, none of the dialectal diversity of the language we call ancient Chinese lives on. The only form that has had linguistic descendants is the one that gave us middle Chinese, and that is the one all modern sinitic languages have come from.
7:05 not necessarily. if a moroccan spoke slowly he/she will be understood to a great extent people of morocco usually use really old arabic words that are not used in daily conversations across other dialects which makes it harder for other arabs to decipher. not to mention how fast they talk. in fact, one could argue that current dialects are closer to quranic arabic than MSA itself
Hit the nail on the head, my biggest pet peeve when people talk about African “dialects” as if before colonization no one knew how to speak a real language 🤔
Not a hot take at all. I think a hot take would be the written chinese language, is different from all spoken chinese languages, so even if someone only speaks one, they end up learning another just to be able to write Further ruffling feathers, I reject the idea that china was a country for thousands of years. I consider it a pretty recent unification given the landmass size, population densities, cultural hubs, and language evolution are all basically on par with the entirety of europe. If you have a bunch of kings warring, not civil wars, then you aint one homogeneous country fam
@@groot-z3d Same "we are so ancient that we deserve a different standard" argument from Chinese. Funny, I never hear Indians or Egyptians claiming the same and they're just as old as China is. It's not about the west trying to "Balkanize" china. It's about China wanting to bully and enforce its political will because "we are better because we are ancient and deserve special treatment than everyone else." Once again, Egypt, India, Iran etc NEVER claim this and are just as old as China.
China's not a country for thousands of years, but it is the Chinese civilisation that has endured for thousands of years. All these kings fought to claim "天下" （all under heaven) which is a term used to refer to China proper since ancient times.
Small correction Croatian uses exclusively the latin alphabet, while in the other three both are official, though latin is dominating in the digital age
More about hindi and urdu: Their classification as different languages is not purely politcal,in spoken they are almost the same but more formal urdu sounds like alot like persian and bit like arabic and has alot of prepositions taken from Persian and more formal hindi sounds alot like sanskrit diverging into seperate langauges Urdu has alot of sounds not present in hindi, z/ز , f/ف ,kh/خ(unvoiced) ,gh/غ(voiced like french R), zh/ژ(like french "j") q/ق(k but from back of the throat) Hindi adds a dot to pre existing letter to represent these sounds ,i have seen it for learning videos hindi to urdu Urdu's identity is deeply invested in Islam,alot of words might have came directly from Quran, whereas hindi's identity is deeply invested in hinduism. moreover alot speakers speak slang hindustani which is highly influenced by english, they will say things like "Swim karo(swim)" at this point this is not even hindi or urdu but a variant of hindustani influenced by english. As a Urdu speaker I was not able to understand some or alot of hindi sentences because the speaker used proper Hindi not english influenced Hindustani. Moreover as a urdu speaker i learned persian within 1 years but only because i took 3 months break otherwise 8 months,farsi has alot of words shared with urdu so i dont even change 80-90% of the words when switching between them. so in conclusion,yes in spoken almost the same language but not in formal. I recognise them as same in almost spoken but as someone that learned persian and has heard formal hindi i recognise them as seperate in formal.
that's basically europe for you they are still considered dialects though, Serbia has both writing systems by the way ! Bulgarian and Macedonian is a similar history... Arabic dialects aren't mutually intelligible though germanic languages are very similar if the same brach is addressed then set have their own micro languages and dialects and those are culturally diffrent... Portuguese is brought to brazil and not culturally developed on brazil you cannot make those comparisons... slavic languages are grammatically different but often have almost no problem to understand each other.. anyhow You got a sub..
Bhra, this is the same thing with Punjabi, Dogri, Kangri, and Landha; especially Punjabi and Dogri are extremely close that people that I’ve talked to have said they’re extremely easy to understand each other; Punjabi and Dogri is like Portuguese and Galician languages that are very close dialects with people that see each other as distinct people 🥲
There's a language called Rajbanshi spoken in Nepal, that, in Bangladesh, is only considered a dialect of Bengali. It's a really pretty language, that's disappearing gradually, unfortunately.
Yue = Cantonese, in Mandarin it's usually referred to as yue yu, the second part meaning language, while hua (speech, tongue, dialect) is used to refer to most other varieties, including "Mandarin", which is called Standard Speech. Also, the picture in 1:31 shows an ethnic minority whose native language isn't (closely) related to Chinese at all.
The "what is your name" is not a solid example, because they are asking different questions, especially in Wu. Wu is asking "please (allow me to) ask what is your surname" as opposed to the other two asking "what is your name". On top of that, the other two are asking slightly differently also. If the question were asked in the exact same way, they would be: Mandarin "ni jiao shenme mingzi" Yue/Cantonese "nei giu sammo mingzi" Also, Chinese do not consider their respective mother tongues to be dialects of Mandarin, they/we consider Mandarin to be one of the dialects instated as the common language.
1:12 i wonder if they only look like completely different languages because they use different phrases. Like i could say “what is your name” but i could use a couple of different words and it would look different but still have the same meaning, like “what do you call yourself?” Or “how may i address you?”
One thing I’ve heard before is that Serbo-Croatian being multiple languages is like if English was considered different languages in all the different countries it’s spoken in.
I don't really understand why Swiss German is considered to be a dialect and Yiddish for example is considered to be a language. I think it has more to do with the fact that Swiss German was never really written down that much and Swiss people always learn to read and write standard German instead whereas Yiddish was passed on in the Hebrew script which made it more secluded. Anyway that's just my theory, but I can say that as a German speaker Swiss is NOT necessarily easier easier to understand than Yiddish....
Saw a post on Instagram calling Chinese a language. Tried telling them basically the same thing that they're talking about Mandarin and there are other Chineae dialects and i got absolutely massacred even by Chinese people lol. Guess they all had a heart attack and took it personally when a Westerner teaches them a fact about their own language 😂
I do consider it a separate language. If Dutch and even Luxembourgish get to be classified as their own languages, so should austro-bavarian and Alemannic/swiss german
Most Dutch people I’ve heard from say Frisian is a pretty different language. They just have a lot in common culturally. But you are right, the Frisians are the closest relatives of the English
@presseagainidareyou4704 as a frisian myself ive heard countless people say it is a dialect and personally that annoys me so thats where this comes from i guess xd
Punjabi is also a "macrolanguage" i.e it has many languages under it's name Punjabi is usually divided into Charhdi (Eastern) and Lahndi (Western) Charhdi is often considered a single language with it's Majhi dialect being standard But Lahndi is further divided into Southern (Seraiki, with Multani being standard dialect), Central (Panjistani, with Northern Pothwari being standard) and Northern (Hindko, with Abbotabadi being standard)
bro left us with homework
Fr
Lmao
"A speaker of Norwegian and a speaker of Swedish usually have no trouble communicating..."
Of course, both have trouble communicating with the Danish. The Danish language being, of course, a dialect of toddler babbling.
danes have trouble communicating with other danes as well, so communication in general seems to be a problem for our southern siblings.
As a Dane I am absolutely infuriated with the sheer accuracy of this statement.
no wonder the immigrants are hard to adapt.
They don’t have any issue communicating because they all also speak English
@@ethanodell8044 True, but if a speaker, speaks slow and both have a genuine willingness to understand eachother then it'll be all fine. But of course, there are words that differ but they are pretty easy to catch up with and just a little bit of exposure to the other languages and you'll be able to understand :) (Dane living in Sweden)
If you ever make a part 2 of this, you should consider including Malay (Bahasa Melayu) and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia). These two languages are so similar that a Malaysian and an Indonesian could effortlessly have a full conversation without any proper education of the other's language. It's like the linguistic equivalent of Hindi and Urdu-historically a single language, but split into two later on. The split happened in 1928 during the Second Youth Congress (Kongres Pemuda II), when Indonesian nationalists decided to adopt a standardized form of Malay (specifically the Johor-Riau dialect) and renamed it to "Bahasa Indonesia" to forge a distinct national identity for the new nation.
Even though the two languages have grown apart a bit, especially in vocabulary due to the influence from local languages in Indonesia (e.g. Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese), they're still practically identical. I was born in Malaysia and never formally learned Indonesian, yet I can still understand nearly every single word they say. To us Malaysians, Indonesian often sounds like the formal standard Malay we're taught at school, just a little bit more 'unique' sounding, especially by how they pronounce some words.
As an Indonesian, i agree. But unlike Hindi and Urdu, Bahasa Indonesia and Melayu is the most similar in their standard form.
As a Sabahan Malay dialect speaker, I often understand Indonesian more than Kuala Lumpur/Selangor Malay dialect 😂😂
@@JosephPrabenon oh yeah? I heard from some Indonesian friends that went to Sabah that Sabahnese dialect is easier to understand than peninsular malay
@@noname-vp6vf Definitely! Most of the time, Indonesians and Sabahans pronounce the words like how they're spelt, so it's really not that hard to understand each other. On the other hand, most Malay dialects like Central Malay (K.L, Selangor, etc.) and Southern Malay (Johor, Melaka, etc.) have weird pronunciations on certain words. 😁😁 For example, whenever a word ends with 'a', they pronounce it as a schwa.
Malaysian mix Indonesian here! Up!
Yeah, Malaysian and Indonesian language is merely political.
Just like Serbs, Bosniaks, Croats and Montenegran (or whatev),
we Malaysians and Indonesian will make sure you know the language is distinct🤣
If Sabahan, Kelantanese and (Strait) Malay can adopt one language,
If Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, Acehnese, Buginese can adopt one official language,
I know Malaysia and Indonesia can!
I was going into this video fully expecting you to dunk on Afrikaans. It's good to see someone who knows what they're talkin about.
Afrikaans doesn’t exist. I remember researching Wikipedia for school and the first option for language was Afrikaans. I always thought it was some sort of joke because it’s literally Dutch but the words are spelt like how a 4 year old would spell it.
Dutch people making fun of Afrikaans is pretty brave
I have been speaking Afrikaans my whole life. It's a distinct language that's been developing separately from Dutch for centuries. Many Malay, Portuguese, and Bantu influences. The grammar is pretty different (for example, we almost always use perfect past tense), and Afrikaans has gone through a significant vowel shift.
@@aspookyeel I don't have any problem with Dutch people. Most of them are really nice. It's English people who should watch out when making fun of Afrikaans.
@@wintutorials2282 afrikaans sounds like a sexy grizzled cowboy language, while dutch sounds like a whimsical fairytale gnome language
dawg educated us and gave us a homework 😭
As a Bosnian, I can safely say that the shared language of all Arabs, Yugoslavs, and Turks is in fact German
for Chinese, it's funny because now Taiwan is calling their dialect of Hokkien (southern Min) as Taiwanese, and considers it a distinct language that deserves a separate name from Hokkien, when it's just Hokkien with small differences.
💀
Literally Hokkien exists on Fujian too legit Taiwanese Hokkien is a word it's basically Hokkien but Taiwanese and Fujianese Hokkien would be called Fujianese Hokkien. Also we gonna mention Teochew or Hainanese Min?
Hokkien is completely different from Mandarin
💀
I think OP mixed things up here.
1) What OP is trying to say: On the identification of name: Progressive(?) linguists are arguing it should be called "Taiwanese" instead of "Hokkien" due to its vocabulary differences and loanwords, but does not deny the fact that it originates within Hokkien. This can be mirrored to how Latin Spanish/Brazillian Portuguese wants its own recognition instead of being simply called "Spanish/Portuguese", but never denies that it is from Spanish/Portugese.
2) As @hayabusa1329 has said, on the identification of dialect/language: They are calling it a distinct language from "Chinese(漢語)", and not from Hokkien. This can be seen as before, Hokkien is considered inferior to Mandarin Chinese, where Mandarin is a 'language' and Hokkien a 'dialect', now they are put to the same status, hence now BOTH are not a dialect and a "national language" status in the ROC.
You can see OP mixed up concepts 1 and 2. I hope this clears things up, and prevent further misinformation.
“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy behind it.”
Yupp, pretty much.
serbia doesnt have navy.
@@rizkyadiyanto7922, I think you didnʼt understand the metaphor...
american is a language and icelandic a dialect
ok boomer
That's an (ab)used quote from the linguist Max Weinreich, describing languages in a European context and his Euro(centric) worldview. It doesn't account for a country like China, which fits roughly nine Europes into it and was an empire much like Rome with many different ethnolinguistic groups even within the Han.
The assertion that you need military to form a language is an outdated scholarly and academic concept. It's an anachronism because many West African states and native American tribes have separate languages, the modern definition is based on mutual intelligibility. US English is not a separate language from UK English or Australian English. There are 7,100 to 7,164 languages and only 206 UN recognized nation states. How do you account for that?
You can't, because the quote was made by an ignoramus.
My Hindi and Urdu friends speak to each other in their tongues and have no trouble understanding each other. They even talk to Punjabi and Gujarati people and seem to have no trouble understanding them despite not using the same language.
They speak the common tongue Hindustani, the standard versions of each language are now mutually unintelligible
gujarati and punjabi are much harder to understand but we get like 50% of it lmfao when we speak to other hindustani speakers as long as you don't use big formal words it's very easy to communicate
We draw the line when millions of people claim that their 'language' is not a dialect. It's merely political. Great content and editing btw.
There are languages spoken by literally hundreds of people.
there's not a quota
@@FlagAnthem i did not say otherwise. What I said is when millions of people say that their dialect should be treated as a language we just comply with it.
@@FlagAnthemthere's a language spoken by 5 people and nobody's calling it a dialect (that could also be because it's a language isolate wildly different from anything else nearby)
you said it was "merely" the case. no it's not
no, that's not the case in linguistics, nobody in any serious setting uses political definitions for languages. There are nearly dying languages with 5-12 people left which are isolates spoken by a few angry people who hate each other because they're humans.
Wait until you look at the online wars started over arguments about Malay vs Standard Bahasa vs Bahasa Indonesia
My grandparents can't even understand Mandarin and they're native to Guangdong (where Cantonese is spoken), it gets even crazier when neither Cantonese nor Mandarin are mutually intelligible with Hakka, Teochew, Shanghainese, or Min Taiwanese
It's interesting and cool though
4:52 actually that's incorrect, Serbian (and Montenegrin which, unlike the other varieties, has no official recognition anywhere outside of areas of Montenegro) is written in the latin script as well, these days it's actually more common to read serbian texts in latin than it is to read them in cyrillic since most signs, books, websites and messages online are written in latin for convenience, out of the habit of the writers (why switch to a cyrillic keyboard if you wanna write sth in serbian and then back to the latin one for English when you can use the latin one for both) or for inclusivity with the other ex-yugos. This last one is usually done by writers since standard serbian in latin barely has any differences compared to standard croatian, they're comparable to the differences between British "colour" and American "color" and how British people use "pavement" while Americans use "sidewalk".
Tho I must note that this only applies to STANDARD serbian and STANDARD croatian which are both based on the SAME Shtokavian dialect, aka. the east Herzegovian sub-dialect, there are other Nashki/Serbo-Croatian dialects that are not nearly as mutually intelligible as the standard varieties are such as Chakavian, Kaikavian and Torlakian of which the last one, Torlakian, is a transitional dialect between standard Serbo-Croatian and standard Bulgarian and Kaikavian is a transitional dialect between standard Serbo-Croatian and standard Slovene.
Basically
The language is called Serbo-Croatian (colloquially called "Nashki") and is based on the Shtokavian dialect.
Its varieities are: Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian.
Its dialects are: Shtokavian, Kaikavian, Chakavian and Torlakian.
Perfect way of summing it up. The actual, natural differences between the language don’t even respect its nations’ borders.
Never seen Štokavski Kajkavski and Čakavski written in English. Also I thought Serbs use Kajkavian not Shtokavian?
Also for foreigners Nashki or Naški (might aswell write "Нашки") is kinda translated as "Ours"
@rigidchalice1252 Oh that's not how they're written in English, but I wanted people to be able to read "Kajkavski" as it's pronounced in Serbo-Croatian instead of reading "Kađkavski" since their J is our Đ.
Also no, Serbs use exclusively Shtokavian, same goes for all of Bosnia, all of Montenegro, Slavonia, Dubrovnik and the inner parts of Dalmatia (basically Lika and areas along the Bosnian border). Only areas around Zagreb use Kaikavian, while the coastal cities in Dalmatia, as well as Istria and the Adriatic islands, use Chakavian.
And yea, I again went with the mentality of "oh well, at least they'll be able to read it" so I wrote "Nashki/Naški/Нашки" tho it basically means "Our (language)" with the 'language' part being implied so it's not mentioned out loud.
I see people write on internet in Serbo-Croatian
i disagree
In the case of Portuguese, there's the complicated topic of Galician and Portuguese being either dialects of the same language (Galician-Portuguese/Galician/Portuguese) or seperate languages due to the Spanish influence on Galician in recent years. However, mutual intelligibility between both dialects is over 95% or even 98%, with both Lusophone and Galician people having no issues communicating. The reason they became classified as different languages was, ultimately, for political reasons.
The current official writing system for Galician is based off of Spanish, a seperate language, to the point sometimes it might be unnatural speach wise, and the organisation that rules over the language has even claimed certain words are incorrect due to them being "Portuguese loan words", while the Spanish loan words are accepted.
However there's a "reintegrationist" writing system based off of the Portuguese Orthographic Agreement, with characteristics exclusive to the Galician dialect like "polo/pola" while in Portuguese "pelo/pela", "cançom" instead of "canção", and so on, and words closer to the Galician spoken before the heavier Spanish influence (sometimes adapted from Portuguese).
2:05 there is NO SUCH THING as emilianromagnol, it's a linguistic classification of close languages (the Emilian languages, Romagnol and, arguably, the Gallopicene). Saying it's a language is like saying you speak Anglofrisian instead of English
3:00 apart that we are talking about 1300s Florentine which is totally not the same as MODERN Florentine (no,, Dante did not say "la hoha hola hon la hannucia horta horta" and would totally feel more at home in Corsica), Italian was already around as a standardized language since 1600.
What's the earliest record of 'la gorgia Toscana', do you know?
Well, as a person from Taiwan, I can say that the map at 0:15 is largely wrong about the situation in Taiwan. We speak Mandarin in everyday life, only an extremely small group of the people refuse to speak Mandarin to communicate with others. And funnily enough, the same group of people will also be very offended by the fact that the map implies "Taiwanese" (mostly Hokkien) has anything to do with China.
"Research and discuss with your partner" ass ending 😭
Another example similar to the Hindustani one is Bahasa Melayu (Malaysia) and Bahasa Indonesia. Both are derived from the Johor-Riau Melayu which was a common trade language in the region. Really the reason why they are considered as 2 separate language is because of political reasons (Indonesians revere Bahasa Indonesia as a part of their national identity). Unlike Hindi and Urdu where the standard form is different and the vernacular form is similar, it is the other way around for Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu.
Thanks for pointing this out. I’m Otomi from central Mexico. The early Spanish colonial period was when my language was still one dialectal continuum. The 300,000 speakers we have today, can actually be split into multiple language groups with low intelligibility between each other.some linguists have declared them all variants, but they themselves cannot understand early Otomi colonial texts. The Otomi language of precortesian times of 1518 has become to these modern variants, what Classical Latin is to the Romance languages .
Hindi and urdu are literally the same in casual form XD, great video bruv
It's not "casual" it's Hindustani
The standard versions are the only proper ones and are mutually unintelligible
@@varoonnone7159 ooh baby with that profile picture and whatever word soup you just wrote i'm not going to listen to you 😭
@@msruag
You love it ? I knew you would be a great fan
Philippines has a very similar situation with China but with the Filipino language. It is literally just the Manila dialect of Tagalog, one out of 11 widely spoken PH languages, and out of 130 total PH languages in the country. Filipino and English both act as lingua franca, and in some places you may find people who know more English than Filipino.
Great video, u deserve more views!!!!
Also remember me as one of your first subscribers😂
Montenegro's chill as fuck
You can also find a similar situation in the Malay language. In Malaysia, the Malay language is known as "Bahasa Malaysia", with more of modern English loanwords whereas in Indonesia, the language is known as "Bahasa Indonesia" (with more of Dutch loanwords). But both of these languages are actually "Bahasa Melayu". The separation in this language is due to political influence.
I love the edition of this video 😂😂😂😂 You've got the brains and the sense of humour, mate💯💯
awesome video
Great video!!!!
This happens with Catalan too, many people in Valencia will crucify you if you dare to say that they speak the same language as Catalans even though there are no many differences between one another and that "valencian" is actually spoken in Catalonia too (they speak the occidental branch of the language that it's also spoken in inner Catalonia). In the Balearic Islands the same thing happens with some people telling you that they speak Mallorcan (or their respective insular dialect) rather than Catalan.
The same case can be done with Portuguese - Galician.
4:23 ignore the voice crack GOT MY DYING😂😂😂😂😂
As a native speaker of Cantonese, I thank you so much for highlighting the importance of calling those Sinitic languages. Unfortunately, due to political reason, in particular the authoritarian dictatorship of Mainland China, many Mainland Chinese people who have been brainwashed by the communist regime for over 7 decades, believe that all those Sinitic languages are inferior to Mandarin Chinese and they look down on them as mere dialects. Politics should have nothing to do with linguistic science. But, of course, in Mainland China, politics is everything. They even rewrite history, archaeology, anthropology, and even geography.
Re. Croatian, Serbian etc. As for the tensions, I went to Serbia about 10 years ago, spoke to everyone in my Croatian accent, and had no problems at all... everyone was massively polite and kind, hospitable etc. there. As for the language, I have the impression outsiders don't really get this but that doesn't stop them from having an opinion. The thing is Croatian, Serbian, Bosniak and Montenegrin are (1) four distinct standard varieties all based on a dialect group called Štokavian; (2) four collections of various dialects some of which are very similar, while some are quite divergent and incomprehensible to anyone except those who speak them. Anyway, the four standard varieties differ in pronunciation, and quite significantly in technical vocabulary - and this wasn't made up in the 1990s, at least in the case of Serbian and Croatian, as anyone can see by having a look at a few books printed in the 1970s. However, being based on the same dialect type, purely linguistically these four standards constitute a single language. The problem is that since they're spoken by four nations, there isn't and has never been a single name for this language. Serbo-Croatian is an artificial name, made up in the 19th century. In everyday life, everyone refers and has always referred to their own language by their ethnic / national name. Of course, some people claim these are different languages - but I suppose 'different' means 'not identical' in this case.
Protip; there is no bosniak language, only Bosnian. Bosniak is an ethnicity not a language.
@@Heartstopper90 See... more evidence these are different languages :D :D :D To me, 'bosanski' (Bosnian) refers to anything from Bosnia, while 'bošnjački' (Bosniak) refers only to Bosniaks. In other words, when I hear a Bosnian accent, that's 'bosanski' even if the speaker is a Bosnian Croat or Serb, or whatever else, but if they say 'kahva' (coffee) or 'sahat' (hour), it might be 'bošnjački'. In fact, for me, 'bosanski' refers only to Bosnia and its inhabitants, i.e. not to Herzegovina, and definitely not to people who live in places such as Sandžak and identify as Bosniaks nowadays, etc. Welcome to the Balkans :)
@davidmandic3417 bošnjački ne postoji. There's only Bosnian and that's it, bošnjački jezik is not something that exists in the realm of other languages only serbs and croats from serbia and croatia use this word but it has no meaning and it also belittles us. Also only Bosnian is recognized around the world. Bosniak is not an all-encompasing word rather it's just an ethnicity.
But then again you're probably going to go full keyboard warrior now so I'm just gonna end it here.
@@Heartstopper90 Look, it's about how people speak where I'm from. In Croatia, I presume most people would describe any Bosnian accent as 'bosanski' (Bosnian), regardless of the speaker's ethnicity. That is, a Bosnian Serb's accent would be perceived and referred to as 'bosanski', rather than 'srpski', which is a word that we associate with the accents of people from Serbia. Similarly, all people from Bosnia are referred to as 'Bosanci' (Bosnians). People from Herzegovina are called 'Hercegovci' and their accents are referred to not as 'bosanski' but rather 'hercegovački'. On the other hand, 'bošnjački' (Bosniak) is used to describe specifically anything related to the 'Bošnjaci' (Bosniaks). That's as logical as anything and I don't understand what may be belittling about it.
(I'm not a warrior of any kind, since this isn't a war - I'm just sharing my opinion, which - I believe - is also the opinion of many other people.)
My favorite example is Persian. Dari, Farsi and Tajik are just one language. Far more similar than how Hindi and Urdu are similar (a lot of nouns and verbs are very different in the two languages, with Hindi being much more heavily influenced by Sanskrit as opposed to Persian). Dari, Farsi and Tajik are essentially indistinguishable.
I heard that Dari is more conservative than Farsi and Tajik, and Tajik undoubtedly has Russian influence due to Tajikistan being a former Soviet republic.
Dari and tajik are recognised as dailects by their own speakers, afghanis themselves all it "afghani farsi"
I'm calling it now, this channel gonna blow up
ARABIC - I have no idea whatever the fuck my neighbour is saying but we all speak the same language trust me bro.
The fact that there's actually more basis for American English and British English to be considered different languages than there is for Croatian and Bosnian is WILD (the former is actually more divergent than the latter)
That’s the interesting thing about languages and dialects: they’re determined by arbitrary boundaries. Take a Latin speaker in Roman Hispania and draw a lineage all the way to their Spanish speaking descendant in modern day Spain. There was never a time when a Latin speaking mother gave birth to a Spanish speaking child. Almost just like the process of speciation in biology, language development is so gradual and blurry that the boxes we try to draw around them are necessarily arbitrary.
This is false. Established modern conventions put language separation as different orthography (in Europe) to mutual intelligibility. Any attempt otherwise is a play at semantics or an attempt to degrade the metaphysics between languages and dialects in a way that does not reflect reality.
The issue is that the Sinitic Languages are further apart than Latin languages are from each other by leaps and bounds from a sound perspective except for rhyming schemes and are much further apart geographically. They are not mutually intelligible and even have separate non intelligible orthography (many linguists use these as speciation points). The line being arbitrary is entirely wrong; the line exists in a fuzzy medium gray between a very obvious white and black - for example, calling English a dialect of Chinese or Chinese a dialect of English would be absurd.
These are even from a philosophical perspective languages in the sense that they stem from Middle Chinese and the branches are brother and sister to one another instead of mother and father.
Latin gave birth to Spanish and the other romance languages. This is not true for Chinese. Mandarin and Cantonese are siblings, and Middle Chinese has been extinct for a thousand years. In terms of Koreans to China, Joseon and the Qing state, were still using a form of written Chinese Koreans could not speak to talk to the Qing, because the language was a written cultural tradition
Cantonese, if it were counted separately, has by some metrics more speakers than multiple of the popular languages speakers.
@@shinybreloom4027 Metaphysics doesn't concern me at all. "Established modern conventions" establishing language separation is still just a convention. The existence of white and black still doesn't remove the fuzzy medium gray. If you want to take a Jordan Peterson-esque prescriptivist approach in a descriptivist field, I don't know what to tell you.
Same in Poland, where debate about "Silesian" beaing dialect or language is still ongoing, and heavily connected to politics
For the last one: As a German who speaks both Norwegian and German I can tell you the languages are pretty similar. Learning Norwegian was quite easy as you can guess a words meaning with like 60% accuracy at the start and when you know more about the language it will get easier.
Love the vid bro, keep em coming)))
Nice.
FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT! This is one of my biggest frustrations. People call languages dialects either for selfish political reasons or just out of convenience. This is so ignorant! When people tell me “I’m trying to learn Chinese,” I instantly look at them and I sometimes can’t refrain from asking “Which kind of «Chinese» are we talking about, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Gan?” And they just stare at me like I had just summoned a demon. Plus when I hear ill informed people say stuff like “the Indian language.” This makes my blood boil.
Great video. Great points. Standard Mandarin is the most common language in China, but in no ways the only language spoken.
This topic hits home. I have family that speaks Urdu, and insists that it’s not Hindi, when really, it damn well is. Spoken forms are nearly identical. On an other note, I studied Arabic and discovered that the reason it’s so damn hard, is because it’s not spoken by anyone, and each spoken dialect is so different from it and each other it’s hardly the same language. It was codified out of Quranic Arabic. This is exactly like pretending that Castilian, Catalan, Tuscan, Sicilian and Romanian are all Latin. Study it, then try to speak Spanish. You can’t. You have to learn a whole different spoken language. The “language vs dialect” dispute is entirely political, and born out of nationalism that really only started to come about in its modern form around 100 to 150 years ago.
7:18
I’ve heard jokes about this. Apparently, Scandinavians have no trouble understanding each other because they just speak English 😂
the Slav division adopted Standard English as a panslavic language, too.
It's a good video and good content .. why only 500 views ? even less than that
Portuguese and Galician?
🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶
The accent is significantly different. Most people I know (Galician, from Costa da Morte, i.e. northwest) would describe it as "needing to speak slowly" in order to understand each other.
The official grammar, regulated by the Real Academia Galega, is different and and unfortunately it robs us of our historical grammar (with letters such as ç).
@@IRONIKSHITFUN there are pros and cons. I think the structure is the same: Portugalego, but we dont need to interfere on each others grammar, then you need to have a grammar for Brazilian, a grammar for Portuguese, a Grammar for Galician etc.
The video ended very abruptly.
Nice vid
The difference in scripts between the Hindi and Urdu languages occurred due to Islamic rulers who ruled in India, which caused the people (mainly soldiers) speaking different languages to try and communicate with each other, leading to a same language which was spoken, but due to each community not knowing the other script, they wrote in their own scripts, causing the nearly-same language to be written in two scripts, Arabic and Devnagri, even when in practice it was the same language. The main divide between the both languages happened when the Mughals decided to keep Urdu as their court language and removed Persian, which angered many scholars and poets, so they started using more and more Persian and Arabic words instead, causing the two languages to differ a little, mainly in words used in higher classes.
The name of the language shared by Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia is "Shtokavian", which is later tagged differently in the four countries. Funny enough, Croatians could adopt their own separate language if they wanted, that being Chajkavian.
The Croatian language is split between 3 dialects: shtokavian, chakavian and kajkavian(which aren't intelligeble to one another). Standard Croatian is based on the shtokavian dialect because it has the most speakers.
love linguistics and this style of editing + u pretty much covered what i was also thinking lmao
Was just about to comment that I hate this style of editing. To each his own, I guess.
mega based for using the real persian flag
I love the way Arabs across countries insist they are speaking variations of the same language even though they can't understand each other whereas Croats and Serbs who understand each other perfectly insist they are speaking separate languages. Even though the Croat from Zagreb can understand the Serb from Belgrade more easily than he can understand some of his fellow Croats speaking "Croatian" dialects.
The encouraging thing though is that although you do occasionally come across the odd nationalist online mostly younger people from the ex-Yugoslav countries are more chill about this point and are happy to admit they are more dialects than languages.
As a native speaker of English when I first started learning Serbo-Croat or BCS as it's often called now I realised quickly that the differences between the two languages were not as big as the differences between various forms of English and Spanish or even French if you include Québec French. However, speakers of these dialects have no problem referring to them as English, Spanish or French because it's a recognition of where the language originated. With Serbo-Croat you can't pinpoint the name of a country and/or people where the language first developed so each nation as they went their own way just called it 'our' language and named it after themselves.
That's because South Slavic dialects are grouped into languages based on their speakers' ethnicity, since purely linguistic criteria simply don't work here. That's why a Croatian dialect can be completely impenetrable to other Croats, but they can understand most Serbian dialects (almost) perfectly. And the other way round. The differences between Croatian and Serbian standards aren't as small as people think. I'd say, lexically, there are more differences than between standard American and UK English... even though the situation is complex, because you get various standard Serbian words that are also used in certain Croatian dialects, or some words that are common in Croatia but they sound archaic or bookish to Serbs, etc.
European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese are increasingly different. A Brazilian from the northeast and a Portuguese from Madeira would probably have a hard time understanding each other in spoken language. I think it’s still the same language, but given another 500 years of divergence and they will definitely be distinct languages from each other.
They're still understandable (even though we brazilians usually have a hard time because we aren't really exposed to eu. portuguese in media, but after 10min. talking we get used to it) , but the way the portuguese speak can sound very unnatural / book-ish depending on the brazilian dialect / sociolect.
Some brazilian dialects aren't that significantly different from the standard language, while others don't really match at all and there can be a huge gap between writing- speaking.
Because generally we tend to use extremely analitical constructions in informality, especially in verbs, sometimes using 2/ 3/4 verbs when you'd only need 1 in the standard language; and also eliminating any redundant agreement (ex: only indicating plurality by the article / elominating any person conjugation except 1st Person Singular).
Portuguese was spoken here since the begining of colonization, but it wasn't a uniform proccess, so some regions were forced into assimilating more recently. Some brazilian dialects also preserve some Old Portuguese archaisms (ex: Rhotacism, more nasal vowels).
Tecnically they could be considered different languages, given that there are languages w/ less differences than this, but it's more benefitial for Brazil to keep econonic ties with the lusophone world.
@ caraca véi vc manja de linguística. Eu só fiz uma análise básica e vc meteu ciência no discurso. Parabéns 👏
From my amateurish learning of Sinitic/Chinese languages being called dialects, I think this is just how common people perceived them as Chinese linguist also recognized them as separate languages within sinitic family. But it didn't helped that within these languages there are dialects that unintelligible to the prestige dialect speaker (like how both Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong speaks Mandarin but with their thick local accent that makes them almost unintelligible for modern speaker). Since China is continuous and the border between these (unintelligible) dialects often blur with the language border itself, the dialect misnomer stuck within the common consciousness.
We are all dialects of proto-afro-asian-euro-austro-american anyways
You skirted around this but it's often political in nature if it is a 'language' or a 'dialect'. From North America here are two examples: Inuktut (Inuit language collective term) is a dialect continuum of languages with many dialects getting their own language name. So is Nehiyawewin (Cree-Y dialect spelling) a dialect continuum without different dialects getting their own name. The Ryukyuan languages of Japan are considered dialects of Japanese and are another case of the languages dying out. There are a lot of other ones around the world.
One last language example to consider: Low German (means so many different things) and High German. Or how German and Dutch dialects near their borders are more mutually intelligible to each other than they are to the standard of their respective language.
im a native urdu speaker and yeah thats pretty much the case a native hindi speaker probably cant understand urdu literature and vice versa but in normal everyday conversation we have 0 problems especially these days considering that theres a major influence of english which further bridges the gap
Indonesian and Malaysian Malay
2:42 This Guy wrote "This Book". Good luck with googling.
Cool video, but you forgot to mention forgot mention two dialects of Bengali which couldn't be any further from the original language - the Chittagong and sylhet dialect. Bengali is spoken in Bangladesh and parts of India. But these two dialects are spoken in the Chittagong and Sylhet regions of Bangladesh. if you make another video on this topic in the future, make sure to include these two dialects.
Meanwhile in The Philippines:
- “Do we speak a dialect or a Language?”
- “I don’t even know, bro”
I went to class with a Bosnian guy for some time. He once spoke in his native language from Bosnia, so I asked him what it was. He simply called the language "Yougoslavian", so apparently there are some people who don't care as much, at least among people I've met who don't live in the region.
It's quite unusual to refer to the language as Yugoslav... we either use our ethnic names, or just 'naši' or 'naški' (ours). As far as I can remember, that was so even before 1991. The term 'Serbo-Croatian' was official back then, but artificial and, I'd say, uncommon in everyday speech.
The modern Sinitic languages have not developed separately from Proto-Sinitic. The ancient Chinese dialects did, but the modern languages have all developed from what is known as middle Chinese. In fact, none of the dialectal diversity of the language we call ancient Chinese lives on. The only form that has had linguistic descendants is the one that gave us middle Chinese, and that is the one all modern sinitic languages have come from.
7:05 not necessarily. if a moroccan spoke slowly he/she will be understood to a great extent
people of morocco usually use really old arabic words that are not used in daily conversations across other dialects which makes it harder for other arabs to decipher. not to mention how fast they talk.
in fact, one could argue that current dialects are closer to quranic arabic than MSA itself
Hit the nail on the head, my biggest pet peeve when people talk about African “dialects” as if before colonization no one knew how to speak a real language 🤔
First clip of the video 0:00 is in Korea, not China btw
Not a hot take at all. I think a hot take would be the written chinese language, is different from all spoken chinese languages, so even if someone only speaks one, they end up learning another just to be able to write
Further ruffling feathers, I reject the idea that china was a country for thousands of years. I consider it a pretty recent unification given the landmass size, population densities, cultural hubs, and language evolution are all basically on par with the entirety of europe.
If you have a bunch of kings warring, not civil wars, then you aint one homogeneous country fam
汉字的保留在中国人的历史认同上帮了很大的忙。如果在过去的某一个时间点中国人突然弃用了表意的汉字而改用表音的字母来书写汉语，那么当今的中国人在看到几千年前的古籍时只会下意识地觉得这是古代某个“国家”的文字而不是某个“朝代”的。“不幸”的是，中国人并没有那么做。
西方世界及westoids无论如何觊觎巴尔干化中国，都改变不了当代中国人普遍愿意接受华夏文明朝代更迭但一脉相承、中国各地各民族和而不同美美与共的事实。这是某些连中国字都看不懂但总自诩深谙中国历史的人永远都无法感同身受的。
@@groot-z3d Same "we are so ancient that we deserve a different standard" argument from Chinese. Funny, I never hear Indians or Egyptians claiming the same and they're just as old as China is. It's not about the west trying to "Balkanize" china. It's about China wanting to bully and enforce its political will because "we are better because we are ancient and deserve special treatment than everyone else." Once again, Egypt, India, Iran etc NEVER claim this and are just as old as China.
It's not recent when China was first unified during the Qin dynasty.
China's not a country for thousands of years, but it is the Chinese civilisation that has endured for thousands of years. All these kings fought to claim "天下" （all under heaven) which is a term used to refer to China proper since ancient times.
Do you, like... Not know any of the major Chinese dynasties then? Not even by name?
ngl as a brazilian portuguese speaker i can understand spanish more than i can understand european portuguese
One day my son, You are gonna be popular. And this channel is gonna blow up .....
I didn't even notice this had less than 10k views💀💀💀
Small correction
Croatian uses exclusively the latin alphabet, while in the other three both are official, though latin is dominating in the digital age
More about hindi and urdu:
Their classification as different languages is not purely politcal,in spoken they are almost the same but more formal urdu sounds like alot like persian and bit like arabic and has alot of prepositions taken from Persian and more formal hindi sounds alot like sanskrit diverging into seperate langauges
Urdu has alot of sounds not present in hindi,
z/ز ,
f/ف
,kh/خ(unvoiced)
,gh/غ(voiced like french R),
zh/ژ(like french "j")
q/ق(k but from back of the throat)
Hindi adds a dot to pre existing letter to represent these sounds ,i have seen it for learning videos hindi to urdu
Urdu's identity is deeply invested in Islam,alot of words might have came directly from Quran, whereas hindi's identity is deeply invested in hinduism.
moreover alot speakers speak slang hindustani which is highly influenced by english, they will say things like "Swim karo(swim)" at this point this is not even hindi or urdu but a variant of hindustani influenced by english.
As a Urdu speaker I was not able to understand some or alot of hindi sentences because the speaker used proper Hindi not english influenced Hindustani.
Moreover as a urdu speaker i learned persian within 1 years but only because i took 3 months break otherwise 8 months,farsi has alot of words shared with urdu so i dont even change 80-90% of the words when switching between them.
so in conclusion,yes in spoken almost the same language but not in formal. I recognise them as same in almost spoken but as someone that learned persian and has heard formal hindi i recognise them as seperate in formal.
I'm English and yet I can still follow the quaint language of this North American!
that's basically europe for you they are still considered dialects though, Serbia has both writing systems by the way ! Bulgarian and Macedonian is a similar history... Arabic dialects aren't mutually intelligible though germanic languages are very similar if the same brach is addressed then set have their own micro languages and dialects and those are culturally diffrent... Portuguese is brought to brazil and not culturally developed on brazil you cannot make those comparisons... slavic languages are grammatically different but often have almost no problem to understand each other.. anyhow You got a sub..
nice
Bhra, this is the same thing with Punjabi, Dogri, Kangri, and Landha; especially Punjabi and Dogri are extremely close that people that I’ve talked to have said they’re extremely easy to understand each other; Punjabi and Dogri is like Portuguese and Galician languages that are very close dialects with people that see each other as distinct people 🥲
There's a language called Rajbanshi spoken in Nepal, that, in Bangladesh, is only considered a dialect of Bengali. It's a really pretty language, that's disappearing gradually, unfortunately.
Yue = Cantonese, in Mandarin it's usually referred to as yue yu, the second part meaning language, while hua (speech, tongue, dialect) is used to refer to most other varieties, including "Mandarin", which is called Standard Speech.
Also, the picture in 1:31 shows an ethnic minority whose native language isn't (closely) related to Chinese at all.
Hindi and Urdu can become Hirdu
Hindustani
A lot of Bosnians settled in my home town, they all said it was just one language.
4:56 Bosnian is written in CYRYLLIC AND LATIN ALPHABET!!!
The "what is your name" is not a solid example, because they are asking different questions, especially in Wu. Wu is asking "please (allow me to) ask what is your surname" as opposed to the other two asking "what is your name". On top of that, the other two are asking slightly differently also. If the question were asked in the exact same way, they would be:
Mandarin "ni jiao shenme mingzi"
Yue/Cantonese "nei giu sammo mingzi"
Also, Chinese do not consider their respective mother tongues to be dialects of Mandarin, they/we consider Mandarin to be one of the dialects instated as the common language.
1:12 i wonder if they only look like completely different languages because they use different phrases. Like i could say “what is your name” but i could use a couple of different words and it would look different but still have the same meaning, like “what do you call yourself?” Or “how may i address you?”
What a cliffhanger
One thing I’ve heard before is that Serbo-Croatian being multiple languages is like if English was considered different languages in all the different countries it’s spoken in.
I don't really understand why Swiss German is considered to be a dialect and Yiddish for example is considered to be a language. I think it has more to do with the fact that Swiss German was never really written down that much and Swiss people always learn to read and write standard German instead whereas Yiddish was passed on in the Hebrew script which made it more secluded. Anyway that's just my theory, but I can say that as a German speaker Swiss is NOT necessarily easier easier to understand than Yiddish....
Saw a post on Instagram calling Chinese a language. Tried telling them basically the same thing that they're talking about Mandarin and there are other Chineae dialects and i got absolutely massacred even by Chinese people lol. Guess they all had a heart attack and took it personally when a Westerner teaches them a fact about their own language 😂
Discover that doesn't exist:
Serbo-Croatian, Arabic
Yeah the truth is the difference between language and dialect is mostly political
I'm a hongkonger, I found Vietnamese and Japanese more intellectual than Mandarin if I didn't learn Mandarin in school
Bro is so underrated
If serbocroatian can be 4 languages, baverian should also be it's own language
it is
I do consider it a separate language. If Dutch and even Luxembourgish get to be classified as their own languages, so should austro-bavarian and Alemannic/swiss german
I agree. I hate it when people say 'I speak 6 languages' oh what are they? "high german and low german" (i'm just kind of joking but still)
frisian also is often confused as a dialect from dutch but it is not i think actually that it is more closely related to english
Most Dutch people I’ve heard from say Frisian is a pretty different language. They just have a lot in common culturally.
But you are right, the Frisians are the closest relatives of the English
@presseagainidareyou4704 as a frisian myself ive heard countless people say it is a dialect and personally that annoys me so thats where this comes from i guess xd
i love frisian, definitely a language that deserves more recognition, shout out
Devanagari is better suited than Arabic script to represent Hindustani
Punjabi is also a "macrolanguage" i.e it has many languages under it's name
Punjabi is usually divided into Charhdi (Eastern) and Lahndi (Western)
Charhdi is often considered a single language with it's Majhi dialect being standard
But Lahndi is further divided into Southern (Seraiki, with Multani being standard dialect), Central (Panjistani, with Northern Pothwari being standard) and Northern (Hindko, with Abbotabadi being standard)
Charhdi:
• Majhi
• Malwai
• Doabi
• Jatki
• Bhattiani
• Powadhi
• Pachadi
• Jaangli
• Darhabi
• Lohri
• Ravichi
• Sutleji
• Barvi
• Lamochri
• Chenavri
• Bilaspuri
[Dialect continuums with:
Southern Lahndi; Jhangvi
Central Lahndi; Shahpuri
Northern Lahndi; Gojri
Rajasthani; Cholistani, Bhattiani, Rangri
Haryanvi; Rathi, Bagri, Rohtki
Himachali; Bhatiali, Kundeali, Shakargarhi]
Lahndi:-
• Northern Lahndi (Hindko):
•• Northern Hindko;
••• Hazarewali
••• Tinauli
••• Kaghani
••• Parmi
••• Uri
•• Southern Hindko;
••• Chachi
••• Ghebi
••• Dhanni
••• Sohani
••• Awankari
••• Peshori
••• Kohati
••• Jandali
••• Khewri
• Central Lahndi (Panjistani):
•• Pothwari;
••• Gujarkhani
••• Jehlmi
••• Mirpuri
••• Dadyali
••• Pindiwali
•• Pahari;
••• Dhundi Kareli
••• Punchi
••• Chibhali
• Southern Lahndi (Siraiki):
•• Sareki;
••• Multani
••• Riasti
••• Derewali
••• Thalochi
••• Mulki
••• Bahawali
•• Khetrani;
••• Jafri
••• Frakhi
• Himachali
•• Dogri
•• Kangri
•• Chambali
for anyone wondering what modi and arif alvi are saying to each other at 6:30 modi says "go to hell!" and he responds "YOU go to hell!"
One Italian language is the closest to Latin. It is Sardinian (more specifically, Nuorese Sardinian), curiously.
Im a croat, and i agree 🙋♂️