Visualising Infinity: The Trouble With Languages : Sociolinguistics

I guess I sympathize with Rob. The boundaries between individual people are easy to observe. The terms langauge and dialect are generalizations. Generalizations are useful; but often they are imaginary. An example. The German language, as spoken informally, changes on the ground every 75 miles or so to the extent that it is unintelligible between speakers from that distance apart: people from Hamburg are lost in the informal setting of a Salzburg family dinner, even though both groups claim to speak German. On the other hand, the Hamburg person can understand farmers in Holland who think they speak a different language - Dutch.

One difference between the two is that when they move to formal settings they move two difference standards of subjective "correctness" or "appropriateness".

But the distinctions are useful generalizations with social and political goals in mind - not measurable realities...

One of my favorite examples of the problem is the study of Australian Aboriginal languages. Examples exist of dialect chains where the people in village A can understand the people in village B easily and the people in village C with difficulty, but they cannot understand the people in village D or E at all. The people in village B can understand D if they struggle, but not village E. C can understand D and E. The chain goes on through F, G, H and so on. Where do you make the language boundaries? The answer is, or normal way of making generalizations abut speech starts to break down...

"Langauge" is a fiction, a generalization we use to help us with our understanding of human thought and speech. And when sound waves stop and there is silence, language exists only i the minds of individuals and means different things to different individuals. It is a conceptual crutch to help our crippled hobble through the complexity of human thought and the difficulties of communicating it.