Part I Language and Communities
The rest of
Part I Language and Communities
Book Name: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics
Writer: Ronald Ward augh
Summarized: Saeed Mojarradi Ph.D. Candidate Page 32-61
Linguistically, Serbo-Croatian is a single south Slov language Used by two groups of people, the Serbs and Croasts, With somewhat different historical, cultural and religious backgrounds. There is a third group in Bosnia, a Muslim group who speak Serbo-Croatian.
The fourth reason that mutual intelligibility cannot be used as the sole means of distinguishing dialect versus language statues is that there are sometimes unintelligible dialects which are identified by their speakers as being the same language.
You may be aware of English you cannot understand, for instance, a particularly interesting instance of unintelligibility of dialects occurs with what we call Chinese, which is generally accepted to include two main subcategories of varieties, Cantonese and Mandarin.
Although they share a writing system, Mandarin and Cantonese are not mutually intelligible in spoken discourse. Written characters are pronounced differently in the varieties although they maintain the same meaning.
Speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese consider themselves speakers of different dialects of the same language.
