Dialect, Language, Nation1

1966/08/01 by EINAR HAUGEN, Eînar Haugen · 741 citations
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Epistemology #Historical Linguistics and Language Studies #History #Impossibility #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Linguistics #Meaning (existential) #Multilingual Education and Policy #Norm (philosophy) #Philosophy #Political science #Psychology #Sociolinguistics #Sociology #Superordinate goals #Vernacular

paper · doi:10.1525/aa.1966.68.4.02a00040

published in American Anthropologist 68(4), 922-935 (Wiley)

openalex publication_date 1966/08/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

The impossibility of stating precisely how many “languages” or “dialects” are spoken in the world is due to the ambiguities of meaning present in these terms, which is shown to stem from the original use of “dialect” to refer to the literary dialects of ancient Greece. In most usages the term “language” is superordinate to “dialed,” but the nature of this relationship may be either linguistic or social, the latter problem falling in the province of sociolinguistics. It is shown how the development of a vernacular, popularly called a dialect, into a language is intimately related to the development of writing and the growth of nationalism. This process is shown to involve the selection, codification, acceptance, and elaboration of a linguistic norm.

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