Dialects as “languages”: Often what begins being considered a dialect of one language is recast as a separate “language” of its own when its speakers are incorporated into a new nation.

A. Scandinavian. Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish are official languages of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. But speakers of them can manage a conversation, and on the page, they reveal themselves as minor variations on a pattern, rather like Scots, Cornwall English, and Standard English.

The Danes initially ruled Sweden and Norway, and there was no such thing as a Swedish “language” until Sweden became independent in 1526 or a Norwegian “language” until Norway became independent in 1814. Until their independence, Sweden and Norway’s speech varieties were simply considered dialects of Danish.

B. Moldovan. Romania used to extend eastward into a little hump of land called Moldova. At first, the speech of Moldova was considered one of many nonstandard dialects of Romanian. But after Moldova was incorporated into the Soviet Union, the Soviets directed Moldovan linguists to write grammars of a new Moldovan “language,” even though many of these were just grammars of Romanian translated into Russian.

C. Different culture, different language? Hindi is spoken in India and written in the Devanagari script, while Urdu is spoken in Pakistan and written in Arabic script. Because of this and the religious and political tensions between the countries, Hindi and Urdu are treated as separate “languages” when they are, in fact, the same one. Hindi has more Sanskrit borrowings, while Urdu has more from Arabic, but these impede communication little more than the differences between American and British English.

D. Indigenous languages. The continuum nature of the language/dialect distinction is clear even when the speech varieties are not adopted as written languages and assigned by nations as single official ones.

1. Malinke, Bambara, and Dyula in West Africa. The “languages” Malinke and Bambara are spoken in a vast region spread across such West African countries as Senegal, Mali, and Guinea, alongside dozens of other languages in each country. But speakers of these languages can understand one another, as well as speakers of the Dyula “language” in Côte d’Ivoire. Only cultural affiliations determine what this one “language” is called from place to place.

2. Tourai and Aria in New Guinea. On the island of New Britain near New Guinea, there are two groups called the Tourai and the Aria. What the two groups speak appears to be the same language with minor differences on the page, and other peoples in the area learn the same language to speak to both. But while the Tourai think of the Aria as speaking a different language, the Aria think of themselves as speaking the same thing as the Tourai.