Ah well, Edward, here you are hindered by your mastery of Catalan. Sometimes linguistic weakness is a strength. A glance at any menu is enough to show the difference between the Catalan of the Balears and the ’standard’. Yet I find the Formenterencs delighted when I manage to stammer out a simple ‘Si’s plau’. (Unless of course I am speaking with, say, a waiter from Andalucia; and I met an Englishman, resident in the island for 30 years, who speaks only Castilian and claims, perhaps genuinely, total ignorance of Catalan.) No doubt they are happy to see a foreigner recognising that they have their own, non-Castilian tongue, and aren’t bothered that I am ignorant of the subtle distinctions.

The difference is that in the Ballearic islands all this is not politicised

Oh yeah; that too.

I see you’ve taken this up at greater length over at your place, but as you raise the language-as-species point here, here’s where I’ll answer it.

One sees what you’re driving at, but with respect, I think you fall victim here to the very natural tendency to carry a good metaphor farther than it can really go. The image of languages as species (and of groups of related langauges as higher-level taxa) is a powerful analogy, and for many purposes very useful. But the ‘biological species concept’ now generally accepted as (for most purposes, and for most organisms) best is precisely where the analogy stops working for languages. For, in sharp contradistinction to organisms (at least, to the ones you’re thinking of), linguistic evolution can be and often is reticulate. If languages are ’species’, they are most like the very species for which the biological concept breaks down: those prokaryotes who swap genetic materiul with other, ‘unrelated’ ’species’. (’Unrelated’ in inverted commas because, hey, if they’re swapping out bits of DNA, surely they are related in the most fundamental sense; ’species’ in ICs because by so acting, these organisms put themselves firmly outside the definition of species under the biological concept; though we may still speak of them as ’species’ using a typological concept or, frankly, simply for taxonomic convenience.)

A glance shows that Catalan and Castilian are both descendants of Latin, and pretty closely related within the family of Romance languages. And one may very legitimately carry on with the taxonomic analogy by saying that they have ’speciated’, i.e., diverged sufficiently from each other since the time of their most recent late-Latin ancestor to constitute separate languages. But another glance shows that something has happened that by definition never happens to biological species once they have gone their separate ways: they have continued to ‘exchange DNA’, as it were. Castilian has influenced Catalan, and I daresay it goes the other way as well. (Given geography and history, it would be surprising if they hadn’t done this.) And reticulate linguistic evolution isn’t limited to languages that were already related anyway: witness the influence of Turkish on modern Greek. To abuse taxonomic terminology, in linguisitcs (unlike systematic biology), a synapomorphy doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about the ‘phylogeny’ of a language.

And I think your test of the distinction between language and dialect (’Can two native speakers understand each other readily enough?’) fails often enough to be rejected. As Edward suggests, one might make a plausible if weak argument that Welsh and Breton, — invariably regarded as separate languages these days — are really related Brythonic ‘dialects’. (Certainly through early modern times, Welshmen, Cornishmen and Bretons could conduct trade, each speaking their own tongue.) Conversely, I have seen a denizen of Tennessee frustrated nearly to tears while trying to speak with Bostonians (whose speech was, to me, perfectly clear if a bit harsh). I have seen a documentary film about northern German sailors shown on German televsion with subtitles for Hochdeutsch-speakers (curiously, I had no difficulty understanding the sailors, perhaps because their Platt dialect is more closely related to English than is standard German). As for me, while I’m not a native germanophone, I’ve learned the language pretty well. And, having learnt it mostly from southerners, I have no problem understanding Bavarian backwoodsmen or Swabians who couldn’t speak ‘correct’ German with a gun to their heads; but I cannot easily understand people from Cologne when they are in full K?lsch flow (and nor, I suspect, could many Bavarians and Swabians). Gaelic is a classic example of divergent evolution; a few centuries ago, the Irish and Scots variants were regarded as the same tongue (just as the Scoti were regarded as a single people; only later did one need to begin adding clarifiers like ‘Eriugena’, and it would take a while after that for the term to be restricted to inhabitants of the one place and not the other). These days Gaeilge and G?idhlig are viewed, correctly, as separate languages (a separateness heightened by modern Irish orthographic reforms). They have ’speciated’. Still, while a Kerryman and a Harrisman would have nigh-insurmountable difficulties in communicating (except, perhaps, in English), as one reaches the border between Scots and Irish Gaelic, communication becomes possible.

So I think we may legitimately speak of ‘fuzziness at the egdes’ without worrying about the dread sorites paradox. Leaving aside the very real phenomenon of reticulate ‘inheritance’, the distinction between (say) standard German and standard Dutch is obvious enough. Get close enough to the (linguistic, not necesarily political) border, though — especially 75 or 100 years ago, when education was less widespread and mass media did not play their modern standardising role — and one sees the borders are rather more porous than those between species.

So I think I will have to defer to Scott Martens here. Linguists, it seems, are happy enough to use the language/dialect distinction as a rough ad-hoc tool, but deny it a strong objective meaning. For all the flippancy of Weinreich’s famous aphorism, there is something to it.

Flemish is a collection of different dialects and as such is not “codified”. This means there is no official grammar nor dictionary of “Flemish”. Someone from Bruges speaking in his/her local dialect would not be understood by a brother/sister from Limburg and vice versa. Different vocabularies, different grammars, different accents.
If Valencian is considered a separate language, then the Flemish dialects should get the same status.

Dutch is the official language in Flanders, even though there are many differences compared with Dutch as it is spoken in The Netherlands (a bit like American English versus British English in this respect). Attempts at creating a Flemish language have so far failed, mainly because of the differences between the regions in Flanders.

Yep, well I guess your friends are just normal. reasonable people. But as we’ve seen in the US recently, sometimes the views of normal, reasonable people aren’t too well reflected in the political circus.

“well — perhaps I speak too hastily”

Yep, maybe you do. There is no doubt that if you go into the bars of Mallorca and try to speak in Catalan people will feign that they don’t understand you, and say ‘here we speak Mallorqui’. But again, you find this type of thing when you move from one village to the next. The difference is that in the Ballearic islands all this is not politicised (the Mallorcans are actually very good Catalans, and simply want ‘to do business’), whilst in Valencia it is.

Your point Mrs T is perfectly reasonable, as a culture the Valencians obviously have as much right to be recognised in Brussels as anyone else.

“Do Valencians agree that they are just speaking Catalan?”

“The claim “What WE speak is a language, not a dialect” (or vice versa) should always be accepted.

The claim “What THEY speak is a dialect, not a language” should alwasy be rejected.”

This last point seems eminently reasonable. The difficulty is that the situation in Valencia is in many ways so bizarre that the problem is turned upside down. If we take the people who speak ‘Valencian’ on a day to day basis, the majority of them would probably regard the language as a variety of Catalan. If we take the people in Valancia who habitually speak Spanish and ask them they will say that Valencian is a separate language (motivated primarily by the desire to deny any ‘Catalan connection’).

Now curiously the most intelligent “Catalanists” in Valencia currently use the “Valencian as a separate language” issue as a kind of Trojan Horse tactic, to get the language more used and accepted (and because they are tired of all the strife: Joan Fuster - who was the intellectual inspiration for this Valencian ‘Catalanism’ has his grave regularly desecrated). The idea is to promote the Valencian identity, and then join up with the other Catalans further up river (they are nothing if not inventive these guys :)).

The big questions I was raising out of all this were twofold: firstly should our definitions of what constitutes a language be decided by political horse trading. I am deeply unhappy with that idea: even if you feel that what you speak is a separate language, you should be able to provide some evidence to back this up. Case in point Welsh (my own native tongue) and Breton. My feeling is that these two, whilst closely related, are sufficiently different to be separate, but it is only a feeling. If I was to have to decide what I would want to see would be a rigorous argument, not a vote in Westminster. (Full disclosure: I am a complete mongrel, and have absolutely no Welsh or Celtic ‘feeling of belonging’ whatever).

The second question is what should count as an ‘official language’ at the EU level (in terms of things like provision of translators and documentation). I would back Catalan as an almost unique case for a non state language here (ie not Euskera - Basque - and not Gallician,not Waloon, not Flemish, not Alsacian, not Corse, not Sardinian, and not I’m afraid ‘Valencian’). I would back the Catalan case on a number of grounds. The first would be the non-violent and pacific way they have pursued their cause. In these violent times this merit should be recognised. Secondly the number of speakers: anything between 6 and 9 million, depending on how you count. Thirdly the wide social and institutional use of the language. And fourthly the fact that the majority of Catalan nationalists, including the so-called ’separatists’ have effectively renounced the idea of having an independent state. What they want is to be a nation without a state: in Spain, and inside the EU. I think the EU would be all the richer for being able to come to terms with this challenge.

Of course, I would be happy to consider any other cases for ’special pleading’ should anyone wish to make them.

I would. Not only is it the truth, but the Flemings acknowledge it as such, at least nowadays; they play a role in determining what constitutes Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands, through the Nederlandse Taalunie.

As for the old “languages vs. dialects” question, the old comprehensibility rule is about as good as it gets: if speakers from two speech communities can understand each other with little difficulty, then “technically” they are speaking the same language, whatever politics might push them to say to the contrary. One may wish to play along with such fictions for the sake of politeness, but one can’t ever lose sight of the fact that it is a fiction; I’d refuse to take seriously anyone who claimed that there were separate languages callled British, Australian and American.

To say that the language vs. dialect distinction can’t be made because it gets fuzzy at the edges is to fall prey to the fallacy of the sorites, i.e, that black shades into grey into white means black and white are the same. Operationally, the definition of what constitutes a language is structurally identical to that used to define species, and though species show the same gradations as languages on occasion, no sensible person claims that’s a meaningless distinction as well.

Language has been an issue in Europe since history began and it is frequently tied up with the political, religious, social, economic and other wonderful regional differences making Europe so unintelligible to our new world cousins, not to mention to Europeans themselves. However, over the last few centuries, far from dying dignified deaths in a big, bland melting pot, these regional differences have been alive and kicking but suppressed. Either voluntarily in times of strife or artificially by influence of larger neighbours, local almost ‘tribal’ differences have taken a back seat to the ‘big picture’.

Life is a little different in today’s peaceful and largely open Europe, local peculiarities are not only gaining recognition but becoming issues of pride, community and, sometimes, unfortunately, derision.

That this is influencing politics cannot be ignored. From the Scotish parliment to the rise of the Lega Nord in Italy, choose your own favourite examples. Last week I was with a group of friends in Haute Savoie and quite surprised at how vehement their old rift with Paris had become. (For those who haven’t heard about this one, they claim that one of the conditions of Haute Savoie joining France was perpetual tax-free status. The French goverment reneged on the deal.)

Today’s national boundaries are almost as arbitrary as the ones imposed in Africa. So, in my mind, the question is not whether we will be looking at an EU of 30 countries in twenty years time, but whether we will be looking forward to a community of a hundred or more statelets. And then, I suspect, Catalunya and Valencia will re-discover their shared values and language.