ABSTRACT
The great number of often very different definitions of dialect shows that the traditional opposition language-dialect (in fact only some 500 years old) is fraught with problems. Beer (1984: 168) affirms: ‘Dialect conventionally designates the sum of linguistic peculiarities proper to a given region. Dialectal boundaries cannot be absolute, since any linguistic feature may overlap across the frontiers that have been arbitrarily imposed by the linguist. Nevertheless, the notion that a set of linguistic peculiarities effectively constitutes a linguistic entity was a medieval as well as a modern one.’ Medieval theory and praxis operated with only one term, as exemplified in the well-known statement by Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence (late twelfth century): Mis lengages est bons car en France fui nes ‘My language is good because I was born in France’ (i.e. in the region known later as Île-de-France). The term dialect was a Renaissance loanword of Greek origin (see Alinei (1981)). Beer, using dialect as a generic term for a linguistic system, considers that the fortune of a dialect depends on non-linguistic factors: ‘politics, not literary expressivity, was ultimately responsible for the success or failure of a dialect’ (politics being understood in a wide sense – ‘polity plus economy as bases of supremacy resulting in hegemony and cultural leadership’).
