Different disciplines look at languages from different angles and multilingualism studies bring these together in order to work out a comprehensive view on multiple languages of the world. This chapter deals with some frequent and general questions pertaining to the most essential human resource – language. How can we distinguish one language from the other? How can we tell a language from its dialect? Is it possible to measure differences between languages and language varieties? What are pidgins, creoles and World Englishes? These are the issues explored in this chapter.

Languages and dialects

What is a language?

If asked, everyone would say that English, Japanese, Spanish (Castilian) and Swedish are languages. Usually, we can easily distinguish one named language from another, even without mastering all of them. But language varieties exist that have a very similar structure and vocabulary. How can we know whether there are two different languages or just one? And are they languages or dialects?

This is a complicated matter. Languages and dialects are studied in linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics and sociology of language. The perspectives of these areas of knowledge on language are somewhat different. Due to this, and also to the well-known elusiveness of the notion of ‘language’, approaches to what can be defined as a language, and on what premises, differ as well. Linguistics and sociolinguistics alike acknowledge that it is impossible to decide what a language is solely on the basis of linguistic criteria. Nor does there exist any unambiguous linguistic measure or series of features that could allow a distinction to be made between two close languages. Likewise, designating a language variety as either a language proper or a dialect cannot be performed on the basis of the linguistic features of a language, since there is no intrinsic value in the morphology or phonology of any linguistic variety. One of several English dialects, South-East Mercian, which dates back centuries, has become Standard English, ‘the bearer of nationhood, to carry the flag, or standard, of the emerging nation’ (Halliday 2020: 334), and is therefore a language, not a dialect.