Quote:
Originally Posted by paraiso 
Regarding dialects I refer to Pennsylvania Dutch. This language is only alive in Amish communities within the United States. If you took a Dutch person into an Amish community they'd be able to distinguish a few words here and there but they wouldn't be able to understand it. The Amish brought the language with them and it froze in time. So although it used to be a dialect of Dutch, the fact that it only survives here makes it a language. This is why I think the line between dialect and mother tongue is dubious. It takes a bit of bigotry and nationalism to say that Haitian creole is a lingua franca and not an honest to goodness language, for example.
Wrong. Pennsylvania Dutch is an old and slightly transformed German dialect from southwest Germany. It has nothing to do with the Dutch language such as that spoken in the Netherlands or Belgium. Dialects are not languages, but local variations of languages. In countries that were historically conglomerates of various tribes, city-states or kingdoms and which only became unified nation states late such as Germany or Italy there are a lot of dialects. For instance, in Germany "Bayerisch" spoken by many who grew up in Bavaria is a southern dialect of German. It is a variation of standardl or "High German" and it may or may not be understood by other German speakers. The same is true for "Plattdeutsch" which is a northern dialect of German. Now, when you get to German speaking Switzerland, what the Swiss speak is a German dialect so drastically different from regular German that some claim it is a different language, but really it is still just a dialect of German, and in its written form it is almost the same as standard German. Other countries hardly have any dialects at all, like France. France, like the US, mostly just has a few accents, the most obvious being the southern accent.
