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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 10
is credited with the encapsulating aphorism that a language is a dialect with an
army and a navy.
Variety
There are other terms used by linguists for the language of particular groups
within society. They are not all used particularly consistently. For example, we
have idiolect for the dialect of a single individual. Register is another technical
term, but has several definitions. The term patois is used in French linguistics,
but not consistently in English linguistics. Jargon and slang tend to be used
specifically of vocabulary.
The term variety is employed by linguists as a neutral term to cover any
coherent language system typical of a set of people (even if the set contains only
one member). So variety is a cover term for idiolect, register, dialect, accent, language
and possibly patois as well. This term is currently preferred among linguists
because it avoids taking decisions about whether, for example, the two
varieties under discussions are dialects of the same language or different languages,
or in the case of languages, whether they are pidgins or creoles or not.
Using the term variety is an attempt to avoid giving offence by the use of a term
which may be semantically or emotionally loaded because of its ordinary language
use. Talking about a standard variety also has the advantage that it does
not cause any semantic clash in the way that standard dialect may for speakers
unaware of the way in which the term is used by linguists.
References
Feagin, Crawford (1991). Preverbal done in Southern States English. In Peter Trudgill
& J. K. Chambers (eds), Dialects of English. London and New York: Longman,
161–89.
Oxford English Dictionary (2006). Oxford: Oxford University Press. On-line edition
http://dictionary.oed.com/, accessed July 2006.
Weinreich, Max (1945). Der YIVO un di problemen fun undzer tsayt. YIVO Bletter
25 (1): 3–18. [In this article, Weinreich quotes an unnamed source for the aphorism
cited in this section. The point is, of course, since the original is in Yiddish, that by
this definition Yiddish would not be classified as a language.]