The "political" and the language-dialect dichotomy - Alexander Maxwell
Channel: Collegium Trilingue Lovaniense
Date: 2021-06-24

The “Political” and the Language-Dialect Dichotomy, or Fact-Checking Noam Chomsky


Alexander Maxwell (Victoria University of Wellington)


This paper suggests that linguists pondering the language-dialect dichotomy fall into two schools: apolitical agnostics who view the dichotomy as something political and therefore not linguistic, and objective assertionists, who declare the dichotomy ought to be analyzed on linguistic grounds to the exclusion of political factors. Since Noam Chomsky seems to straddle both schools, the paper then examines his comments on the dichotomy at length, fact-checking assertions concerning the linguistic diversity of Romance and Chinese and the putative scholarly consensus about Dutch and German. The extraordinary role of “the political” as a bugbear in linguistic thought also informs how scholars invoke the Weinreich witticism, and why it generates so much cognitive dissonance.



Convenor: Raf Van Rooy



The talk was organized by the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas of the University of Oslo, in collaboration with the KU Leuven Center for the Historiography of Linguistics and in the frame of the course "The history of western linguistics: A survey in myths" at the University of Graz.