Are there inferior and superior languages

This also explains why most people take their time to learn such languages due to it's usefulness. It is also a NO for me because no language can be more superior than one's own language or mother tongue. Home Answer Notifications. Question asked on Language 2 years ago. Can we ever objectively say that one language is superior to another, and if so what determines?

A big NO! There isn't any such. What about you? The number of speakers, and the area itself, can be of arbitrary size. It follows that a dialect for a larger area can contain plenty of sub- dialects, which in turn can contain dialects of yet smaller areas, et cetera.

The concept of dialects can be distinguished from:— sociolects , which are a variety of a language spoken by a certain social stratum, standard languages , which are standardized for public performance e. Varieties of language such as dialects, idiolects and sociolects can be distinguished not only by their vocabulary and grammar, but also by differences in phonology including prosody. If the distinctions are limited to phonology, one often uses the term accent of a variety instead of variety or dialect.

You can decide about the social class of speaker from what you hear, but it does not indicate that the language itself is also in a higher position! Anonymous Do you agree with this comment? For example, many people today object to the use of the word "he" to refer generically to either males or females as sexist, and so instead use "they" as a singular pronoun for a person of unknown or unspecified gender. Personally I think this is a bad idea, because it loses the distinction between singular and plural, and so makes the language less robust.

Or to take the example you give of the word "ain't": "ain't" has half a dozen meanings: "am not", "are not", "is not", "were not", etc. We already have perfectly good words for all of these except "am not". So why create a new, ambiguous word? It's a change in a direction that makes the language less clear. I think it should be resisted.

You seem to be concerned about the idea of denigrating the dialect spoken by some minority of the population. On that point, I think, from the point of view of someone who wants equal recognition of his dialect, the situation is hopeless. If some minority -- oh, I should clarify that by "minority" here I don't mean an ethnic or racial minority, but a linguistic minority. But anyway, if a minority speak in a slang that violates the grammar rules used by the majority, then whether you define language purely by usage, or you define it by logic, either way their language will be seen as inferior.

It is different from the majority, and in language majority rules, so they lose. If their grammar is less consistent and well-formed, then by logic they lose. If some minority group had a slang that had a more well-formed and consistent grammar, the case might be ambiguous.

But I've never heard of slang being more regulated than formal speech. Conceivable, but not likely. As to a statement like, "Sanskrit is just grammatically incorrect Hindi", well, that sounds like a joke. If someone said that seriously, meaning that Sanskrit is an inferior language because it resembles Hindi but does not follow the same grammar rules, that doesn't sound like a serious argument.

I don't know either language and I don't know the history of the languages, so there might be a serious comment somewhere in there about the origin and development of Sanskrit. The word "dialect" is unfortunate, because it means different things in speakers different, oh, ah, hum, "dialects". In the good old times, it used to mean a kind of "sub-language" or "quasi-language" - what was described, with some wit, as "a language without an army and a navy".

In that sence, Venetian, or Hunsruekisch, are "dialects". More recently, and more politically correctly, in our troubled times when it is deemed improper to talk about some facts of life, including navies and armies, "dialect" came to mean any variant of a given language.

The former definition became badmouthed for being "extra-linguistic" - but unfortunately the word dialect is still applied to things such as Pommersch or Neapolitan, while now being used also for very different phenomena, such as AAVE, the Portuguese spoken in Rio de Janeiro, the several non-standard varieties of any given language, slang, professional jargons, etc, etc, etc.

So, is it possible to say that "Venetian is a dialect", and that, being a dialect, it is "inferior to Standard Italian"? Well, there would be a problem here; after all, "Italian" is just "Tuscan dialect" upgraded to national language through a political decision. If other factors had prevailed, perhaps the newly unified Kingdom of Italy would have chosen Sardinian, or Sicilian, or Piedmontese, as its national language, and now we would speak of Tuscan as a "dialect".

And this introduces a deep inequality between Italian in the one hand, and the other languages of Italy in the other, because the State, albeit being "extra-linguistic" in the sense it is meant when we say that the difference between language and dialect is "extra-linguistic", is a very powerful glossopoietic entity, that "produces language" everyday - especially through its courts and academic institutions, but also, even if less decisively, through its army and navy.

This gives the standard language a decisive, if unfair, advantage against dialects such as Venetian or Hunsruekisch: the State speaks Standard Italian or Standard German, and if you want, or need, to communicate with the State, you will have to do it through the appropriate national Standard.

In this precise sense, Standard Italian is "superior" to any other language of Italy: it is the language that is taught in schools, that you need to know to read the national press, to listen to TV, to demand in court, to write your doctoral thesis But I suppose you are asking about "dialects" in the more modern meaning. Or is Standard English "correct" English, while the other variants are "wrong" English, or perhaps different languages?

I would say no. Those variants are part of a same language, English, and they serve different purposes. You don't write a dissertation in cockney, but you also don't address your buddies at the bar or your family at home in Standard English.

You use different "registers" of the English language, some more formal, some more informal. The informal registers tend to vary more geography-wise than the standards, but that doesn't make the English spoken in Pennsylvania a different language than the English spoken in South New Wales though, of course, if given a few centuries more, they very weel might evolve into exactly this, and become mutually incomprehensible.

A traditional, prescriptive, point-of-view is that the standard is the only "correct" language. This is the reason people look at constructions like "it ain't true" and say they are "wrong". They do not conform to standard grammar, or standar lexic, or both. And since the standard is the only variant that is studied in school, and consequently, the only whose rules are aprehended consciously, people tend to imagine that the standard "conforms to the rules of language", while informal variants are like the Old Far West, a territory of lawlessness.

But this is false; the speech of the prostitutes or the teamsters is not less regulated by rules than the English of the Queen - they are just different rules, quite probably not even less strict than those of Standard English, and those rules are not taught or even studied in the same depth as stardard rules are. So, there are sentences that do not follow the rules of Standard English, but the rules of other variants of English.

Those are "wrong" only if your intention was to speak or write Standard English. If used in an informal social context, they are probably correct. The opposite is also true: to speak among friends like you were in court or parliament will result in you being told to stop; they probably won't tell you you are speaking "wrong" English, but the effect is the same: to enforce the rules that are contextually correct.

But there are also sentences that do not follow the rules of Standard English, nor the rules of any other variant. Those would be wrong English by any measure. Sign up to join this community. From a syntactic and morphological point of view, some languages can have more options, finer distinctions.

At the same time a language can compensate a lack of morphology using analytic constructions for example in order to differenciate between subjunctive and optative, an helping verb can be used, for example " possano i tuoi sogni avverarsi!

I think the major difference lies in vocabulary. Latin borrowed a lot of words from Greek, because the Greek vocabulary had more terms about abstract concepts, philosophy, medicine.

Other Indo-European languages borrowed a lot of words from Latin, mostly administrative and legal terms, because Romans were good in this field, the Roman administrative and legal system was more complex. During the XIV century many languages borrowed words from Italian about music.

In the same period we borrowed the Hindu-Arabic numerals and this positional numeral system replaced the old additive, subtractive and multiplicative ones, which required an abacus. Today we all borrow a lot of English words related to the information and communication technology, for example. So it happens that in some historical periods some countries develop new concepts, ideas, products, technologies, their vocabulary becomes richer and their words spread all over the world.

Nino83 said:. Scholiast said:. And I would claim for English since about that it is the most plastic and expressive language in Europe, particularly for rhetoric and poetry, because of its schizophrenic parentage in Germanic Anglo-Saxon and Norman French so Latin lexemes, and almost completely flexible grammar. English poets better, poets writing in English from Shakespeare to Frost and Eliot have instinctively known and used this unique feature of their Muses' inheritance.

There are all sorts of reasons for this difference, partly lexical, partly grammatical: Greek has an appreciably larger vocabulary, it has conjugated middle as well as active and passive , and optative as well as indicative and subjunctive finite verbs, a much wider range of participles and indeed of particles to indicate nuanced relationships between sentences , and some syntactical options unavailable in Latin.

Shut may my eyes the last shadow, that my steals white day; and will then be able to release this soul of mine hour to her eagered longing pleasing. There's no doubt that English is one of the most rigid languages. The question is if a flexible word order means superiority which is the question of the OP. Penyafort said:. To what extent can a hyperbaton be used in an English poem? I believe all languages are perfectly created to express everything.

The Superiority of other famous languages to less known languages was the result of their degree of popularity to different places.

It resulted to more refined forms than the least known. But if all of them are made equally developed the same usages in formal levels, they will exist equally excellent in all expressions and popularity. I suspect that English is better suited for pop song lyrics than many other languages.

I also conclude that tonal languages like Chinese probably pose more difficulties for the same matter. Hector9 Senior Member Buenos aires, Argentina. I don't know why they say German is " the " language for precision, I don't know any German but I find English to be a highly precise language. On second thoughts, perhaps it's not English being fit for pop music, but the other way around: modern pop music is influenced by the rythm and intonation of spoken English.

It is not the province of linguistic science to make value judgments about languages, not moral or esthetic ones, anyway. On the other hand, to assume that all languages are equal is just as much a value judgment as to assume that one is superior to another.

It would be quite a coincidence if languages were all equal in everything. They may be roughly equivalent, but I'd expect some languages to be slightly better at some things than others. I think my own native language English, for instance, is not at all good at spelling. Several persons in this thread have expressed opinions about one language being better at something than another I don't agree with the earlier likening of such opinions to supporting Hitler -- even the general opinion that one is superior to another.

Still, even though languages are obviously different, it wouldn't be easy to add up all the pluses and minuses, and make a judgment about a language as a whole, even a subjective one. Also, when it comes to esthetics, tastes vary, so it would be practically impossible to devise an objective test for that. The closest thing I can think of to an objective test of superiority among languages would be a test of efficiency in basic communication, that is -- how much time does it take to communicate information accurately in one language versus another?

Both syllables per second and information density have been the subject of comparative studies by linguists. Just a few months ago I participated in a discussion about "language efficiency" and whether languages vary in that.