"You Don't Look Like a Language"

and other things not to say on your first date with a language

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

What’s the difference between a language and a dialect?

If Ukrainian and Rusyn are mutually intelligible, why not simply consider Rusyn a dialect of Ukrainian?

How distinct does a dialect need to be to be considered a separate language?

First of all, mutual intelligibility is not a clear-cut matter. As a native Russian speaker, I understand a lot of Belorussian. But it doesn’t feel close enough to be considered the same language (also no one asked me.)

Second of all, mutual intelligibility doesn’t always go both ways. Portuguese speakers have an easier time understanding spoken Spanish than vice versa. That’s because the grammar is very similar but because of the way Portuguese pronunciation works makes it harder to understand.

But it gets even muddier. Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are pretty much completely mutually intelligible but they’re considered separate languages, and they use different scripts (Cyrillic for Serbian, Latin script for Croatian, and both for Bosnian.)

Conversely, many Chinese dialects are not mutually intelligible but are still considered to be dialects of the same language.

What’s the deal here?

In undergrad, we were taught that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy” which isn’t exactly right because the Rusyn people don’t have their own army and navy and maybe don’t even want one. But this saying refers to the fact that the distinction between a dialect and a language is not a linguistic question but a socio-political one.

If you like, it’s essentially the same question of self-identification that applies on a personal level.

Why is it that someone who is *only* 25% Jewish identifies as Jewish? Why is it that Nas Daily, an Arab Israeli, identified as a Palestinian all his life, but after the events of October 7^th said that he now felt Israeli first and Palestinian second? Why is it that someone who is *only* 12.5% native Canadian and mostly Irish and has been raised by her Irish family and only saw her native grandmother twice a year growing up identifies as a native Canadian?

The best way to answer this question is to quote one of the greatest thinkers of our time, Mo Willems:

An excerpt from “I Broke My Trunk.” The “Elephant and Piggie” series, volume 27. by Mo Willems

I’ll tell you a secret: linguists don’t care whether something is a dialect of a certain language or a different language (and if they do, they’re bored linguists and should find something better to worry about). They’re more interested in describing the system of rules that governs the way this particular person or this particular language community speaks.

FYI, everyone speaks a little differently. Your family’s way of speaking is a little bit different from that of your neighbors. And your speech is a little different from your cousin’s. Even if it comes down to specific expressions you use often or the way you pronounce a certain word. These different sub-sub-varieties of language are called idiolects.¹

For example, my family’s Russian idiolect includes the word zaspan’ka to refer to the green goo that sometimes sits in the corners of your eyes when you wake up. It sounds like a normal Russian word and I don’t think my kids are aware that I invented it when I couldn’t find a better way to tell loved ones that they have ‘eye snot’ in their eyes (but I also hope they don’t talk about eye snot a lot when they’re out and about.)

In other words, if a speaker of language X says that language X is a separate language and not a dialect of language Y, believe them. Just like you would believe them that they’re native American even though they don’t “look” native or that they’re a girl even if they “look” like a boy.

That’s just basic decency. That’s just following the most important rule in life which is “Don’t be a jerk”.

The Ukrainian government is being a jerk about it.

This feels like a mildly controversial thing to say these days, especially coming from a person born and raised in Russia.

I can imagine the kind of headline this would get were I to try to publish a piece about this in a mainstream media outlet (because writers never write their headlines): “I Was Born in Russia and I Think the Way Ukraine Treats its Ethnic Minorities is Abhorrent.”

Brrr… I just shuddered. 

I guess in their desperate fight for our ever-decreasing attention spans, media outlets have no choice but to take advantage of our natural predisposition to see things as black and white. Which is kind of scary. We live in a fairytale. The Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. As if the Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t also squash bugs on the windowsill in her spare time. As if the Big Bad Wolf can’t also be a caring gardener in addition to his day job of devouring grandmothers. 

People have trouble wrapping their minds around the fact that oppressed people are capable of oppressing others. That ‘good’ people and countries can sometimes do bad things and that doesn’t automatically make them all evil. That ‘bad’ countries can also do good in the world because (gasp!) not everything is bad about them. I don’t know, maybe the solution would be to not label people, communities, countries, and languages as a priori ‘bad’ or ‘good’, ‘oppressor’ or ‘oppressed’… but I fear we’ve lost our ability to care about subtleties.

Where was I. 

Oh yeah. The Rusyn language is a real language because my dad said so when I was eight years old and also because the Rusyn people think it’s a separate language. 

It’s all well and good but it turns out that our² brain is a very practical, efficient, and unsentimental machine that doesn’t understand why we need to make an effort to learn this language that looks, sounds, and feels in my mouth like Russian.

Many Rusyn words are similar to Russian words, but the tiny differences are anything but neutral.

For instance, the Rusyn word for ‘female teacher’ is uchitelka, similar to the Russian uzhitelniza. It’s a minimal difference, but to my native Russian ear, uchitelka sounds like a derogatory term that a failing (and possibly violent) ninth-grader would use to refer to his math teacher.

The Rusyn word for ‘family’ - rodichi - also exists in Russian but as a kind of slang, a term that the same failing ninth-grader might use to refer to his overbearing parents who are annoyingly at home when he wants to skip school.

It doesn’t help that my upbringing was steeped in the great Russian supremacism. Ukrainian (to which Rusyn is closest, and it’s not like we knew Rusyn even existed) was specifically seen as something comical. Ukrainian equals jokes about Gorbachev (who spoke Russian with a Ukrainian accent and was considered a comical figure in the Soviet Union) and general barbarism. We were taught to speak ‘proper’ Russian because anything else would make us sound like ‘uneducated village people.’

Now I understand that ‘uneducated village people’ simply spoke varieties of Russian that were closer to Ukrainian, Rusyn, and Belorussian.

Now I just need to figure out how to make that switch and embrace the ‘crude and uneducated’ parts of myself and finally start saying things in Rusyn. But I’m too worried that I’ll get in trouble with Nina Alexandrovna my second-grade teacher for speaking like a derevenskaya babka (a grandmother from a Russian village).

Despite my fear of speaking like a derevenskaya babka, whenever I attempt to paint something 90% of the time what comes out is a vaguely Slavic grandmother. Or a crocodile. Or both. I mean there must be a deeper meaning there. This is from last year, long before I got into trying (and failing) to learn various Slavic languages.

1. But if you want to call yours a separate language, go ahead. Linguists won’t care. Your mom might though.

2. When I say ‘our’ I mean ‘my.’ Your brain might be a wonderfully inclusive, open-minded, and politically correct organ that automatically treats all languages, peoples, and cultures the way they want to be treated.