Abstand Languages and Ausbau Languages

Abstract

1. The concept of ausbau language.1 Linguists like to look at the problem of drawing a boundary-line between language and dialect by defining these terms as relational concepts, with French, e.g., being a language in relation to the dialect of Picardy but a dialect in diachronic relation to Latin. Fourteen years ago I attempted to supplement the linguistic approach by a primarily sociological one when I introduced the concepts of Abstandsprache and Ausbausprache. The term Abstandsprache is best paraphrased as 'language by distance', the reference being of course not to geographical but to intrinsic distance. The term Ausbausprache may be defined as 'language by development'. Languages belonging in this category are recognized as such because of having been shaped or reshaped, molded or remolded-as the case may be-in order to become a standardized tool of literary expression. We might say that an Ausbausprache is called a language by virtue of its having been reshaped, i.e., by virtue of its reshapedness, if there were such a word. Terms such as reshaping or remolding or elaboration, by focusing on deliberate language planning, help us to avoid a misunderstanding that the term development might lead to, namely that Ausbau might come about by that slow, almost imperceptible and quite uncontrolled growth which we are wont to call natural. Henceforth I shall use the terms abstand language and ausbau language; it is not for me to suggest new English designations. An abstand language is a linguistic unit which a linguist would have to call a language even if not a single word had ever been written in it. Whenever linguists face the task of enumerating the languages of a large number of preliterate tribes, they have to decide which vernaculars they ought to list separately and which they ought to treat as belonging to a cluster of dialects which together form an indivisible linguistic unit. In a given case a linguist may find six types of speech which he arranges as in figure 1. By the manner in which I have marked off the six varieties I have tried to suggest degrees of intrinsic distance. It will thus be seen that there is a definite break between the languages Z (semicircles) and Y (lines and dashes). The linguist would not hesi-

The authors' abstract, as published at the source., 2016 · DOI ↗