The link between polyglottery and perceptual dialectology: a case study of Russian dialects

Abstract

The status of language varieties as dialects or distinct languages has long been a controversial topic, as the distinction is often coloured not only by objectively measurable linguistic data, but also by history, speakers’ attitudes, prejudices, metalinguistic awareness and general education. It is the author’s belief that one could establish criteria for differentiating a language from a dialect by asking the speakers of a majority language directly in a survey-based blind test, thus accounting for the complex interaction of factors that affect language perception, but mitigating the biases of socio-cultural influences. This study proposes a simple method for checking one-way intelligibility in lieu of a mutual intelligibility test. Another issue that this article is concerned with is polyglots. Polyglots are known for being able to study languages efficiently, presumably, due to their increased language aptitude and awareness. Can this awareness have an effect on a polyglot’s propensity for perceiving dialects as languages? Answering this question is the second task of this paper. The results of the study show a rather weak positive correlation between the number of languages that a person knows and his tendency to identify an unknown speech sample as a language rather than a dialect; however, they do not refute this idea outright. Additionally, the author found setting a criterion for differentiating a language from a dialect difficult due to an unexpectedly high intelligibility rate of a lect that was known to be a distinct language. This implies that further testing of this sort needs to be done. It was, however, established that speakers of Russian tend to see a dialect as a lect that only differs in phonetics, while a language, in their perception, is a lect that differs in phonetics as well as vocabulary.