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From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWhorter, and our topic this time is going to be something that I've always assumed I did an episode about, but apparently I haven't.

It's something that I think any of you who like this podcast would like to know and probably need to know. We need to explore the whole concept of dialect. People often ask, what is the difference between a language and a dialect? And it's a very messy question to which there really is no answer. It's one of those things. Nevertheless, we all have

certain folk conceptions of what distinguishes a language from a dialect, including linguists.

I certainly have a sense of what a dialect is as opposed to a language, despite that I know

formally that the whole question is ultimately meaningless. But from what we're taught, the world has a whole bunch of

languages and then also a whole bunch of dialects. And we have a sense that there are dialects

of a language, but where do you draw the line? What are we talking about? What is the technical

truth? What we're going to do is we're going to look at some of these folk conceptions, these kind of intuitive ways of looking at it, and we're going to see that those don't quite work.

We're going to fly around the issue and then zero in, and then we're going to face ourselves and what we're always going to think nevertheless, including linguists.

But let's start with this. You might suppose

this is something that you may have learned or it may be something you intuit, that dialects are

varieties of a language, that a language comes in a bunch of dialects and that as long as people

who are speaking these dialects can understand

each other if these dialects are mutually intelligible as we say then they are dialects of a language

and the language consists of all those dialects together that seems to make a certain sense you

figure with English there's's, you know, old

Brooklynese, there is black English, there's Cognin English, there's Australian English,

...