2. THE PROJECT DETAILS:
Students who worked over the project: Albina, Aslan, Bahar, Sanubar, Zeynab and Ulviya.
Information was collected through different sources, mainly with the help of Internet and books provided
by professor.
3. DEFINING THE LANGUAGE
आज तीन घंटे बारिश हुई, सड़क ं पि पानी जमा ह गया
The sentences above, the first in the Devanagari script, the second in the Perso-Arabic script, both mean ‘it
rained for three hours today, water built up on the roads’. Hindi and Urdu are formal standards of the same
dialect, linguists usually hyphenate them as a single language, ‘Hindi-Urdu’, or simply refer to it as
Hindustani. The two are not only similar, but virtually identical in grammar, syntax, and informal vocabulary.
Visible differences only begin to show in discussions of a decidedly technical nature.
4. ARABIC, WHILE HINDI BORROWS (OR RE-BORROWS) WORDS FROM
SANSKRIT. IN EVERYDAY CONVERSATIONS AND POPULAR CULTURE,
THE TWO ARE VERY DIFFICULT TO TELL APART. ‘HINDI’ AND ‘URDU’
WERE INTERCHANGEABLE TERMS UNTIL THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY,
THE IDEA THAT THEY ARE DISTINCT LANGUAGES EMERGED ALONG
WITH INTER-COMMUNAL POLITICS IN THE REGION.
While the example of Hindi-Urdu may be surprising, it is far from unique. Arbitrary, counter-intuitive
definitions of ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ are highly commonplace. Popular ideas of what are ‘different
languages’, or varieties of the same language, can often be in complete disregard of objective linguistic
parameters.
Austrian linguist, Heinz Kloss, coined the terms Abstandsprachen, and Ausbausprachen which refer to two
different sets of criteria for distinguishing one language from the other. The former (literally ‘distance
language’) is a form of speech which is distinguished from others on the basis of objective linguistic criteria.
Spanish and French are distinguished from each other as abstand languages because they differ in
pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and orthography — they are largely mutually unintelligible (speakers
of one can’t normally understand speakers of the other without formal training), and a layperson will be
quick to notice the difference.
5. HEINZ KLOSS (1904-1987)
was a German linguist and internationally recognised authority on linguistic
minorities. He coined the terms "Abstandsprache" and "Ausbausprache“ to try
to describe the differences between what is commonly called a dialect and
what is commonly called a language. Kloss was also responsible for summing
up previously publicly available statistical data on the North American Jewish
population; one copy was found in Hitler's library. The book was entitled
Statistics, Media, and Organizations of Jewry in the United States and Canada.
Hitler's personal copy of the book was obtained by Library and Archives
Canada in 2018 and was restored, digitised and made available to the public
in 2019.
6. ABSTANDSPRACHE (ABSTAND LANGUAGE)
The term Abstandsprache is paraphrased best as 'language by distance', the reference being of course not to
geographical but to intrinsic distance. The term Abstandsprache 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 toot of literary expression.
Kloss proposed an English translation of "language at a distance", referring to language differences, not geographical
separation. Abstand means the distance of continued separation, for example, the gap of a mechanical structure. In the
context of linguistic varieties, abstand indicates a gap between two dialects; according to Kloss, there is a "definite gap"
between the varieties.
An abstand language is a cluster of varieties that is distinctly separate from any other language. European examples
include Basque and Breton. Kloss also spoke of degrees of abstand between pairs of varieties. He did not specify how the
differences between two varieties would be measured, assuming that linguists would apply objective criteria. A standard
linguistic criterion is mutual intelligibility, though this does not always produce consistent results, for example when
applied to a dialect continuum.
An abstand language does not need to have a standard form. This is often the case with minority languages used within
a larger state, where the minority language is used only in private, and all official functions are performed in the majority
language.
7. ABSTANDSPRACHE (ABSTAND LANGUAGE)
Abstand languages are definitely languages by `distance', i.e. there is no close relative with which they can
be confused, or are mutually intelligible with: Japanese, Korean, Icelandic, etc. No chain of mutually
intelligible lects merging with some other `language'. Thus many African languages, Amerindian languages,
Malayo- Polynesian languages, Australian languages are so by Abstand, but not by Ausbau.
The most often-cited case like this is Chinese, where language systems that are so different from each other
as to make them virtually mutually unintelligible are constructed as dialects of the Chinese language. In this
case, though, the “dialects” are clearly related to each other, historically and in general structure.
Presumably, the Chinese dialects fall short of what Kloss would regard as pure abstand languages, such that
they could never be considered co-dialects, no matter what ideology might be served by doing so.
8. AUSBAUSPRACHE (AUSBAU LANGUAGES)
The German verb ausbauen (literally "to build out") expresses core meanings of "expanding" something
or "developing something to completion", e.g. adding to an existing structure. (Croatian linguist Žarko
Muljačić [hr] translated Ausbausprache into French as langue par élaboration.)[5] Kloss suggested the
English translation "language by development", referring to the development of a standard variety from
part of a dialect continuum:[1]
