The ‘political’ and language-dialect dichotomy of Noam Chomsky
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Description
This paper suggests that linguists pondering the language-dialect dichotomy fall into two schools of thought: apolitical agnostics who view the dichotomy as something political and therefore not linguistic, and objective assertionists, who declare the dichotomy ought to be analysed on linguistic grounds to the exclusion of political factors.
Since Noam Chomsky seems to straddle both schools of thought, the paper then examines his comments on the dichotomy at length, fact-checking assertions concerning the linguistic diversity of Romance and Chinese and the putative scholarly consensus about Dutch and German. The extraordinary role of "the political" as a bugbear in linguistic thought also informs how scholars invoke the Weinreich witticism, and why it generates so much cognitive dissonance.
Speaker Bios
Alexander Maxwell studied at the University of California Davis (1992), Central European History in Budapest (1999) and University of Wisconsin, Madison (2003). He is now associate professor of history at Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, where he also runs the Antipodean East European Study Group. He is the author of Choosing Slovakia (I.B. Tauris, 2009), Patriots Against Fashion (Palgrave, 2014), and Everyday Nationalism in Hungary (De Gruyter, 2019). He is currently working on Habsburg Panslavism and the politics of the language-dialect dichotomy.
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