Language, dialect or jargon?

Jun 23, 2010 by

Linguists generally struggle with defining language versus dialect (we’ll take up this issue in later postings), but not everything a layman might call a language or a dialect would qualify as either for a linguist. Here’s an example: Boontling.

It is spoken only in Boonville in Northern California. Wikipedia calls it alternatively a “folk language”, an “extremely esoteric dialect” and a “lingo”. So which is it, a language or a dialect?

The answer is neither. It is true that it has over a thousand unique words and phrases, such as applehead ‘young girl; girlfriend or wife’, bahlness ‘very attractive woman’ and cocked darley ‘man with a gun’. While most Boontling words come from English, its vocabulary has been influenced by Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic, as well as Spanish and Pomoan (a local Native American language).

But what Boontling lacks to be a true language (or dialect, for that matter) is its own grammar. Grammatically, it is just plain old English. Thus, Boontling is neither a full-fledged language, nor even a dialect of English. Lingo or jargon are more appropriate terms for it.

There are many other such linguistic varieties around the world created by various groups to ease in-group identification and prevent outsiders from understanding insiders. Take, for example, the thief jargon (vorovskoj zhargon) in Russian; secret jargon employed by some Řom communities, especially in Britain, the Iberian Peninsula, Scandinavia; or Verlan, the secret language of teenagers in France. All of these linguistic varieties have unique vocabularies (mostly based on the host language), but no unique grammar. Borderline between such lingos and language games are secret languages such as “Pig Latin” in English, fufajskij jazyk in Russian, šatrovački in SerboCroatian and many others. Even Cockney rhyming slang fits the same category. All of these are dictionaries without grammar.


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  • goddidntsaythat.com

    My brother, a doctor, tells the story of an elderly patient of his who, apparently, didn't speak any English. Finally the patient's daughter came to translate.

    "Ask her where it hurts," my brother told the daughter.

    "TELL DA MAN WHERE IT HURT," the daughter "translated" into something that my brother was never fully able to identify.

    What seems like a dialect to one person might seem like a completely different language to another.

    -Joel

  • Asya Pereltsvaig

    Thanks for sharing this story, Joel!

  • John Cowan

    Boontling is close to the border between jargon and dialect, because it's got a few syntactic discrepancies. I posted about it back in 2005, highlighting this sentence:

    "You must do much graymatterin fore pikin for seekin Ite steaks to gorm, cause the sockers might not be bahlers, but nonchers with dusties dust, so deek your bok well."

    Now "pikin for seekin Ite steaks to gorm" means "walking/hiking to find mushrooms to eat", but literally "walking for finding mushrooms to eat", which is not Standard English. Obviously this is not a large difference, any more than BrE is syntactically very different from AmE, despite sentences like "England has not been defeated since 1066, whereas England are defeated regularly".

    The longest piece of neo-Boont still on the web is "The Brightlighter's Jonnem

  • Asya Pereltsvaig

    thank you for the comment, John! I was not aware of any grammatical peculiarities of Boontling — I guess another trip up to Mendocino county is in order!

  • John Cowan

    Unfortunately, field research is no longer possible, as the Boonters piked to the dusties (walked to the graveyard, died) a long time ago. Regular use of the variety ceased around 1920.

    In full, the above sentence translates to "You have to do a lot of thinking before going to look for mushrooms to eat, because they might not be good ones, but bad ones that are deadly poisonous, so pay attention to your ???" (not sure of the last word).

  • Asya Pereltsvaig

    Boontling being more of a jargon than a full-fledged language, it might be easier to "revive" it…

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