Introducing English Linguistics

The current state of the English language
Introduction
20
INTRODUCING ENGLISH LINGUISTICS

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As Table 2.1 illustrates, the most commonly spoken language is
Mandarin Chinese, one of the so-called dialects of Chinese. However,
including Mandarin in Table 2.1 but not the other dialects of Chinese (e.g.
Cantonese) reflects a difference in how the terms 
language
and 
dialect
are defined in theory and in practice.
In theory, what distinguishes a language from a dialect is the notion of
mutual intelligibility. If I speak Northern American English and you speak
Southern American English, we will be able to understand each other.
Therefore, we speak dialects of the same language. On the other hand, if I
speak French and you speak Vietnamese, we will not be able to under-
stand each other, meaning that we speak different languages. However, in
practice this distinction is not consistently maintained. China is a unified
political entity. As a result, many people refer to all of the languages spo-
ken in China as dialects, even though the spoken forms of the dialects are
mutually unintelligible. Speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin, for
instance, may use the same writing system, but if they were to have a con-
versation, they would be unable to understand one another. The opposite
situation exists with other groups of languages. Danish, Swedish, and
Norwegian are referred to as separate languages, even though they are rel-
atively mutually intelligible. These languages are not referred to as
dialects of, say, Scandinavian, again because the countries of Denmark,
Sweden, and Norway are autonomous political entities.
The issue of what is considered a dialect of a language also affects how
one counts the number of speakers of a language. In tabulating the number
of native speakers of English, Crystal (2003: 65) includes not just speakers 
The development of English
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