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Dialect which is also known as Language Shift is when a community who shares a native language, abandon it and collectively shift to speaking to another one instead. Dialects are rule- governed languages, with systematic deviations from other dialects of the same language. For example, Rajasthan has no common regional language. The people speak some 20 different dialects majorly including Marwari, Mewari, Mewati, Dhundari, etc.
However, the result of dialect being a part of societies today is sometimes misunderstood. This can be explained by placing a few advantages and disadvantages of how dialect can be a boon or a curse in different situations.
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is a popular written text using eight different dialects taken from the background of the southern region of the United States and adapted them to meet the personality of the character. By this, one can understand the ease of communicating or conveying the message by the author (in this case) or any common man. Using different dialects to make the other person understand our point of view is one of the major advantages of Dialects.
Next is, the translation of one language to the other which is again a complex procedure. Finding an effective translator is often a big challenge for any professional work. Let’s assume that there’s a person who speaks proper Hindi language and there’s another person whose primary language is proper Marwadi. Now, these two need to communicate with each other. How? This is where Dialects come into the picture and play an important role in translation. They both will require a third person who speaks a language which is the dialect of Hindi and Marwadi.
When the Arab Slave Trade (which started in the 7th Century) and Atlantic Slave Trade (which started in the 16th Century) began, many of the pre-existing local African slave systems began supplying captives for slave markets outside Africa. Due to this African Slavery, most African languages were lost in one to two generations and in today's time there exist around 200 dialects around Africa which are not the variety of African Language but those are the variations of the European language.
Listing down just the advantages and disadvantage is not enough to understand what actually a dialect is, so let’s come back to the previous example, the Rajasthani Dialect. According to an old saying, “The dialect, food, water and turbans in Rajasthan change every 12 miles”. Indeed, the state of Rajasthan is a region of rich culture and linguistic diversity. Now focussing more on this example of Marwadi Language (alternatively spelled as Marwari), which is a dialect spoken at various places including Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Barmer, Bikaner, etc. The language, as well as the community, is also found in the neighboring state of Gujarat and some adjacent areas of Pakistan. I’ll be further elaborating on this example more as Marwadi is my primary language, and I come from Rajasthan as well!
Marwadi is the principal member of the Western Rajasthani Dialect which is spoken in various forms in Marwar, Mewar, Eastern Sindh, Jaisalmer, and North-West of Jaipur State. The script of Marwadi presently is in Devanagari. Older people use an older Marwadi script popularly known as Modi/Modiya also the alphabetical characters of this script are similar to the Gujarati script. But now Zhe younger generation has shifted to Devanagari scripts for representing Rajasthani.
Now let us understand this concept of Dialects more by comparing various dialects in Rajasthan. Below, I have mentioned a few variations of different words spoken in different dialects across Rajasthan.
Here the Rajasthani Dialects = Mewari, Jaipuri, and Marwadi are compared with independent languages Hindi, Gujarati, and English. Braj is the major dialect of Hindi and hence can be considered as the Hindi language as of now. In order to make a stronger difference, some studies have performed Lexical similarity of different dialects of Rajasthan. Here’s a piece of short information about that:
Speech communities that have more terms in common (higher percentage of lexical similarity) are more likely to understand one another than speech communities that have fewer terms in common. So, the degree of similarity is referred to as Lexical Similarity. According to the few kinds of research, the lexical similarity of Marwari is within 72-80 percent and according to standard terms, speech varieties that have less than 60 percent lexical similarity can be classified as a different language but in the case of Marwari as it is more than 60 percent it indicates that it is a dialect of Hindi language. We can clearly see that the Dialects taken into the study are barely similar to English and there is hardly any difference between Hindi, Mewari, Jaipuri, Marwadi, and Gujarati. Hence, we say that the Rajasthani dialects form a group among themselves, differentiated from Western Hindi on one hand and Gujarati on other hand. So, Hindi and Gujarati languages are a kind of boundary for Rajasthani Dialects.
In conclusion, language as a means of communication might be found varied. This variation is known as dialect, whose differences comprise of pronounciation as well as vocabulary. Dialect are acquired through the daily conversation, through other people who are involved in a talk. It has some cons of itself, but it is not possible to include these cons as a part of our society as these dialects helps in simplification of the speech communication.
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