Abstand Languages and Ausbau Languages

1. The concept of ausbau language.1 Linguists like to look at the problem of drawing a boundary-line between language and dialect by defining these terms as relational concepts, with French, e.g., being a language in relation to the dialect of Picardy but a dialect in diachronic relation to Latin. Fourteen years ago I attempted to supplement the linguistic approach by a primarily sociological one when I introduced the concepts of Abstandsprache and Ausbausprache. The term Abstandsprache is best paraphrased as 'language by distance', the reference being of course not to geographical but to intrinsic distance. The term Ausbausprache may be defined as 'language by development'. Languages belonging in this…