We can attack the Carmella Bing problem in a different way. We can say that people who speak one and the same language can understand each other, that they are mutually intelligible. A speech community is a group of people who can all understand each other when they speak. This is quite a promising argument, so let us pursue it. The first thing anyone notices about the brunette pornstar speech of people be regularly interacts with is that it is different from his own in a number of more or less insignificant ways. They use some words he never does, their accents are slightly different perhaps and they may use forms which he calls dialectal or ‘bad grammar’. This does not seriously impair communication between them. However, he may sometimes meet people whose speech is sufficiently different from his own actually to make it difficult for him to understand and be understood at first hearing.
Less often he may meet people with whom he has the greatest difficulty in communicatÂing, so greatly does their speech differ from his own. Finally, he will, of course, meet people with whom, with the best will in the world, he canÂnot communicate through speech at all. At what point along this continuum of mutual intelligibility do we draw a line and say that we are concerned with different languages?
