Peter Trudgill: Norwegian as a Normal Language
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All linguists are very well aware that the notion of "a language" is only partly linguistic—as we tell all our beginning students, the question of whether a variety of language should be considered "a language" or "a dialect" (or something else again) is by no means entirely a linguistic decision. Cultural, social, political and historical factors may be very heavily involved also. Kloss, however, sheds further light on this issue by pointing out that some languages can indeed be considered separate languages on purely linguistic grounds—by reason of their linguistic distance from all other varieties. In the European context, Basque is often cited as a typical example of an Abstand language. It has no close linguistic relatives, and could never reasonably be regarded as being a dialect of any other language.
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We also need clearer examples to show that Norwegian is not unique. Here are two. Hindi and Urdu are often regarded as being different languages. A more realistic way of regarding them, however, is as the same language, sometimes referred to as Hindustani, with two different autonomous standards. And although Urdu alone is the official language of Pakistan, in India both Hindi and Urdu have official status. To ask, in India, if someone is speaking Hindi or Urdu is rather like asking if someone in Norway is speaking Bokmal or Nynorsk: it is most often a question without an answer. At the colloquial, spoken level, the two "languages" are indistinguishable. It is only in writing that they differ, with Hindi being written in the Devanagari script, and Urdu in the Arabic script. At the level of vocabulary, too, they differ, to the same kind of extent as Nynorsk and Bokmal, with Hindi taking its learned lexis from Sanskrit, and Urdu from Arabic and Persian."

Nothing too ‘Eeyorish’ about new dictionary

MUPPET,” TAKEN from the children’s TV show, “Sesame Street,” means a foolish person, while “Eeyorish” refers to the character in Winnie the Pooh known for his gloomy outlook on life.
Unsurprisingly, many new entries come from the world of science and high-tech, particularly genetics and the Internet. Thus “blog” (short for Web log), and “egosurfing” (searching the Internet for references to oneself) are joined in the dictionary by more unusual phrases such as “shotgun cloning” (the insertion of random fragments of DNA).
New words included in the dictionary often reflect trends and the changing cultural makeup of the United Kingdom.
Britain’s multiethnic population has had a great influence on the new edition, with many words included from Chinese, Yiddish and Indian languages. “Chacha” is a Hindi word for uncle, “doudou” is a West Indian term of endearment, “sic bo” is a Chinese game of dice, and “bashert” is a yiddish word for fate.