Languages or dialects in Acts 2

[Ploutos]

This is an off-the-wall question, but I was reading Acts 2 tonight (this year's Bible read-through is the NASB 95), I noticed a footnote that the word for "languages" in vv. 6 and 8 could also mean "dialects".

I'd be pressed to see any serious weight in this view, but I'm nonetheless curious: has anybody tried to argue that the apostles were speaking, not foreign languages, but various dialects of Hebrew or Aramaic as spoken by the diaspora Jews that seemed to make up most of the Pentecostal audience?

 

[Claes Jacob Heijndericksz]

I have never heard anyone argue that the languages mentioned in Acts 2 were merely dialects. Such an argument would be particularly difficult to sustain given that even the proselytes (v. 10) heard the apostles speaking in the language of their own birth.

Jews in the diaspora did not necessarily speak Hebrew as their first language. In Egypt, the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek in the Septuagint, in part because many Jews no longer understood Hebrew. The Targums, likewise, rendered the Scriptures into Aramaic. At most, one could argue that the miracle also encompassed dialects, since the people heard the apostles speaking in the language into which they had been born.

The distinction between a language and a dialect is often vague. As the saying goes, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” Consider the Low Saxon varieties, for example. In the Netherlands, Gronings, Drents, and Overijssels are generally considered dialects of Dutch, while in Germany, East Frisian, Eastphalian, Westphalian, and other varieties are generally classified as dialects of German. Yet during the Reformation, Bibles were printed in Low Saxon in Bremen. Had history taken a slightly different course, Low Saxon might well have emerged as a separate Germanic language on the map of Europe.

 

[EvanF]

“Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, in Judæa and Cappadocia, in Pontus and Asia, in Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and sojourners from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians"

Seems like a significant stretch to say that all these were born speaking dialects of any single language. Parthians, Medes, Phrygians, Pamphylians, Romans, and Cretans spoke Indo-European languages. Elamites are believed to have spoken a language isolate. Arabians spoke a semitic language, but it wasn't intelligible to Aramaic speakers. Egyptians certainly weren't born speaking a dialect of a language in common with Parthians.

All these people probably communicated with eachother in Greek and/or Aramaic, so it would be unlikely that they would find it strange to hear Galilaeans speaking one of these common languages, and it would be a strange thing if the power of the Holy Spirit came upon them only to make them shift from speaking Greek with an Aramaic accent to speaking Greek with a Pamphylian accent. Can you imagine if I, being a native speaker of an American dialect of English, went to Scotland and started bearing witness in a Scotish dialect? Would this be likely to cause native speakers of Scottish dialect to be amazed and perplexed or even suspect a miracle? Why would the Holy Spirit even miraculously translate one dialect of a language to another dialect of the same language unless they were weren't mutually intelligible (which most linguists would say makes them separate languages)?

I can only guess that an interpretation of "dialects" is preferred by those who have trouble accepting the reality of miracles described in the scriptures.