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Language or Dialect?

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Christian Mair helps to clarify the difference between language and dialect.

Dialect: A way of speaking associated with a specific region which differs from other dialects and standard speech in pronunciation, grammar, and lexicon.

Script can't help us here as a defining criterion: many languages around the world are not written down at all, while many dialects are - both in literary works as well as on social media.

 

Mutual intelligibility also can't help us. There are pairs of languages (e.g. Norwegian and Swedish) which are mutually intelligible, but German dialects which are not understood if spoken elsewhere in German-speaking countries.

Speakers of varieties such as Alemannic, Badish, and Kaiserstühler are often on board with the categorisation of their way of speaking as a dialect. However, calling something a dialect can be controversial or subject to historical change in other instances, such as in the case of Schweizerdeutschen/Schwyzer-tüütsch or Luxemburgischen/Lëtzebuergeschen. The term dialect is clearly discriminatory in the case of languages outside of Europe, from A for Aymara to Z for Zulu.

 

An answer from Max Weinreich

Yiddish: A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un a flot.

English: A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Source: Weinreich, "Der YIVO un di problemen fun undzer tsayt," YIVO Bleter 25,1 (1945): 13)
YIVO = Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut [דישער װיסנשאַפֿטלעכער אינסטיטוט]

weinreich
Max Weinreich was a linguist, language activist, and a pioneer of the research into Yiddish. He was born in 1894 in Goldingen, Kurland in what is now today Latvia and completed a PhD in Marburg in 1923. He fled Germany to the USA in 1940, where he died in 1969 in New York City.