915: Dialects and Languages Jun 11, 2017

The sociolinguist Max Weinreich popularized the phrase, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy" and people have been quoting it ever since. Other than that, there is not much of any consensus about what makes a dialect and what makes a language; maybe there will be one day, but it can take a long time to definitively pin down ideas that seem quite simple, much like how the form for a syllable, in any scientific way, was only defined in the 1980's. In general, dialects of a language tend to be considered anything with mostly similar grammar and vocabulary, that may have different pronunciations, syntax, and some different lexicon while being intelligible to those who know another dialect, but that can itself be hard to determine. There are, for example, some dialects of English, like those spoken in Scotland or the Appalachians that evolved somewhat differently and might be unintelligible to someone who knows English from New York, but these are considered dialects. On the other hand, Swedish and Norwegian, and also Danish though to a lesser extent, are considered different languages, but aside from different spelling-standards and some different pronunciation, these are pretty much mutually intelligible.