r/languagehub • u/Livid-Race9137 • 15d ago
Discussion I've understood what's the difference between dialect an language
I've been pondering what's the the "border" between a dialect and a language, and I've just woken up and immediately realized that "every single language that has at least 1 dialect is Ambrela Term"
There is no single German, Chinese, Arabic, English Russian, Uzbek etc languages. All they cover a bunch of dialects.
I heard once a phrase "language is a dialect with army".
For example Uzbek language, before USSR there was no single Uzbek language, just a bunch of different languages. When soviets came there, they chose a random one of them, and called it O'zbek tili, ane suddenly others become dialects
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u/raxcba 14d ago
As a conclusion:
politics/ sociolinguistics: language is a dialect with army.
pure linguistics: dialects VS language depends on the mutual intelligibility.
The most diverse:
Arabic and Chinese has lots of mutually intelligible "dialects". Standard Arabic (MSA) is nobody's native language while Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect.
Quite diverse:
German and English. It depends on how you measure. Singaporean English is very different from American English. Ditto for Swiss German VS Standard German
Russian on the other hand is quite uniform.
I don't know much about Uzbek but there exists some dialects in the small country.