Dialects—Where Do You Draw the Line?

The labels language and dialect are, in practice, arbitrary, and necessarily so. Dialects of one language can be called separate languages simply because they are spoken in different countries, such as Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. Different languages can be called dialects because they are spoken in the same country and written in the same system, such as Chinese “dialects,” which are as different as French and Spanish. Often, dialects change slightly from region to region until people at one end of the chain cannot converse with people on the other end; where one draws the line between dialect and language here becomes meaningless.

The truth is that there is no such thing in any definable sense as a “language.” Tens of thousands of dialects are spread across the globe, many of them akin enough to be perceptible as variations on “the same thing”—but even here, only in variable degrees.