4 ms·
To the extent that there's a rule to go by, it's that in general dialects are mutually intelligible and languages are not, and video of this speech is not compr
by apendleton 9y ago
To the extent that there's a rule to go by, it's that in general dialects are mutually intelligible and languages are not, and video of this speech is not comprehensible at all to me (a native English speaker), so that arguably pushes it into "language."
But of course there really isn't a rule, though. In practice what gets called a language vs. a dialect is mostly political. Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are at least somewhat mutually intelligible, and Moldovan and Romanian are essentially the same language but for a border in between, as are Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin. By contrast, Mandarin and Cantonese aren't mutually intelligible at all but are supposedly both "Chinese dialects," and ditto for the various colloquial flavors of Arabic. The saying among linguists is "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."