In the Chinese case I read there are political implications for using "language" vs "dialect". Chinese is a very diverse country (geographically, ethnically, li

In the Chinese case I read there are political implications for using "language" vs "dialect". Chinese is a very diverse country (geographically, ethnically, linguistically) and keeping the whole country unified is the role of the government. Thus this one use the terms dialect which implies all this languages are of in fact one with little differences rather than language that implies big differences. Even the name of the standard language is subject to connotation with 7 different words for it. And this trick is also played in France (my country). Alsatian is called a dialect (insinuating a dialect of French) whereas is it linguistically related to German; and indeed it doesn't have a fixed written form and Standard German (Hochdeutsch) orthography is often used for it. Same goes for Flemish, etc. While now France's dialect policy is a complete turnabout of his old one (repression), the dialect word is still used in place it shouldn't technically be.