I also can give you my example. My mother tongue is Catalan, but I speak a dialect called Valencian. Many people defends Valencian is a different language from Catalan just because they don’t want to feel identified with the Catalan folk, but reality is we use 98% of the same words and we can understand mutually without any kind of problems. Politicians in Valencia encouraged this controversy to try to get more votes or to make increase hate towards Catalans. Finally, the official agreement is that Catalans and Valencians speak the same language but in Valencia the name of Valencian for our language we’ll be respected. Something similar to Dutch in Holland and Flammish in Belgium.

I have a degree in linguistics. Languages do not work like that. It becomes extremely hard to define a dialect linguistically and how that differs from a language. How would you do that? Differing words? Differing geography? Differing culture? When does it suddenly become a dialect, rather than a language? Normally, mutual intelligibility is used as the “main” idea for the difference between language and dialect, but this is also problematic.

I recommend you watch this video, which explains the linguistic perspective & problems more clearly than I would be able to write it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji6vURnWfrk

and this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbvCD29Sg58

I give a personal example. My first language is actually Afrikaans, a language brought to South Africa by Dutch settlers in the 17th century. Due to isolation and change in the language, it became Afrikaans one of the official languages of South Africa. However, I can understand 75% of Dutch when its spoken and almost 90% when its written. Dutch people however have a lot harder time trying to understand Afrikaans. Besides the problems with mutual intelligibility, a lot of people would say its close enough to consider Afrikaans to be a dialect of Dutch, but it’s not. There’s more to language than just its linguistic properties. Afrikaans has its own culture and is geographically isolated.

Now, if we put Afrikaans and its community in the Netherlands, this classification would definitely be different. That just shows how hard it is to define a language versus a dialect. There are many more examples: Urdu vs Hindi, Swedish vs Norwegian, Chinese and its dialects, Spanish & Portuguese, heck even many of the Romance languages can be considered dialects of Latin, but that’s not how we define it.

As I said, most of the time, the difference between language and dialect is determined by sociolinguistic factors.

I hope you understand this a bit better? If you have any more questions, I’d definitely answer them

“In the end it came down to the fact what people define as languages or dialects are defined by the people, not linguistic differences.”

One person’s dialect, might be another person’s language.

I never really thought of Cantonese in that way. In the sense less homophony than Chinese. The first thing people say is “More tones! Way more difficult!”. Thanks for a new perspective.

I agree. Language/dialectal divisions are notoriously political and social.

Personally I think that the issue of dialect versus language is very much a political one. When speaking to Mandarin speakers from mainland China, there never seems to be any give and take – they just insist that Cantonese is a dialect and that is that. I suspect they’ve been brain-washed. Under normal circumstances I’d expect some different opinions but so far I’ve only heard the language option from Cantonese speakers.

It doesn’t help that Cantonese speakers always write in standard Mandarin… this just convinces the Mandarin speakers that because they can read what Cantonese speakers write, Cantonese is a dialect.