There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing a language from a dialect. A number of rough measures exist, sometimes leading to contradictory results.
Some linguists do not differentiate between languages and dialects, i.e. languages are dialects and vice versa.
The distinction is therefore subjective and depends on the user's frame of reference. Note also that the terms are not always treated as mutually exclusive.
The status of language is not solely determined by linguistic criteria, but it is also the result of a historical and political development.
Romansh came to be a written language, and therefore it is recognized as a language, even though it is very close to the Lombardic alpine dialects.
An opposite example is the case of Chinese, whose variations such as Mandarin and Cantonese are often called dialects and not languages, despite their mutual unintelligibility, because the word for them in Mandarin, 方言 fāngyán, was mistranslated as "dialect" because it meant "regional speech"
Bookmarks