can anybody explain to me what is meant in this sentence? - " A language is a dialect with an army & a navy."

Question

thanks very much!

Answer 1

what the sentence is tryign to say is that when it comes to communicating, both the army and navy have common language which they share amongst themselves..and this language may not be understood by us cause its military lingo

Answer 2

Seems like only Marakay understood your question correctly. I've heard that too from reliable sources that without certain country politics, many languages would be considered dialect, not different languages. Some Norwegian accents are closer to Swedish than some actual Swedish ones when spoken. But languages politics and national proudness, i guess, has changed spelling, grammar and what words are more frequent, and made languages more distant from each other. Some hundred years ago, Germanic languages like dutch, German, English etc were closer to each other. But people change, words change and obviously our national identity has a lot to do with it. And yes, that is the way that languages have developed through the history, drawing borders have a great impact on languages.

Answer 3

I think it's a little joke meaning it has rules and such to back it up! Seriously, a dialect is a branch of a language...think of a dialect as a state, and the language as the country, so the country has control of the army and navy, not the state.

Answer 4

a dialect is any subset of language which has some uniqueness or changes. when that dialect identifies a distinct group which is large enough to spread elsewhere and take on an identity of its own, distinct from the original language, it merits being called its own language. having an army/navy reflects a groups ability to branch out thus validating its dialect as a language

Answer 5

i think it means that all the languages in the world could be seen as a different dialect. and that we can still all communicate to each other even if we can't speak to each other.

Answer 6

my take is that any dialect with power behind it becomes a language because it can proclaim itself as a language and no one will dare to dispute it, he who has the gold makes the rules

Answer 7

for me that means a particular language has many rules that we should follow for example the English language...

Answer 8

So Costa Rica has no language. Correct?
It's so nice there, maybe they don't need one.
All they do is smile, and everybody agrees.