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

For a linguist, two ways of speaking by different groups of people are 'dialects' if there is mutual intelligibility between them, that is, each group of speakers can understand the other. If one or both groups of speakers cannot understand the other, they are considered to be speaking different languages.

In practice, languages and dialects are defined in political terms. For example, Mandarin and Cantonese are different languages from a linguistic point of view, but Chinese people consider Cantonese to be a Chinese dialect. Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are dialects from a linguistic point of view, but in practice they are considered to be separate languages because they are spoken in different countries - each having its own army and navy.

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

A "language" gains stature when it is spoken by a country, which implies a government and a military. A "dialect" is regional, and as such usually has no national government or military.

Answer 4

military groups have so much jargon that it is like a special category of the soldiers or sailors natgive language. Therefore it assumes the category of a dialect of the native language of the speakers