What makes a dialect a dialect and not a new language?

Question

Sometimes dialect sounds so different that it sounds like a language on its own? How do linguists classify a dialect as dialect?

In: Other

Answer 1

It’s mostly linguistic politics. Speaking the same language is very important to cultural identity: that’s why when the modern nations first formed they started mapping the languages spoken in the torritory, creating the first modern grammars to unify them. The line between what is still the same language and what’s not it’s rather about people being considered a part of the same community/ nation/ empire than any formal aspect of the languages themselves – including intelligibility.

So basically, a variation between two linguistic forms becomes a different dialect or language when people say and accept it is: it becomes a dialectic when they want it to be consider it part of the same “whole”, and a different language when they want it to be separated.