What makes a language and dialect different?

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I intuitively know this, kind of like I intuitively know what a species is. I also accept that language is imperfect and there’s gonna be messy bits where things don’t fit right (again, like a definition of a biological species).

But if linguists and other languagey folks were to put a group of English speakers on another planet and let them live there for x amount of time, going back to study their language from time to time, what markers would they look for to say “this is now not a group with new slang, this is a group with a new dialect”? And “this is not the same language as the English spoken on Earth”?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I speak English but my English is scattered with idioms and grammatical differences that are part of my area’s dialect so although I speak the same language as every other English speaker there are quirks in the way that I speak that are there because of my dialect.

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