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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Coming from a Chinese American, I have always been under the impression that languages more so refer to the written language, whereas dialects are the spoken language. It is my understanding that in countries as large as China, there became different interpretations and pronunciations of the written languages and boom, a new dialect. Hardcore definition-wise though, no one seems to know
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