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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Dialects are often regional or tied to specific groups and while they can make some changes to pronunciation, vocabulary and even grammar it is still part of the same language. You would say it has become a new language when it is no longer mutually intelligible between speakers with dialects.
In some cases extremely thick accents in combination with fast speech can make it impossible for two people speaking the same language to understand each other, but if they just slowed down and attempted to speak as clearly as possible they would be able to communicate.
Scandinavians are a good example because while they like to joke around how each other’s languages are unintelligible guttural sounds they would still be able to communicate fairly well if they spoke slowly, clearly and used body language in cases where the words are not similar enough in their respective language.
Icelandic however will be largely incomprehensible to them in both speaking and writing even though all four languages share the same origin, so they will mostly only be able to recognize basic, ancient words that are similar in most European languages like mother, father etc.
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