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”?
In: 41
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy)
It’s an arbitrary distinction, and in practice it’s often based on who has the political power to identify themselves as speakers of a separate language rather than a dialect of a common language.
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