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 pronounce words differently and can even call the same object differently (roundabout vs traffic circle, 18-wheeler vs semi-truck, etc.) but you can ultimately understand one another even if some difficulty (I know 1 family where the wife’s side are New York Italians and the husband’s side are good ol boys from Alabama, there is indeed some difficulty), a different language is like English vs Chinese, you have no clue what the other is saying.
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