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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As my professor used to say “a language is a dialect that got lucky”
There is no scientific difference between the two, most languages are a spectrum and one tiny part of it is “the language” and the rest are “the dialects”, with some of them being more well known and established while some of them have no written form and are spoken in 3 villages only.
“A language is a dialect with an army and navy” – Max Weinreich
There was a linguistic distinction at some point, but now it’s almost entirely politics.
See Norwegian and Danish, it’s almost the same language to the point that both can understand the language of the other in written form. But since these are separate countries, it isn’t politically correct to say that Norwegians speak Danish (or the other way round).
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