[lolinder]

I don't think we actually disagree.

I'm saying that because China has one single army and navy and at the same time a huge narrative wrapped up in the idea that it's all one China, those "dialects" don't get to be languages because the army and the navy say otherwise.

"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" implies its corollary, which is that "a dialect is a language without an army or a navy".

(In fact, that's likely what was originally meant by the person who coined the phrase—he was a specialist in Yiddish linguistics writing during WW2.)

[mytailorisrich]

It's perhaps how it is seen and used in English. But in China Chinese languages tend to be referred as such with Mandarin referred to as the "common language", etc though the character used has an oral connotation.

[numpad0]

I think our disagreement is in whether there can be fault lines of mutual intelligibility bewteen dialects. If liguists and Chinese languages speakers are to be believed(no particular reasons not to), there are in China.

[lolinder]

I don't disagree that there can be fault lines of mutual intelligibility between dialects. I'm not even commenting on how we define dialects at all—all I'm saying is that the distinction between a dialect and a language is an arbitrary one that is made for political reasons more than linguistic ones, and that's something that even the sources for that Wikipedia page agree with me on. For example (emphasis added) [0]:

> The debate as to whether or not the varieties of speech used by the Chinese should be classified as separate languages or dialects of one language is a difficult one, with reasons on both sides. The main criterion according to which some scholars tend to use the English term 'language' for the varieties of Chinese, is the lack of mutual intelligibility between the various forms of speech, the fact that the "various 'Chinese dialects' are as diverse as the several Romance languages". On the other hand, since there are no extra-linguistic (political, historical, geographical, cultural) reasons to treat these dialects as individual languages, the tradition is to call them dialects of Chinese.

In the absence of nation states I suspect that we'd mostly talk about dialects and dialect continuums. Discrete languages are only really relevant as a concept because of the non-linguistic ties that bind a nation together.

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=lCgnrA7Ke3QC&pg=PA1&source...