[abayer]

Ok, then the linguists I read tend to be splitters rather than lumpers. =) This is particularly drama-prone in re: the Chinese languages/dialects due to the tendency for Beijing to attempt to cast all speakers of Chinese languages as in fact speakers of a single language, as part of their attempts to create a single unified Han identity.

But in the end, I really believe that if it weren't for the common written language, no one would ever think of Cantonese as being just a dialect of the same language as Mandarin - the differences between the two spoken languages are so massive.

[jamesli]

It involves more than linguistic characteristics to distinguish language from dialect. One can argue for both cases.

I personally prefer to think of Chinese as a language family. It would be a much larger, and very interesting, topic. For the discussion on this thread, I use "dialect" other than "separate languages", since Cantonese, We Chinese, etc. are described as dialects in most materials I read.