Language vs Dialect

Several, don't forget dialects.

The meanings of "language" and "dialect" are surprisingly tied up in politics. Aside from what various folks in India speak, consider...In China, too, we say that people in different regions speak different dialects: the national standard Mandarin; Shanghainese; Cantonese; Taiwanese; Fukanese; and others. Someone who speaks only one of these languages will be entirely unable to speak to someone who speaks only a different one. I'm friends with a couple, the guy being

You don't even have to go all the way to China. The English countryside has multiple so called "accents" that are basically unintelligible to a speaker of London English, with plenty of famous examples in popular media (e.g. [1][2]).Similarly, Germany has plenty of mutually unintelligible dialects. They are all related to each other and any two geographically adjacent dialects are mutually intelligible, but as distance grows it becomes harder to bridge the gap (which is why eve

I'm talking about the various Chinese dialects, which my understanding is share a written language.

"Unless you limit yourself to the official dialect of English, Indo-Germanic also has lots of inconsistencies, partially because of the majority of the population being able to speak English is actually a fairly recent development..."Just saying, unless you talk about written Chinese, the big languages in China are not even intelligible amongst each other - less so than English, French or German. They are not dialects that can be trained together, they are very very distinct languag

Those are more like dialects than languages, IMO.

All language has significant regional difference if it covers enough regions

Politics it is.On the opposite side, consider the many "dialects" of Chinese: Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, etc. Someone who only understands one of these will be pretty much entirely unable to understand the others. Yet we give the Chinese a nod and let them consider all these different languages to be just dialects.

If you want to nitpick, it's not just different dialects but different languages. Mutual intelligibility is a common line used to split things into separate languages and most of the Sinitic language group "languages" are true languages as they aren't mutually intelligible. It's a bunch of different languages with a shared writing system and more mutual intelligibility in writing than in spoken words.

There is no precise and official way to identify something as a "language" rather than a "dialect".For example: there are five major dialects of Hindi, some of which are mutually unintelligible -- yet few people call them separate languages. On the other hand, standard Hindi is mutually intelligible with Urdu -- they use different writing systems, but as spoken languages are roughly as close as American and British English -- yet they are considered different languages. Si