Languages vs. “Dialects”

When do we call a language a dialect and when we do call it a separate language?   Although there is a very natural and intuitive linguistic criterion we can use, this criterion is not always followed. 

The purely linguistic criterion of mutual intelligibility:

To be intelligible is to be understandable.  According to the criterion of mutual intelligibility, those linguistic varieties whose speakers understand each other are considered dialects, while those mutually unintelligible are considered separate languages.

By this strict criterion, many of the so-called dialects should really be considered languages.  For example, Cantonese, Mandarin and Min (Taiwanese) are not mutually understandable. Why then are they referred to (especially by Chinese)  “dialects”?

The writing system.  All Chinese languages share the same writing system using characters, which can be read by all literate Chinese speakers.

Cultural and religious identity. 

Not to be ignored are the cultural and religious factors when people choose to identify (or not identify) with a language.  Three examples come to mind, where the same language is called different languages for cultural and religious reasons. 

Although their users would not like to think so, Serbian and Croatian used in the former Yugoslavia are linguistically really one and the same language, which is the reason for combining the two into a single term Serbo-Croatian.  Being of Eastern Orthodox religious persuasion, the Serbs call their language Serbian and write it in a modified form of the Cyrillic alphabet shared by other Slavic speaking (and Eastern Orthodox) countries. The Roman Catholic Croats, on the other hand, call their language Croatian and employ the Roman/Latin alphabet.  

Urdu and Hindi spoken in Pakistan and India respectively are basically the same language, despite the superficial difference in the written script (Urdu uses the Arabic script while Hindi is mostly written in a script called Nagari or Devanagari used by the ancient language of Sanskrit).  But the linguistic similarity is overshadowed by powerful cultural and religious and political antagonisms between the two countries.  Pakistan is an Islamic country and the dominant religion in India is Hinduism.  The two neighboring countries became archi-enemies ever since their separation in 1948.  

The Dungan “language” spoken in the former Soviet central Asian republics of Kirgistan and Kazakstan is really a form of Northwestern Chinese.  But Dungan people are Muslims who fled China during the Qing Dynasty due to religious repression.  So their speech is called Dungan rather than Chinese.  They have also used the Arabic and Cyrillic alphabets to write their form of Chinese. 

Isn’t there also an identity issue when the southern Min dialect spoken in Taiwan is often called Taiwanese, although it is the same as that spoken in the Mainland province of Fujian across the Taiwan Strait?  It may be argued that since “Taiwanese” is spoken in Taiwan, there is no problem really.  But by the same logic, shouldn’t we say that the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong also warrants a designation such as “Hongkongese”?

It is therefore not without justification for the saying that “if you have an army and a flag, then you have a separate language”!