A language is a dialect with an army and navy

"A language is a dialect with an army and navy", sometimes called the Weinreich witticism,[1] is a quip about the arbitrariness of the distinction between a dialect and a language.[2][3][4][5] It points out the influence that social and political conditions can have over a community's perception of the status of a language or dialect.[6] The facetious adage was popularized by the sociolinguist and Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich, who heard it from a member of the audience at one of his lectures in the 1940s.

  1. ^ Abend, Gabriel (25 July 2023). Words and Distinctions for the Common Good: Practical Reason in the Logic of Social Science. Princeton University Press. p. 225. ISBN 978-0-691-24706-9.
  2. ^ Victor H. Mair (2002). The Columbia History of Chinese Literature. Columbia University Press. p. 24. ISBN 9780231528511. It has often been facetiously remarked... the falsity of this quip can be demonstrated...
  3. ^ Mchombo, Sam (2008). "The Ascendancy of Chinyanja". In Brown, Keith; Ogilvie, Sarah (eds.). Concise encyclopedia of languages of the world. Elsevier. p. 793. ISBN 9780080877754. A recurrent joke in linguistics courses ... is the quip that ...
  4. ^ Wolfram, Walt; Schilling, Natalie (1998). American English: Dialects and Variation. p. 218.
  5. ^ Blum, Susan D. (2000). "Chapter 3: China's Many Faces: Ethnic, Cultural, and Religious Pluralism, pp. 69-96". In Weston, Timothy B.; Jensen, Lionel M. (eds.). China Beyond the Headlines. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 85. ISBN 9780847698554. Weinreich...pointing out the arbitrary division between [dialect and language]
  6. ^ Barfield, Thomas (1998). The Dictionary of Anthropology. Wiley. ISBN 9781577180579. Fundamental notions such as 'language' and 'dialect' are primarily social, not linguistic, constructs, because they depend on society in crucial ways.