"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.
^Mchombo, Sam (2008). "The Ascendancy of Chinyanja". In Brown, Keith; Ogilvie, Sarah (eds.). Concise encyclopedia of languages of the world. Elsevier. p. 793. ISBN9780080877754. A recurrent joke in linguistics courses ... is the quip that ...
^Barfield, Thomas (1998). The Dictionary of Anthropology. Wiley. ISBN9781577180579. Fundamental notions such as 'language' and 'dialect' are primarily social, not linguistic, constructs, because they depend on society in crucial ways.