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Comment by shas3 | Hacker News Reader

"1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy"

Tell that to the speakers of 10s of languages of India, most of which are so different from one another that no definition would classify them as dialects. I wonder if that quip, even as a humorous one, makes sense when it fails for about 20% of all humans.

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Well it was said (attributed, anyway) to Max Weinreich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...) who was a professional linguist.

Notice that it was said in Yiddish which, of course, did not have its own navy or army. So it may have been said with a tongue in cheek, especially if the story relayed by Weinreich at the link is correct.

I always interpreted it as meaning that there is no objective distinction between dialects and languages but that nations (which have armies and navies) declare their prestige dialect to be a "language" and claim related dialects to be subservient to it.

Yes, normative dialects are selected to be the language. Often based on the dialect of the capital city.

I'm pretty sure that at some point in the not too distant past, these Indian languages had armies.

Well, yes and no. Kingdoms and provinces weren't ever linguistically organized till 1957, 7 years after India was unified as a Republic (1950). Most kingdoms and provinces were multilingual, though they all had one or more court languages for which the respective governing elites patronized scholarship. An example is the Vijayanagara empire in southern India (1330s to 1565) which was ruled by different multilingual elites who patronized Kannada, Telugu, Sanskrit, and to a lesser extent, Tamil and Persian. There are also other types of counter-examples- dialects that were patronized by kings or leal chiefs with their own armies (e.g. Dakhani Persian/Urdu of the various Sultans and Nizams (1300s - 1900s) of the Deccan region of South/South-Central India)

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