Editing Language (section)

===Languages and dialects===
{{main|Dialect#Dialect or language}}

There is no [[Language or dialect|clear distinction]] between a language and a [[dialect]], notwithstanding a famous [[aphorism]] attributed to linguist [[Max Weinreich]] that "[[a language is a dialect with an army and navy]]".<ref name="5 minute linguist">{{cite web|last=Rickerson |first=E.M. |title=What's the difference between dialect and language? |url=http://spinner.cofc.edu/linguist/archives/2005/08/whats_the_diffe.html?referrer=webcluster& |work=The Five Minute Linguist |publisher=College of Charleston |access-date=17 July 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101219070627/http://spinner.cofc.edu/linguist/archives/2005/08/whats_the_diffe.html?referrer=webcluster& |archive-date=19 December 2010 }}</ref> For example, national boundaries frequently override linguistic difference in determining whether two linguistic varieties are languages or dialects. [[Hakka Chinese|Hakka]], [[Cantonese]] and [[Mandarin Chinese|Mandarin]] are, for example, often classified as "dialects" of Chinese, even though they are more different from each other than [[Swedish language|Swedish]] is from [[Norwegian language|Norwegian]]. Before the [[Yugoslav civil war|Yugoslav Wars]], [[Serbo-Croatian language|Serbo-Croatian]] was generally considered a single language with two normative variants, but due to sociopolitical reasons, [[Croatian language|Croatian]] and [[Serbian language|Serbian]] are now often treated as separate languages and employ different writing systems. In other words, the distinction may hinge on political considerations as much as on cultural differences as on distinctive [[writing system]]s or the degree of [[mutual intelligibility]].<ref>{{harvcoltxt|Lyons|1981|p=26}}</ref> The latter is, in fact, a rather unreliable criterion to discriminate languages and dialects. [[Pluricentric language]]s, which are languages with more than one standard variety, are a case in point. [[General American English|Standard American English]] and [[RP English|Standard RP (English) English]], for instance, may in some areas be more different than languages with names, e.g. Swedish and Norwegian. A complex social process of "language making"<ref>{{Cite journal |author=Krämer, Philipp |author2=Vogl, Ulrike |author3=Kolehmainen, Leena |display-authors=etal |date=2022 |title=What is language making? |doi=10.1515/ijsl-2021-0016 |doi-access=free |journal=International Journal of the Sociology of Language |issue=274 |pages=1–27|hdl=1854/LU-8745135 |hdl-access=free }}</ref> underlies these assignments of status and in some cases even linguistic experts may not agree (e.g. the [[One Standard German Axiom]]). The language making process is dynamic and subject to change over time.