A language is a dialect with an army and navy

Common card · No. 229461

"A language is a dialect with an army and navy", sometimes called the Weinreich witticism, is a mordant aphorism about the arbitrariness of the distinction between a dialect and a language. It was originally said in the context of the "social plight of Yiddish", and has been widely adopted as a shorthand for the importance of social and political conditions, rather than purely linguistic considerations, in defining the status of a language or dialect. The witticism 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. A more scholarly approach to the problem of dialect versus language is the framework of abstand and ausbau languages.

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