The following well-known passage is often attributed to the linguist Max Weinreich, however, Weinreich believes it to come from a high school teacher who gave his lecture in 1940: "Language is a combination of army and navy. dialect.” In other words, the way of speaking, called a “language,” is usually supported by the political forces of the state’s institutions, and it is officially declared that the language is the state or official language. Therefore, linguistic differences identified as languages or dialects do not arise from the number of repetitions of vocabulary or grammar, nor from mutual intelligibility, but are rooted in geopolitical factors. For example, Swedish and Norwegian are considered two languages (official languages of Sweden and Norway, respectively), yet speakers of both languages can fully understand each other (Childs 2006).
Likewise, although Hindi and Urdu have different written scripts, spoken languages have a high degree of overlap. However, since these two languages belong to two countries, India and Pakistan, they are considered as two languages. On the other hand, although Cantonese, which is a "dialect" of Chinese, has similar whatsapp list written characters to Mandarin, the mutual intelligibility of spoken languages is very low. Furthermore, prior to parting with the former Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croatian was considered a single language, with eastern and western "dialects", however, after Serbo and Croatia became independent, respectively The two dialects each claim to have nothing to do with the other.
Although speakers of Serbian and Croatian have few communication difficulties, the governments and peoples of both sides often argue that the two languages are completely different (Greenberg 2004: 1-3). Obviously, whenever people mention the difference between language and dialect, the considerations of politics, history, ethnic identity, culture, and indigenous rights are far higher than the technical considerations of language. The term "dialect" is also ambiguous and controversial, as it often refers to a lower-status way of speaking. Virtually everyone speaks (at least one) dialect, however, speakers of "standard dialects"—mainstream newscasters, highly educated national figures, and others—usually don't think they speak a dialect , however, the fact is that they also have an "accent" (Lippi-Green 1997).