Sunday, February 11, 2018

[xvdfqlev] Dialects with armies

A language is a dialect with an army.  Among countries whose language is named after a different country, list them by size of their army.

  1. American
  2. Brazilian
  3. Mexican
  4. ...
  5. Moldovan
  6. ...

It's not that bad an idea to define a language in terms of an army: it means there's enough mutual intelligibility including shared culture that one can practically organize an army with it.  Curiously, the word Urdu means "army".  Urdu is Hindi with its own nuclear arsenal so is of course a separate language.

Go further and define the normal or standard dialect as the one belonging to the country with the largest army.  Hugh Laurie speaks American with an Englandish accent, but can lose the accent and speak normally when playing an American character.

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