PIERRE, S.D. (AP) - Are they two languages or one, Dakota and Lakota? And what about the more distant cousin tongue, Nakota? And how many people speak these languages? Linguist Armik Mirzayan at the ...

The vast majority of people, if asked what language is spoken in China, would say: That’s a no-brainer: Chinese, of course! Some might know enough to differentiate between Mandarin Chinese and ...

What’s the difference between a language and a dialect? Is there some kind of technical distinction, the way there is between a quasar and a pulsar, or between a rabbit and a hare? Faced with the ...

With at least 350 million speakers, Arabic is the fifth most spoken language in the world after English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish and French. However, the kind of Arabic you hear on the streets of the ...

In dialectology, the study of dialects, the notion of mutual intelligibility has been used as the most reliable criterion to determine whether two linguistic communities speak different languages or ...

Shanghai dialect is a dialect spoken in the city of Shanghai and the surrounding region. Shanghainese, like other Wu dialects, is largely not mutually intelligible with other Chinese dialects such as ...

A language is a dialect with an army and navy. His point being that the difference between a language and a dialect was ultimately a political distinction and had little to do with linguistics per se.

For the average person, the differences between a language and a dialect seem pretty clear. A dialect is a subset of a language. One speaks in a dialect and writes in a language. As the linguist and ...