Re: dialectal diversity in English

Stone Gordonssen wrote:
> While I can see where cultures' claims of exclusion or inclusion of selected
> dialects to have significance  politically and socially, I personally place
> this in the catagory of subjective rather than objective fact. I guess I
> value obhectivity more when it comes to scientific analysis.
In my opinion, there should be a recognized distinction between
"linguistic dialects", which would be based on the mutual
intelligibility guideline, perhaps with reference to speakers' intuition
in ambivalent cases, and "cultural dialects" which would be based on how
they are viewed, thus, Chinese would be a single "cultural language",
but several "linguistic languages", while Serbian and Croatian would be
"cultural languages" but "linguistic dialects".

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