What's the Difference Between Language and Dialect?

When it comes to language learning, one of the most difficult questions to answer is 'what is the difference between language and dialect?`'. It is a common debate among linguists. The truth is that there is no common agreement between the two. We have asked some of the tutors that work at Justlearn for their opinion. 

What's the difference between language and dialect?

We are going to try and keep things simple here. We are not going to go too much into depth on the whole technical aspects of things.

We all know what a language is, right? It is the way that a group of people speaks to one another. All of us could name at least 20 languages.

Dialect is similar. It talks about the way in which a certain group speaks to one another. There may be small variances in the words used, and maybe a little bit of grammar. However, they all share the same overarching language. This means that, in theory, all the different speakers of a language could all be speaking different dialects, but everybody would be able to understand one another. Let's give an example.

Language vs Dialect: The English Language and Its Dialects

English is a language, right? You also have British English, American English, Canadian English, Australian English, etc. Even these larger dialects can be broken down into smaller groups, but we won't get too confusing there. A Canadian English speaker would have no issues being understood by a speaker of British English. However, there may be small word differences in each of the languages that can cause some confusion. Take British English, for instance. The word football there means something completely different in American English! It is small nuances like this that create a dialect.

You can think of a dialect as a certain way of speaking a language. Some dialects are more in-tune with the original language than others. For example, European Spanish has less overlap with Mexican Spanish than the English variants that we discussed previously. So, if you are learning Spanish, then you will want to ensure that you learn the right dialect for your situation e.g. if you are in Europe, then it would probably be best to go down the route of European Spanish.

Final Thoughts

As we said, things do get a bit more complicated than this. For example, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish is clearly separate languages. However, speakers of each language can easily understand the others without any formal training. In theory, this would class them as different dialects by the definition that we gave here. However, most linguists will see them as separate languages as there are still some major differences between them.

In our opinion, you probably won't have to worry too much about the difference between language and dialect, at least when you are starting to learn a language. It doesn't matter all that much for most languages.