- Joined
- Aug 7, 2021
Dialects can be both spoken and written. The difference between a dialect and a language is a matter of degree and can be blurry at the edges. Linguists often use "mutual intelligibility" as a rule of thumb, that is, if speakers can understand each other then they're only dialects, but this is a fuzzy definition as there are degrees of understanding.
There is a famous quote that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, meaning that a dialect gets treated in practice as a language when it's the language of a country, regardless of how similar the neighboring country's speech is, and conversely quite different languages (such as Mandarin and Cantonese) are routinely referred to as dialects when they're inside the same country.
It's similar to the definition of a species, where the rule of thumb is that organisms are of the same species if they can produce viable offspring. But sometimes while they can breed, the hybrid is messed up in some way (such as being infertile), so that's a continuum too.
The second article (Moldovan language) is a matter of nomenclature; Moldovans (sometimes) refer to the Romanian language as "Moldovan", but it's the same thing. The Moldavian dialect refers to the variety of Romanian/Moldovan dominant in Moldova. That is, they consider the Romanian/Moldovan speaking continuum to be a single language, and their own local variety as a dialect of that language.
