Magner, Thomas F. 'The Study of Foreign Languages in China,' The Modern Language Journal, Vol 58, No. 8 (December 1974): 384-391.

"In explaining the different between a dialect and a language, someone has facetiously remarked that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, an observation which simply means that there is a political component in any definition of a language."
(p. 386)

Izenberg, Oren. 'Language Poetry and Collective Life,' Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No.1 (Autumn 2003): 132-159.

"The old linguist’s joke that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy” needs to be updated; it also has an educational system, powers of taxation, and a corporate ethos."
(p. 145)

Boddy, Janice. 'Review.' Review of Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion, by J. Lorand Matory. American Ethnologist, Vol. 24, No. 4 (November 1997): 950-951.

"If a language is a dialect with an army behind it, the same might be said of religions and cults."
(p. 950)

Jacobs, J. Bruce. 'Review.' Review of Rethinking Transnational Chinese Cinemas: The Amoy-dialect Film Industry in Cold War Asia, by Jeremy E. Taylor. The China Journal, No. 67 (January 2012): 214-215.

"The Yiddish linguist, Max Weinreich, states, “A language is a dialect with an army and navy”. According to this definition, Mandarin has armies while Hokkien and Cantonese do not."
(p. 216)

G., T. B. 'Editorial: Trial By What Is Contrary.' Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Spring 1985): 1-6.

"It must, nevertheless, be apparent even to the most dogged supporters of logic, reason, and scientific inquiry in education that the line between "This argument is faulty" and "I do not agree with this argument" is fine indeed. Especially so when, as Szasz shows, truth in social reality is chiefly fashioned from words and metaphor, from pure invention and linguistic charade backed by institutionalized power. The nature of the problem is seen in the quip that runs, "A language is a dialect with its own army and navy." As we search for reliable knowledge in education, can we avoid the accusation that truth is an opinion with its own journal?"
(p. 3)

Marshall, Catherine, Douglas, E. Mitchell and Frederick Wirt. 'Assumptive Worlds of Education Policy Makers.' Peabody Journal of Education. Vol. 62, No. 4, State Politics of Education (Summer 1985): 90-115.

"The focus on words and language has great potential for understanding latent operational values in the cultures of policy making. As Greenfield (1985) said, "a language is a dialect with its own army and navy.""
(p. 93)

Sorenson, Roy A. 'The Metaphysics of Precision and Scientific Language,' Nous, Vol. 31, Supplement: Philosophical Perspectives, 11, Mind, Causation, and World (1997): 349-374.

"Many flippant definitions can also be viewed as invitations to relax. When a linguist says that a language is a dialect with an army, he downplays the significance of the distinction. His advice is to turn the "theoretical" issue into a practical one. Don't try to pigeonhole the unclear case, just clearly understand the similarities and differences that make it unclear."
(p. 361)

Gosden, Chris. 'Review.' Review of The Lapita Peoples: Ancestors of the Oceanic World by Patrick Vinton Kirch. American Antiquity. Vol. 63, No. 2 (April 1998): 340-341.

"It has been said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. The link between language spread and seafaring is at the core of Kirch's book, and the data supplied by linguistics are crucial. Kirch sees the series of reconstructed protolanguages as providing a crucial clue to the nature of colonization and the societies of the colonizers."
(p. 341)

Gordon, III, James D. 'Free Exercise on the Mountaintop.' California Law Review. Vol. 79, No. 1 (January 1991): 91-116.

"Culture is always linked to power. Max Weinreich observed, "A language is a dialect with an army and navy.""
(p. 109)

Lim, Julian S. 'Tongue-Tied in the Market: The Relevance of Contract Law to Racial-Language Minorities.' California Law Review. Vol. 91, No. 2 (March 2003): 579-620.

"More importantly, despite the rhetoric of neutrality asserted by English-only proponents, language in actuality is by no means neutral, but is political: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."<sup>72

72</sup> Jill Gaulding, Against Common Sense: Why Title VII Should Protect Speakers of Black English, 31 U. MICH. J.. REFORM 637, 656 (1998)"
(p. 598)

Polese, Mario. 'Misplaced Priorities: A Review of "Demolinguistic Trends and the Evolution of Canadian Institutions".' Canadian Public Policy / Analyse de Politiques. Vol. 16, No. 4 (December 1990): 445-450.

"But, status is also conferred by the state via legislation and by policies which affect the status of those who speak it. 'A language is a dialect with an army,' someone is reputed to have once said."
(p. 448)

Bashkow, Ira. 'A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries.' American Anthropologist. Vol. 106, No. 3 (September 2004): 443-458.

"Linguists' recognition that language boundaries are shaped by politics is expressed neatly in the aphorism that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." By and large, linguists seem less troubled than are anthropologists by the fact that their objects of study are not naturally bounded entities."
(p. 456)

Kaye, Alan S. 'Review: Semitic Languages in the New Millenium.' Review of Semitic Linguistics: The State of the Art at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century by Shlomo Izre'el (ed). Journal of the American Oriental Society. Vol. 123, No. 4 (October-December 2003): 819-834.

"There is no easy answer to the nomenclature problems of language vs. dialect - in Semitic, AA, or indeed any other language family. In fact, the old adage attributed to Uriel Weinreich and his father Max, that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy," might be the best we can do to demarcate these terms."
(p. 830)

Coveney, Aidan. 'Review.' Review of The French-Speaking World: A Practical Introduction to Sociolinguistic Issues by Rodney Ball. The Modern Language Review. Vol. 93, No. 3 (July 1998): 824-825.

"(Incidentally, the saying 'a language is a dialect with an army and a navy', to which the author refers on page 71, is now believed to have been coined by the young Joshua Fishman: see Language in Society, 26 (1997), 469.)"
(p. 824)

Scott, James C., John Tehranian and Jeremy Mathias. 'The Production of Legal Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname.' Comparative Studies in Society and History. Vol. 44, No. 1 (January 2002): 4-44.

"The transfer of power, in terms of state capacity, is obvious, as is the fact that it is achieved against opposition. As socio-linguists are fond of saying, 'the difference between a dialect and a national language is that a national language is a dialect with an army.' Nation-states, even revolutionary ones, could not simply decree projects of synoptic legibility; they had to be enforced."
(p. 33)

Nunberg, Geoffrey. 'Double Standards.' Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. Vol. 15, No. 3 (August 1997): 667-675.

"It was as good a piece of language reporting as you are likely to encounter in the general press. Burdman quoted Susan Ervin-Tripp, Wayne O'Neil, John McWhorter, and Berkeley historian Martin Jay; described the standard cases of the mutually incomprehensible Chinese "dialects" and the mutually comprehensible Scandinavian "languages"; and duly repeated the famous quip that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. But with one swoop the headline writer turned all those scholarly scruples into mere disquietude: "Ebonics Tests Linguistic Definition; Politics Tempers Rules, Scholars Say". The implication was clear: Ebonics lies beyond the pale of linguistic classification, and political agendas were being allowed to compromise scholarly standards."
(p. 670)

Kaye, Alan S. 'Review.' Review of Arabic Sociolinguistics: Issues and Perspectives by Yasir Suleiman (ed). Language in Society. Vol. 25, No. 3 (September 1996): 481-484.

"Uriel Weinreich's famous dictum that "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" is as good as it gets with the plethora of nomenclature problems."
(p. 484)

[Bright, William]. 'A Language is a Dialect with an Army and a Navy.' Language in Society. Vol. 26, No. 3 (September 1997): 469.

""A LANGUAGE IS A DIALECT WITH AN ARMY AND A NAVY." This saying, long part of oral tradition among sociolinguists, was quoted in a review by Alan Kaye in LiS 26:484 (1996). In his manuscript, Kaye had attributed the quote to Max Weinreich; the editor of this journal changed the attribution to Uriel Weinreich [from whom I first heard it in 1957-WB]. However, it has also been attributed to Joshua Fishman. Recent e-mail correspondence involving Christina Paulston and Ellen Prince, as well as Kaye and Fishman, has brought out the following points:

(a) Some scholars believe that the saying is an expansion of a quote from Antoine Meillet, to the effect that a language is a dialect with an army. Up to now the source has not been found in the works of Meillet. Can any readers provide information on this?

(b) The earliest documentation of the saying is in a publication in Yiddish by Max Weinreich. The following is a translation (by Ellen Prince) of a posting on "Mendele," a Yiddish e-mail list, by Joshua Fishman on Oct. 28, 1996:

Avrohom Novershtern (Jerusalem) found for me the source of Max Weinreich's saying that Ashprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un aflot ['A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.'] This is found in Weinreich's "YIVO and the problems of our time," Yivo-bleter, 1945, vol. 25, no. 1, p. 13. Weinreich attributes this formulation to a young man who came to his lectures, and he decided, "I must bring to a large audience this wonderful formulation of the social fate of Yiddish." Congratulations to our good friend Novershtern and to all Mendele-subscribers who helped look for the largely forgotten source of a famous saying that is relevant to Yiddish and to all "one-down" languages.

(c) Joshua Fishman believes that he may have been the young man who, as a student of Max Weinreich, originated the saying. It is clear, in any case, that the dictum derives from the tradition of Yiddish linguistics, and that it was made familiar by the Weinreichs and by Fishman. Further information from readers will be welcome."
(p. 469)

Chvany, Catherine V. 'Review.' Review of A New Slavic Language is Born: The Rusyn Literary Language of Slovakia by Robert Magosci (ed). Language in Society. Vol. 28, No. 4 (December 1999): 621-624.

"Though there exists no linguistic definition of "language" as opposed to "dialect," the case for a Rusyn literary language reshapes the old saw that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." In modern terms, a language is a dialect with dignitas - prestige whose source is more likely to be cultural or economic than military."
(p. 624)

Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. 'Globalization, Kitsch and Conflict: Technologies of Work, War and Politics.' Review of International Political Economy. Vol. 9, No. 1 (March 2002): 1-36.

"The old saying that 'language is a dialect with a navy and an army' confirms the significance of linguistic and discourse analysis (Dedaic, 1999: 137). 'Hate speech' from Rwanda to Serbia, and in slick packaging by NATO, is a case in point."
(p. 12)

Perry, John R. 'Languages and Dialects: Islamic Period.' Iranian Studies. Vol. 31, No. 3/4, A Review of the "Encyclopaedia Iranica" (Summer-Autumn 1998): 517-525.

"The greatest number of single entries comprises living Iranian dialects, especially those of villages on the foothills and the desert fringes of the plateau, in present-day Iran. These are not dialects of Persian-indeed, for the most part they are structurally totally unlike Persian, and despite the influence of radio and other leveling trends they retain a remarkable amount of distinctive phonology and vocabulary. Culturally isolated communities, such as Jews and Zoroastrians, have tended to preserve archaic language features particularly well. However,
the popular hierarchical notion of "language" vs. "dialect" - a language is a dialect with an army and a navy - will not serve in these cases."
(p. 517)

Hobson, Marian. 'Statues and Normalization: The Presidential Address of the Modern Humanities Research Association, May 2007.' The Modern Language Review. Vol. 102, No. 4 (October 2007): 29-44.

"In the France of the eighteenth century, many people will have been bilingual between local dialect and a more regulated French. In present day Scotland, many are bilingual between Scots - a true language, I remind you, with a centuries-old literature and English, and the same is true in Germany, between Hochdeutsch and Schwabisch, for instance. My friends from the south of India move between four languages, Kanaada, Tulu, Telugu, and English. Now, these friends tend to avoid Hindi, and that can provide one reason for linguistic normalization: as the joke says, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy; it explains, too, why what a friend and colleague Donald Rayfield assures me is essentially the same language with different slants to its vocabulary, with different scripts - Serbo-Croat - is known as Bosnian, Slovenian, Serbian, or Croat in what yet different friends, though no doubt with a different political persuasion, persist in calling ex-Yugoslavia."
(p. 29)

O'Neil, Wayne. 'Ebonics in the Media.' The Radical Teacher. No. 54, Education in the Media (Fall 1998): 13-17.

"A second common-sense definition of language, central to this discussion, lies in the quip that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy - or a school system. This definition suggests, correctly, that languages are defined politically through power relations, not scientifically. For example, Swedish and Norwegian, though mutually intelligible, are counted as different languages (in contradiction to the common-sense test) because a political boundary divides Sweden from Norway; while Cantonese, Fujianese, Mandarin, etc., though not mutually intelligible, are considered dialects of Chinese because they are historically related, typologically alike, and located within the national boundary of the Peoples Republic of China."
(p. 17)

Bauer, Robert S. 'Review.' Review of Introduction to Chinese Dialectology by Margaret Mian Yan. Journal of Chinese Linguistics. Vol. 40, No. 2 (June 2012): 478-497.

"However, as linguists well know, the linguistic criteria are less important in this debate than the political factors. Indeed, not mentioned here but certainly relevant is the humorous but astute maxim that is usually attributed to the Yiddish linguist, Max Weinreich, that language is a dialect with its own army and a navy" (Chambers 1997:214)."
(p. 482)

Salomon, Richard. 'Gāndhārī in the Worlds of India, Iran, and Central Asia.' Bulletin of the Asia Institute. New Series, Vol. 21 (2007): 179-192.

"Latin, for example, has survived for millennia not because it was in any way inherently superior to the other languages and dialects of ancient Italy, but merely because it was the dialect of Rome, which rose to political and military supremacy over the Western world. Endnote: The point is expressed concisely in the old saw, usually attributed to the Yiddishist Max Weinreich, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" ("A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot")."
(p. 188)

Lupke, Christopher. 'Review.' Review of Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary by June Yip. Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR). Vol. 29 (December 2007): 184-192.

""Dialect" is another good example. While it might be said in jest that "a language is a dialect with an army," what is closer to the accepted view in linguistics these days is that Chinese languages such as Taiwanese and Cantonese are regional languages. Let us be honest, there is more similarity between Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese than there is between Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese or Cantonese. These regional languages are mutually unintelligible and evolved separately over many centuries. They only share a writing system and some syntactical affinities."
(p. 191)

Maley, Willy. 'Review.' Review of Ireland and Scotland: Culture and Society, 1700-2000 by Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan (eds). The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1, Irish-Canadian Connections / Les liens irlando-canadiens (Spring 2005): 134-135.

"Liam Mcllvanney tackles the tricky topic of "Ulster Scots," which avoids the easy political argument that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy in order to show that however bound up with political quid pro quo is the prominence given to Ulster Scots, it is also a linguistic currency that typifies the trade and traffic of cultural exchange, and one on which Catholic writers like Seamus Heaney can draw."
(p. 135)

Eoyang, Eugene Chen. 'From the Imperial to the Empirical: Teaching English in Hong Kong.' Profession. (2000): 62-74.

"4 The fact that Western linguists categorize Cantonese as a mere dialect of Chinese is prejudicial: if speakers of two tongues cannot understand each other, then what they speak constitute different languages. The illogic of Western characterizations of languages and dialects can be seen by this contrast: Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are mutually comprehensible but characterized as separate languages; Cantonese, Shanghaiese, and Mandarin are mutually incomprehensible but characterized as dialects. Max Weinreich was not far off the mark when he said, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" (qtd. in Pinker 28)."
(p. 73)

Sharkey, Heather J. 'Arab Identity and Ideology in Sudan: The Politics of Language, Ethnicity, and Race.' African Affairs. Vol. 107, No. 426 (January 2008): 21-43.

"When does Arab ethnic identity become Arab racism? Amir H. Idris has pointed out that racism in the Sudanese context has been rooted in local histories of slavery and in the unequal distribution of wealth and power between regions and social groups. But in the post-colonial period, and now especially in the context of Darfur, Idris has argued that racism has sharpened within the climate of fear surrounding Arab pastoralists - who are buffeted by drought and desertification, awash in guns but not in well watered grazing lands, and abetted by a regime that is determined to retain its power by crushing internal rebellions. Racism has been flourishing amidst violence, among disproportionately well-armed Arabs who can kill with impunity. One could perhaps extend the adage that 'a language is a dialect with an army' to say that, with regard to Sudan today, Arab and African 'races' are ethnicities with armies."
(p. 39)

Bloom, Paul. 'Review: Explaining Linguistic Diversity.' Review of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter, and The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar by Mark C. Baker. American Scientist. Vol. 90, No. 4 (July-August 2002): 374-375.

"But in fact, what gets counted as a language is a matter of social and political considerations and has little to do with the sort of linguistic facts that linguists are interested in. Danish and Swedish are counted as separate languages even though they are far more similar than Cantonese and Mandarin, which are commonly viewed as dialects of the same language, Chinese. As the linguist Uriel Weinreich put it, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.""
(p. 375)

Goodby, John. 'Review: Anthologies and Misogynies.' Review of The New Younger Irish Poets by Gerald Dawe (ed.), Poets From the North of Ireland by Frank Ormsby (ed.) and After Seymour's Funeral by Roy McFadden. The Irish Review (1986-), No. 11 (Winter 1991/1992): 120-126.

"... Ormsby's anthology, by virtue of its geographic mandate, embodies them. In the process it reminds us not only of how difficult it is to prove the existence of a poetic tradition but also of the old adage that a language is a dialect with an army and navy. The Northern Irish cultural case has to be made - and in terms of poetry is more than well-made - despite the ugly contradictions of machtpolitik."
(p. 126)

Tochon, Francois Victor. 'The Key to Global Understanding: World Languages Education - Why Schools Need to Adapt.' Review of Educational Research. Vol. 79, No. 2 (June 2009): 650-681.

"No valid linguistic criteria can be justified to differentiate a language from a dialect (Sebba, 2008). Postulated principles and criteria that distinguish language varieties from others are ideological and political, not scientific (Kubota, 2004). Linguists tend to respond: A language is a dialect with an army. Dialects can become languages anytime as soon as they are associated with power, values, and money. These issues are excessively difficult to evaluate because of the various interests involved and, in particular, because of the language ideologies that interfere in policy making."
(p. 661)

Louden, Mark L. 'The Logic of Nonstandard Syntax.' Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik. Vol. 72, No. 2 (2005): 167-182.

"Let us begin by considering what a "dialect" is, which is often defined in opposition to a "language" An oft-quoted maxim, usually attributed to the great Yiddish linguist, Max Weinreich, holds that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy".¹ Implied here is that the difference between "languages" and "dialects" is an accident of the external situation of their users. That is, under particular social, and often political, circumstances, a community of speakers may choose to identify the linguistic system (to employ a neutral term) that unites them as a "language", distinct from what different, often geographically proximate, groups of people speak. "Dialects," in contrast, lack the image of autonomy enjoyed by "languages", hence we typically speak of "dialects of a particular language".

¹ The precise origins of this maxim are unclear, however the consensus is that if it did not originate with M . Weinreich, he nonetheless promoted it (Bright 1997)."
(p. 167)

Lötscher, Andreas. 'A Rule Is a Rule Is a Rule... ? Bemerkungen zum Diskussionsbeitrag von Mark L. Louden: "The Logic of Nonstandard Syntax".' Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik. Vol. 72, No. 3 (2005): 327-330.

"Der Unterschiedz wischen einem Dialekt und einer Sprache ist nach ihm überhaupt systematisch gesehen ein rein zufälliger, willkürlicher, lediglich politisch bedingter: „Sprache" und „Dialekt" ist grundsätzlich das Gleiche: „A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" (nach Max Weinreich). Loudens Beitrag liest sich stellenweise wie eine Verteidigungsschrift für die Würde gesprochener Sprache, die gegen den erniedrigenden Vorwurf der Irregularität in Schutz genommen werden muss."
(p. 328)

Fogel, Joshua A. 'The Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies.' Journal of the History of Ideas. Vol. 71, No. 2 (April 2010): 313-333.

"¹⁶ Calling both Chinese "language" and Shanghai" dialect" lects enables us to avoid the unproductive language vs. dialect debate. Half a century ago, Max Weinreich summed it up beautifully with the aphorism: "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot" ("a language is a dialect with an army and a navy"). See his "Der YIVO un di problemen fun undzer tsayt" (YIVO and the problems of our time), YIVO bleter 25.1 (January-February 1945): 3-18."
(p. 320)

Starčević, Zoran. 'Review.' Review of Language Planning in Yugoslavia by Ranko Burgarski and Celia Hawkesworth (eds). Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes. Vol. 35, No. 1/2 (March-June 1993): 162.

"In particular, the articles which discuss problems associated with Serbo-Croatian - the largest language in Yugoslavia common to several national groups - will be valuable for future considerations of language planning and politics in the drastically changed sociolinguistic situation, now that recent events have provided sociolinguists with good proof that indeed a standard language is "a dialect with its own army.""
(p. 162)

Priestly, Tom. 'Koroščina, Kajkavica and Kaszëbskå Gådka: The Sociolinguistics of 'Dialect' Literature in Minority Language Areas.' Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes. Vol. 39, No. 3/4, Canadian Contributions to the XII International Congress of Slavists, Kraków 1997 (September-December 1997): 361-383.

"Third, in the non-academic (and even sometimes in the scholarly) usage of the labels "language" and "dialect," it is history and politics which matter far more than anything to do with linguistic facts. <sup>8

8</sup> This is now a cliché: cf. "A dialect is a language that failed," quoted by Haugen 1966:926 from Brun 1946; "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" (first said by Max Weinreich, see Language in Society 26 [1997]: 469); and "As is well known, the concept of a language is in many cases as much a political, cultural and historical concept as it is a linguistic concept," Trudgill 1992:168."
(p. 363)

Miller, Jim Wayne. 'Regions, Folk Life, and Literary Criticism.' Appalachian Journal. Vol. 7, No. 3 (Spring 1980): 180-187.

"As a student of languages, I have dealt with the purely linguistic corollary to such questions: Why is the language of one group in a particular place thought to be correct and held up as a standard, while slight variations nearby, in no way inherently inferior, are regarded as dialects? The answer one linguist has given is that a standard language is a dialect with an army and a navy. ² This has often been, in fact, the crucial difference.

² Harold Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p.103. See also "Linguistic Chauvinism" in Peter Farb's Word Play (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1975), pp. 157-87."
(p. 180)

Holt, Jim. 'Review: Homme, Hombre, Omul.' Review of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter. The American Scholar. Vol. 71, No. 2 (Spring 2002): 142-145.

"Practically every language is actually a cluster of dialects, and which among them gets identified as the "standard" dialect is, McWhorter insists, a matter of luck rather than merit. Well, not only luck. As another linguist once put it, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.""
(p. 143)

Portuese, Aurélien. 'A Darwinian Account of the Current European Multilingualism.' Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia. Vol. 66, Fasc. 4, Darwinismo: Vertentes Científica e Religiosa / Darwinism: Scientific and Religious Vertentes (2010): 819-854.

"Language planning contributes to the distortion of a natural selection of languages through different interventions such as "status planning" ¹⁹ (selection and implementation of languages), "corpus planning" (codification and standardization of language norms).

¹⁹ Weinreich published in 1945 in Yiddish the famous statement: "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy"."
(p. 832)

Auger, Julie. 'Picard et français: la grammaire de la différence.' Langue Française. No. 168, Le(s) français: formaliser la variation (Decembre 2010): 19-34.

"La définition de langue qui illustre le mieux l'importance des facteurs externes est sans doute celle attribuée à M. Weinreich: A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Cette définition explique que le danois, le norvégien et le suédois soient vus comme des langues distinctes mais que le mandarin, le cantonáis et le wu constituent des dialectes du chinois."
(p. 20)

Strongman, Roberto. 'Women Writing Creole: Deyita's "Esperans Dezire", Sistren's "Lionheart Gal", and Mamita Fox's " Identifikashon".' Journal of Haitian Studies. Vol. 9, No. 2 (Fall 2003): 42-57.

"A re-evaluation of the stigmatization of Creole needs to take into account the ways in which European culture, with language as its referent, has been utilized as a standard by which everything else is measured and valued in the Antilles. That the inferiorization of Creole has more to do with political colonization than linguistics is aptly expressed in the truism that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.""
(p. 43)

Boullata, Issa J. 'Review.' Review of Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language by Abdelfattah Kilito. Translated by Wail S. Hassan. Review of Middle East Studies. Vol. 43, No. 2 (Winter 2009): 267-268.

"It is, of course, known that cultural associations of a word or a structure in one language cannot be exactly the same in another; but Kilito goes beyond that to suggest that, even between a language and one of its dialects, there is difference. In his introduction to the book, translator Waïl S. Hassan says, "It has been said that the difference between a dialect and a language is that a language is a dialect with an army." He captures here Kilito's belief in the fact of dominance and subordination among languages and dialects, and readily brings to mind what political power can do in transferring meaning from one culture to another or, for that matter, from one gender to another."
(p. 267)

Vovin, Alexander. 'Review.' Central Asiatic Journal. Vol. 52, No. 2 (2008): 310-315.

"Apart from soundtracks done by John G. Hangin, a native speaker of Chakhar, for old American textbooks of Khalkha Mongolian (Hangin 1968, 1973), there are no other materials available in the textbook form for the study of this important language. It is my hope that someone among the youngest generation of Mongolists will transgress the boundaries of the old proverb "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" and finally produce an English language based textbook of the Chakhar dialect."
(p. 314)

Anderson, Victoria B. and James N. Anderson. 'Pangasinan—An Endangered Language? Retrospect and Prospect.' Philippine Studies. Vol. 55, No. 1, Battle of Mactan (2007): 116-144.

"The judgment of which speech varieties merit the popular term" languages" and which are relegated to the popular term "dialects" is a social and/or political judgment. A definition attributed to Max Weinreich (1945) is apt: "a language is a dialect with an army and navy." Thus, rather than having been "found" to be a language, Tagalog was declared to be a language, presumably because it was spoken around Manila, which for historical reasons became the Philippines's most important hub of social and political activity (and not because the language spoken around Manila was inherently superior to others)"
(p. 124)

Ehrensperger, Kathy. 'Speaking Greek Under Rome: Paul, The Power of Language and the Language of Power.' Neotestamentica. Vol. 46, No. 1 (2012): 9-28

"What is called a language in the sense of an "official" or "legitimate" language emerges through "a complex historical process, sometimes involving extensive conflict especially in colonial context" through which one particular dialect is being constituted as this "official" language with other dialects and languages being subordinated. It is the language of the "victorious" which emerges as a dominant or "official" language - hence the saying "Language is a dialect with an army" is not inappropriate when the implicit power involved in the use of language is addressed..."
(p. 16)

Crowley, Tony. 'The Political Production of a Language: The Case of Ulster-Scots.' Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. Vol. 16, No. 1 (June 2006): 23-35.

"It is unclear precisely who coined the pithy phrase "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." It appears to have been either the linguist Max Weinreich or his student, the socio-linguist Joshua Fishman.¹ Whatever the origin, the point is well made: There is nothing intrinsic to a set of linguistic practices which makes them either a language or a dialect. Indeed, as Rumsey (1990:346) has suggested, linguistic categorization and linguistic ideologies (defined as "shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world") are often closely related. With regard to particular forms of language-making, the conferral of the status of 'language' or 'dialect' is rendered by social forces that are external to the practices themselves (Gal and Irvine 1995). These are sometimes overtly political, as is implied by the identification of military strength as a significant factor in the categorical distinction, and sometimes they are less openly political and operate discursively.

¹ For a discussion of the coinage, see the note by William Bright (1997:469)."
(p. 23)

Chomsky, Noam. 'Explaining Language Use.' Philosophical Topics. Vol. 20, No. 1, The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam (Spring 1992): 205-231.

"A standard remark in an undergraduate linguistics course is Max Weinreich's quip that a language is a dialect with an army and navy, and the next lecture explains that dialects are also nonlinguistic notions, which can be set up one way or another, depending on particular interests and concerns. Such factors as conquests, natural barriers (oceans, mountains), national TV, etc., may induce illusions on this matter, but no notion of "common language" has been formulated in any useful or coherent way, nor do the prospects seem hopeful. Any approach to the study of language or meaning that relies on such notions is highly suspect"
(p. 216)

Kaye, Alan S. 'Formal vs. Informal in Arabic: Diglossia, Triglossia, Tetraglossia, etc., Polyglossia — Multiglossia Viewed as a Continuum.' Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik. No. 27 (1994): 47-66.

"Before the reader becomes totally exasperated with my contentions of what a "language" is and what a "dialect" is, let me point out that I am familiar with the old adage that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."
(p. 48)

Davis, Barry. 'Yiddish: The Perils and Joys of Translation.' European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe. Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring 2010): 3–36.

"Max Weinreich, to demonstrate the vulnerable status of Yiddish, cited the phrase: 'A language is a dialect with an army and a navy'. ¹⁵ This lack of an association with power enhances its attractiveness today as a language of marginality and 'otherness' to those who find the association of Jews and power discomforting.

¹⁵ Max Weinreich, Yivo Bleter, vol. 23, no. 3, May-June 1944, pp. 420-421."
(p. 5)

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.

"Yet it is also perfectly obvious why Esperanto, which lacked a powerful state to enforce its adoption, failed to replace the existing vernaculars or dialects of Europe. (As social linguists are fond of saying, "A national language is a dialect with an army.")"
(p. 257)

Grewal, David Singh. Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization. Yale University Press, 2008.

"The remarkable rise of English in the twentieth century offers a dramatic example of how the “force of intercourse” can lead to the emergence of a universal standard. Like any natural language, English is a standard in the first sense I discussed, a mediating standard, a system of signs that inherently governs communication with others who use it. It is a Germanic language (with significant amounts of French thrown in, thanks to the Norman Conquest) whose modern form emerged in the British Isles around 1475 from Middle English. From England, it spread throughout Britain and Ireland by conquest, trade, and cultural exchange. Then British imperialism carried it across the globe: in 1900, the British Empire encompassed one quarter of the world’s population, which explains why English is an official or dominant language in over 60 countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, India, South Africa, and indeed all the countries of the British Commonwealth. English offers a dramatic example of the linguist’s quip that “a language is a dialect with an army and navy.”"
(p. 73)

Woelk, Jens. 'Bosnia-Herzegovina: Trying to Build a Federal State on Paradoxes,' in Consitutional Dynamics in Federal Systems: Sub-national Perspectives, Michael Burgess, G. Alan Tarr (eds). McGill-Queen's University Press, 2012: 109-139.

"Although linguistically very close to each other and even known as “Serbo-Croatian” in former Yugoslavia, the official languages of BiH are nowadays three, known as “B-C-S”: Bosniak, Croatian, and Serbian. Despite some smaller differences, people usually understand each other perfectly; however, reversing the famous saying by the linguist Weinrich (“a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”), currently, a politically guided process of linguistic differentiation takes place. With the existing differences being highlighted and new ones being deliberately introduced, three distinct languages will be created to strengthen the distinct “national” character of the three constituent groups in Bosnia."
(p. 131)

Douzet, Frédérick. The Color of Power: Racial Coalitions and Political Power in Oakland. University of Virginia Press, 2012.

"Linguists are in the habit of saying that “a language is a dialect with an army.” The Oakland school district achieved worldwide notoriety in the late 1990s, rivaling that of Topeka at the origin of the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation decision. Late in the night of December 18, 1996, after hours of debate, the seven members of the Oakland school board decided unanimously to recognize Ebonics (a composite of Ebony and Phonics—“Black Sounds”), as a separate language, unique to African American students, thereby elevating what was known as Black English to the status of a primary language distinct from English."
(p. 199)

Bell, Daniel A. Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context. Princeton University Press, 2006.

"I do not mean to take sides in the dispute concerning what constitutes a dialect and what constitutes a language. Linguists tell the joke that a language is a dialect with an army."
(p. 182)

Dei, George J. Sefa, Alireza Asgharzadeh, Sharon Eblaghie Bahador and Riyad Ahmed Shahjahan. Schooling and Difference in Africa: Democratic Challenges in a Contemporary Context. University of Toronto Press, 2006.

"In pluralistic societies, language is more than a cultural symbol or a simple means of communication. In fact, it can have detrimental sociopolitical and economic impacts within society. As Nash has observed: "Language seems straightforwardly a piece of culture. But on reflection it is clear that language is often a political fact, at least as much as it is a cultural one. It has been said that 'language is a dialect with an army and navy.' And what official or recognized languages are in any given instance is often the result of politics and power interplays." (1989, 6)"
(p. 250)

Errington, Shelly. Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm. Princeton University Press, 1989.

"Thus the first project of a culture—any culture—is what Roland Barthes calls "mythologizing": to make the merely cultural appear natural, to make what is human and contingent appear to reflect the nature of reality. The first struggle of a system of signs is to promote itself as non-arbitrary, as real, as a reflection of the very structure of the cosmos, and therefore as able to define what is ultimately valuable. Mythologizing takes effort, and perhaps ultimately requires force. As the joke goes: "What is the difference between a language and a dialect?" Answer: "A language is a dialect—with an army and a navy." Any dialect of signs tries to assert that it is not only a language but Language, the voice of reality itself. Ultimately, the dialect of signs makes good its claim to be Language by using an army and a navy, or whatever along those lines it can muster. (In very unstratified societies it may be only the force of public opinion.)"
(p. 297)

Sutherland, John. A Little History of Literature. Yale University Press, 2013.

"A further important point needs to be added here. Literary epics – those, that is, which are still read centuries (millennia, in some cases) after they were composed – chronicle the birth not of ‘any’ nation, but of nations that will one day grow to be great empires, swallowing up lesser nations. In their later maturity empires cherish ‘their’ epics as witness to that greatness. Epics certify it. Linguists love the following conundrum: ‘Question: What’s the difference between a dialect and a language? Answer: A language is a dialect with an army behind it.’ What, then, is the difference between a long poem about a primitive people’s early struggles and an epic? An epic is a long poem with a great nation behind it – or, more precisely, in front of it."
(p. 16)

Hauck, Maurice Cogan and Kenneth MacDougall. Twelve American Voices: An Authentic Listening and Integrated-Skills Textbook. Yale University Press, 2002.

"The question of whether the variety of nonstandard English that Geneva Tisdale speaks is a dialect or a separate language is a controversial one in the United States today. There is a saying about the difference between a language and a dialect that a language is “a dialect with an army.” What does this saying mean? Do you agree with the idea it expresses?"
(p. 107)

French, Brigittine M. Maya Ethnolinguistic Identity: Violence, Cultural Rights, and Modernity in Highland Guatemala. University of Arizona Press, 2010.

"Max Weinreich’s famous adage that ‘‘a language is a dialect with an army’’ underscores the role of power in defining some linguistic varieties and not others as legitimate and authentic languages.1 He may have put it better were he to have said, ‘‘A language is a dialect with an army of linguists.’’"
(p. 63)

New, Christopher. 1991. 'English versus Islam: The Asian Voice of Salman Rushdie,' in Asian Voices in English, by Roy Harris, Mimi Chan (eds). Hong Kong University Press, 1991: 87-100.

Crowley, Tony. Scouse: A Social and Cultural History. Liverpool University Press, 2012.

Hull, Matthew S. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. University of California Press, 2012.

"When, as in many American offices, emails and memos mediate deliberations and directives, cases are distributed over a dispersed set of artifacts - common servers and individual hard drives, folders, and desks. Such a loose connection between a case and any one of its material elements makes it easy to think of a case as a set of circumstances or facts. But this view of a case is an abstraction from the material practices that sustain it as a particular kind of bureaucratic object. Material documentation is an essential component of the case; we might even say, adapting the quip that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy,” that a case is a set of circumstances with some material documentation."
(p. 151)

Mair, Victor H. 'Language and Script,' in The Columbia History of Chinese Literature by Victor H. Mair (ed). Columbia University Press, 2001: 19-57.

"It has often been facetiously remarked and widely quoted that “a language is a dialect with an army/navy" and that, since Cantonese, Shanghainese, Szechwanese, and so forth do not have their own armies/navies, they cannot be considered separate languages. Disregarding the tortured logic of the second half of the sentence, the oft-repeated claim of the first half of the sentence (the part within quotation marks) is itself not true. The falsity of this quip can be demonstrated by pointing out that the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia all have their own sizable armies and navies, yet it is recognized everywhere that the vast majority of their populations all speak a single language, namely English (albeit in various dialects). Conversely, although Switzerland has only one army, its inhabitants speak at least four languages: German, French, Italian, and Romans(c)h (also called Rhaeto-Romanic). And Navajo, which is accepted by all as a language, is totally devoid of an army to back it up."
(p. 24)

Brenneis, Don. 'Some cases for culture.' Human Development. Vol. 45, No. 4 (July/August 2002): 264-269.

"But, to return to language more specifically (and to let you carry the analogy on), there were some other problems. First was the definition of a language (as opposed to 'language', which is another problem). As has been long noted, a language is a dialect with an army - or into which the Bible has been translated. Specific languages are defined much more by historical and political factors than by their internal organization; so too are their relative rankings and evaluations."
(p. 266)

Moore, Michael. 'On Language Wars.' et Cetera. Vol. 72, No. 1 (January 2015): 68-74.

""A language is a dialect with an army and Navy," attributed to Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich."
(p. 68)

Mannoni, Michele. 'Chinese Dialects/Dialects of Chinese: Lack of Standard English Terminology in Chinese Linguistics 1.' Quarterly Journal of Chinese Studies. Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter 2014): 77-88.

"The first question that needs to be addressed with reference to the Chinese world is: what is
the difference between language and dialect? By answering this question, it will be possible to draw the definitions of the two words, making them unambiguous terms. The difference is well known by linguists of other languages, but it looks like linguists of Chinese easily forget that the difference between the two can only be found if we look at these two words firstly from the socio-political perspective, and later from the linguistics perspective (Nocentini, 2004, pp. 78-83; Abbiati, 2001, pp. 40-50). It has been said that "A language is a dialect with an army and navy", and indeed dialects lack a lot in terms of social value and literary works. Dialects are not recognised by governments and institutions, and they cannot be used in official documents. Furthermore, they can seldom be found in literature, as dialects mostly exist in their spoken form. Last but not least, no state’s official language can be referred to as dialect, and thus no one can speak of an “official dialect” or of a “dialect of a nation”. This is the reason why dialects lack social prestige."
(p. 79)

Nolan, John Shaun. 'The results of a nascent language emancipation in France: perceptions of the status and future of Gallo in the context of its inclusion in Brittany's language education policy.' Sociolinguistic Studies. Vol. 7, No. 1/2 (2013): 151-166.

"Ausbau refers to the functional development of a language whereby it is socio-politically viewed as an autonomous language by the degree that it has written and spoken standards, and fulfils
important social functions (Kloss, 1967). Ausbau shows how the old linguistic joke, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, is in no way a flippant throwaway remark. Standardised alphabets, prestige pronunciations and other such elements of the process of linguistic normalisation are the ‘uniforms’ of a centralised official language with as much symbolic potency as any army, navy or flag to a nation-state."
(p. 154)

Bernini, Andrea. 'Local Languages and Cultural Differences in the Age of Globalisation: the Example of Cremonese Dialect.' Socialiniu Mokslu Studijos. Vol. 5, No. 1 (2013): 87-100.

"“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” - Max Weinreich

Max Weinreich’s aforementioned motto is maybe a little provocative, however it underlines that the difference between languages and dialects is not linguistic, being based on the (perceived) power of a language within society: actually languages and dialects are not different at the level of internal linguistics."
(p. 88)

Razfar, Aria. 'Language Ideologies and Curriculum Studies An Empirical Approach to "Worthwhile" Questions.' JCT (Online). Vol. 28, No. 1 (2012): 127-140.

"If highly recognized national languages, like Spanish, can so easily be dismissed and relegated to the margins of our collective identity; the prospects for dialects and "non-standard" varieties are direr. There is a famous linguistic adage regarding dialects: "The difference between a language and a dialect is that a language is a dialect with an army." No where do these words ring more true than in the debates regarding African American Vernacular English (AAVE) or "Ebonics.""
(p. 136)

Pogorzalá, Ewa. 'Report: Miedzynarodowa konferencja naukowa Mniejszosci narodowe, etniczne i jezykowe w Unii Europejskiej, Lublin, 14-16 wrzesnia 2011 roku.' Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Sklodowska. Vol. 18, No. 2 (2011): 113-118.

"Kwesti sytuacji jezyków podniós á równie Tomasz Wicherkiewicz (UAM) w wystąpieniu Jezyki regionalne/pomocnicze w Europie – nowa (?) jakosc w polityce jezykowej, podkreslając, iz jeszcze do niedawna sytuacje jezyków mniejszosciowych i szanse ich przetrwania opisywala maksyma Maxa Weinreicha, który stwierdzil „A language is a dialect with an army and navy”."
(p. 117)

Blair, Heather, Janine Tine, and Violet Okemaw. 'Ititwewiniwak: Language Warriors - The Young Women's Circle of Leadership.' Canadian Journal of Native Education. Vol. 34, No. 1 (2011): 89-104.

"Over time, Indigenous languages have all taken tolls against the seemingly more powerful languages or "those dialects with an army and a navy" (Weinreich, 1945). In this context, English and French have invaded the First languages spaces. Through the horrendous processes of colonization, Indigenous languages have been beaten back to the recesses, to the reserves, to some homes, still carefully guarded by the Elders but with few young, healthy speakers left to fight. These languages are currently undergoing severe obsolescence and are at serious risk of being wiped out."
(p. 90)

Gingell, Susan. 'Lips' Inking: Cree and Cree-Métis Authors' Writings of the Oral and What They Might Tell Educators.' Canadian Journal of Native Education. Vol. 32, Aboriginal Englishes and Education. (2010): 35-61.

"However, such revaluation of varieties of English spoken and written in decolonizing contexts is a project that has thus far not gained much purchase in how most Canadian educators think about language. As a group we are still much invested in defending standard English, but we might be given pause by the knowledge that the word standard in the term standard English links the term to the idea of a coercive imposition. The etymology of standard is rooted in the name for the military pole with identifying forms or symbols used both to indicate to soldiers where they should gather and stand and to mark the point from which commands were issued. In later related use, the word standard signified a rallying point for armies or navies. Max Weinreich's aphorism that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy" (cited in Childs, 2008) thus chimes well with the concept of standard language."
(p. 44)

Pensalfini, Rob. 'Not in Our Own Voices: Accent and Identity in Contemporary Australian Shakespeare Performance.' Australasian Drama Studies. (April 2009): 142-158.

"A language in the lay sense of the word is a collection of similar dialects which will typically share national boundaries, history, or both. <sup>10

10</sup> But this is also problematic, as almost every linguistics textbook will point out. The various 'dialects' of Chinese, for example, are so different from one another that by any objective criteria they must be considered different languages. On the other hand, the "languages" Norwegian and Swedish are so similar that the only reason for considering them to be different languages seems to be the national boundary that separates them. The oft-quoted quip by Max Weinreich. that 'a language is a dialect with an army and a navy' (Yivo-bleter 25.1 [1945]: 13), is probably as good a definition as any."
(p. 157)

Anonymous. 'Introduction.' Cross / Cultures. 112, Multimodality in Canadian Black Feminist Writing. (2009): xiiv-xxxiv.

"'Code' is a very slippery, though necessary, term. To begin, using the word 'code' to mean language or dialect is a convenient way of avoiding the distinction between a language and a dialect. That is because there is, in formal linguistic terms, no very good way of making that distinction. Is Yiddish a dialect of German or a language? Is Haitian a dialect of French, or a language? Is JEC a dialect of English or a language? It has famously been said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy - that is, the difference between a language and a dialect is not linguistic but social, supported by a real difference in power. National languages are supported by bureaucratic regimes, armed forces, and all the other apparatus of a nation-state."
(p. xix)

Dwyer, Arienne M. The Xinjiang Conflict: Uyghur Identity, Language Policy, and Political Discourse. East-West Center, 2005.

"Central to the process of standardization is the selection and codification of one prestige language variety. Far from being a simple process of sorting through all dialects and picking the one with the biggest population, standard dialect candidates are inevitably associated with the elite stratum of a given society. Only then can a dialect be elevated to the status of a language. We therefore must update Max Weinreich's oft-quoted observation that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy"⁴⁰ to Tove Skutnabb-Kangas' proposition that "a language is a dialect promoted by elites" (Skutnabb-Kangas 1997-2004, Phillipson 1988).

⁴⁰ Weinreich (1945). The original statement, often misattributed to the linguist Uriel Weinreich, read in Yiddish: "A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot.""
(p. 25)

Wittlin, Curt. 'Review: "Untersuchungen zum lateinischen Erbwortschatz des Katalanischen. Aspekte der Klassifizierung und Differenzierung im Verhältnis zu Gallo- und Hispanoromania" by Stephan Koppelberg.' Romance Philology. Vol. 54, No. 2 (Spring 2001): 513-518.

Robinson, Benjamin. 'What comes first in German studies, German or studies?' The Germanic Review. Vol. 75, No. 3 (Summer 2000): 226-243.

"³ Consider the saying, cited by Claire Kramsch (368) that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy." In this sense, language departments might also plausibly trace their origins back to Realpolitik, rather than Dichter and Denker. Departments, in this cynical view, are ethnic heritage halls backed by fat GDPs."
(p. 241)

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 'From Margin to The (Canadian) Frontier: "The Wombs of Language" in M. Nourbese Philip's "She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks".' Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue d'Études Canadiennes. Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 1998): 121-144.

""Language is a dialect with an army and a navy." Noam Chomsky"
(p. 131)

Shoptaw, John. 'Wrong.' Chicago Review. Vol. 43, No. 4 (Fall 1997): 40-43.

""A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." - Max Weinreich"
(p. 40)

Kramsch, Claire. 'The privilege of the nonnative speaker.' Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA). Vol. 112, No. 3 (May 1997): 359-369.

"⁵ Speakers with nonstandard accents and speakers of local varieties of the standard language are placed below the top of the hierarchy of social acceptability. The arbitrary designation of native speakers can be seen anytime a national linguistic standard is artificially imposed on local varieties, as Parisian French was during the French Revolution. By eradicating the local dialects, or patois, and imposing the language of the Parisian bourgeoisie on the rest of the population, the revolutionary government constructed the notion of the French native speaker and bequeathed it to the rest of the world. As a saying variously attributed to Otto Jespersen and Max Weinreich goes, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.""
(p. 368)

Kirschen, Bryan. 'Judeo-Spanish Encounters Modern Spanish: Language Contact and Diglossia among the Sephardim of Los Angeles and New York City.' PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2015.

"I have described Jewish speech varieties as languages. However, as linguists often find themselves discussing, the distinction between a language and a dialect is a controversial, political, and ideological matter. Max Weinreich is known for his statement that a “language is a dialect with an army and navy,” which serves to demonstrate the paradox as to how languages have become independently recognized from one another throughout history due to underlying politics at hand (Spolsky 2014: 141)"
(p. 6)

Hoffman-Gonzalez, Anne C. 'Language Use or Non-Use in Study Abroad as an Indicator of Community Membership.' PhD diss., University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2015.

"The term dialect is widely used in common speech; however, in reality, it is hard to define. A well-known quote attributed to the linguist Max Weinreich states that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” (quoted in Kamusella, 2012). Weinreich’s quote, while glib in nature, suggests that there is no clear, objective division between dialect and language. Dialect can be understood to be two varieties of a single language that are mutually intelligible: that is, two speakers of two dialects of a given language would understand each other."
(p. 13)

Christoffersen, Katherine O'Donnell. 'Language choice and code-switching among sequential and simultaneous bilingual children: An analysis of grammatical, functional and identity-related patterns.' PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2015.

"Admittedly, “language” is defined rather arbitrarily, as is clearly depicted in the old adage that “a language is a dialect with an army and navy,” often attributed to Max Weinrich. Yet, though a comprehensive meaning of ‘language’ may be elusive, there is a sense in which some languages are more distinct than others."
(p. 11)

Biase, Adriana Di. 'The representation of Central-Southern Italian dialects and African-American vernacular English in translation: Issues of cultural transfers and national identity.' PhD diss., Kent State University, 2015.

"Among the possible definitions of dialect, the one that will be used as a reference in this project was proposed by Max Weinreich. He argues that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy (1945: 13). This definition underlines that the difference between languages and dialects lies on the power recognized to standard languages and not to dialects. Language is perceived as a ‘superordinate,’ whereas dialect is a ‘subordinate’ because, according to Einar Haugen, language can be used without making reference to dialects, while dialects always belong to a language (923)."
(p. 2)

Fulginiti, Valentina. '"Il vocabolario e la strada." Self-Translation between Standard Italian and Regional Dialects in the Works of Salvatore Di Giacomo, Luigi Capuana, and Luigi Pirandello.' PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2014.

"In the previous sections, we have seen how the difference between bilingualism and diglossia is related to the sociolectal distinction between the status of each language, to some extent proving Max Weinreich’s well-known assertion that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” However, at the level of the idiolect, the practice of multilingual writing is linked to other important questions related to an author’s native proficiency in Italian and/or in dialect: a thorny matter, in which the expressive quest for one’s own authorial voice overlaps with the mythical conception of a “mother tongue.” In this respect, the ideology of the “mother tongue” is to the individual writer what the quest for a “national language” is to the national community of writers."
(p. 46)

Siegel, Jason F. 'Nou oblije pale mo-to: Code-switching between two Creoles and their lexifier in French Guiana.' PhD diss., Indiana University, 2014.

"Indeed, the fact that these two creoles have the same base language has resulted in such close resemblances that the question comes up as to whether these are different languages or dialects of the same language. Frequently in popular discussions of language and dialect appears the saying “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” This quotation, generally attributed to the linguist Max Weinreich, has become a cliché, and is not particularly helpful in this situation. The quote aims to describe when a variety is recognized as a full language rather than as a non-standard variety of a prestige variety already recognized as a language, or as a system that is in fact grammatical rather than gibberish, a status previously accorded to the languages of Amerindians, Africans (creole and non-creole speakers alike), and the deaf."
(p. 2)

Pratt, Daniel W. 'Aesthetic selves: Non-narrative constructions of identity in Central Europe.' PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2014.

"If the old expression, “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy,” holds true, then after the Thirty Years War, when the smaller states across what is now Germany were given the right to declare war and make peace, there was not even a single German language. <sup>55

55</sup> It is not surprising that the expression comes from Yiddish, a decisively Central European
language."
(p. 40)

Dean, Michael Whitaker. '"What the Heart Unites, the Sea Shall Not Divide": Claiming Overseas Czechs for the Nation.' PhD diss., University of California - Berkeley, 2014.

"The connection between states and colonies appears obvious. Where there is no state, there can be no colony. It would seem to follow that the study of colonialism and the history of “small nations” have little to do with one other. The Czechs, landlocked in the center of Europe, seem far removed from any reasonable understanding of overseas expansion. To hold colonies means to extend the powers of state abroad, to secure foreign territory by gunboat diplomacy. “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy,” quipped the German-Jewish linguist Max Weinreich. Colonialism was the affair of big nations with states, not small peoples belonging to supranational empires; the British, French, and, after 1884, also the Germans took possession of colonies by sending out their militaries to protect state interests. As a small people just emerging from what they called a national awakening, still a dialect without an army or a navy, the Czechs seem to have had little at stake in the project of European overseas expansion."
(p. xvi)

Andrews, Richard. '"What I care bout dogs?" How the hegemony of the English language colonizes marginalized groups.' PhD diss., University of Missouri - St. Louis, 2014.

"“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” (Ogulnick, 2000, p. 8)."
(p. 124)

Hoffman, David Bryan. 'Becoming real: Undergraduates' civic agency journeys.' PhD diss., University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 2013.

"The interests of the already-powerful also are expressed in school practices and teacher judgments that equate dominant groups‘ cultural capital, as reflected in discourse styles, with intelligence and achievement. Proficiency and non-proficiency, appropriate behavior and misbehavior are matters of cultural perspective (McDermott & Varenne, 1995). Just as "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" (Quinn, 2001, p. 1), meritorious communication by students in a classroom is a way of talking and demonstrating proficiency endorsed and enforced by the school and the teacher."
(p. 44)

Nakagawa, Satoru. 'The quest of Shiman-chu: Questioning the absolutes of language, culture, and Being.' PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2013.

"That is, speaking in Yiddish, Max Weinrich suggested that “A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot” which is usually translated into English as “A language is a dialect with an army (and a navy).” As these words affirm, dialects are the “base” forms of all languages, in addition to which a further layer is added - that the current world definition of language is defined by physical violence. In short, any regional definition of language comes down to the local
dominant ideology."
(p. 73)

Martinez, Brian. '!Casinando! Identity, meaning, and the kinesthetic language of Cuban casino dancing.' MM diss., Florida State University, 2012.

"So, in one sense, a dialect is a subset of a language; dialects of the same language are related to each other, even though they might not even be mutually intelligible. The question arises, then, of which dialects are chosen to become the standard, formalized representations of the language as a whole. To this, Winkler offers what she calls “The Golden Rule of Dialects”:

"1. Those with gold get to make their dialect the standard.
2. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." (2007, 13)

It follows, then, that a dominant dialect is not necessarily inherently better than any less dominant one; rather, the people who wield it are in a position of power, either politically or institutionally, and can put their version of the language into the mainstream."
(p. 39)

Stanford, Nichole E. 'Good God but You Smart! A Study of Language Legitimacy in Cajun Louisiana.' PhD diss., City University of New York, 2012.

Dyer-Spiegel, Jacob A. 'Following Eshu-Eleggua's codes: A comparative approach to the literatures of the African diaspora.' PhD diss., University of Massachusetts - Amherst, 2011.

Lacey, Claire Louise. 'Twin Tongues.' MA diss., University of Calgary, 2011.

"As Max Weinreich famously said, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" (qtd in Sebba 3). If Tok Pisin is counted as an English, the world count of English speakers goes up, and global standards of the English language apply. If it is a separate language, speakers of Tok Pisin can develop their own standards without worrying about how speakers of English might judge those standards."
(p. 64)

Bergerson, Jeremy. 'Apperception and Linguistic Contact between German and Afrikaans.' PhD diss., University of California - Berkeley, 2011.

"Every linguist has heard the old adage that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
The truth of it is clear enough; many languages exist on a continuum of intelligibility and genetic relatedness, just as dialects do. This is easily seen in the case of Dutch, which is closer to Low German than either of the two is to High German, yet Low German is considered a dialect and Dutch a language. This is because the Dutch were able to maintain their political independence during the rise of High German in the fifteenth century, and the Low German speakers were not. An army and a navy were handy indeed."
(p. 9)

Hassan, Deqa M. 'Somali Dialects in the United States: How Intelligible is Af-Maay to Speakers of Af-Maxaa?' MA diss., Minnesota State University - Mankato, 2011.

"The most impactful non-linguistic factor in this case is referring to the elites or the people in power who place their language variety above other language varieties; an idea that Weinrich (1945) described as “A language is a dialect with its own army and navy” (as in Chambers, 2009, p. 227). Usually the standard language variety is established by the elites in order to label their language variety as the only correct variety (Chambers, 2009)."
(p. 21)

Ho, Dahpon David. 'Sealords Live in Vain: Fujian and the Making of a Maritime Frontier in Seventeenth-Century China.' PhD diss., University of California - San Diego, 2011.

"Add particularly the chimerical nature of Fujian, a land riven with old regional rivalries and severe dialectal differences (see Map 3.2), which often erupted in turf wars. (The epigram, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy,” usually attributed to linguist Max Weinreich, takes on new meaning in Fujian.) Add further the divide between the agricultural hinterland of Fujian and the commerce-dependent coast; and the concentration of political power in the north against the accumulation of commercial wealth in the ports of the south. Add at last the innumerable warlords, pirates, bandits, and Ming and Qing commanders competing for food, weapons, sailors, and timber—and you have a recipe and reality that could best be described as a war of all on all."
(p. 175)

Draskovic, Radosla. 'Re-Imagining Yugoslavia: Learning and Living with Diverse Cultural Identities.' MA diss., University of Toronto, 2010.

"With the latest Yugoslavian war the language was turned from the means of communication into means of separation, state building and division. During - but, especially, after - the war, the body of what was in Tito’s Yugoslavia called Serbo-Croat or Croato-Serbian language was dismembered into four distinct languages. This action confirms one of the most frequently used aphorisms among linguists to point to the difference between the dialect and the language: “A language is a dialect with an army and navy.”"
(p. 189)

Tran, Tammie M. 'An exploration of the relationship between Vietnamese students' knowledge of L1 grammar and their English grammar proficiency.' EdD diss., Alliant International University - San Diego, 2010.

""A language is a dialect with an army." - Yiddish proverb"
(p. 180)

Vyroubalova, Ema. 'Linguistic alterity and foreignness in early modern England, 1534-1625.' PhD diss., Stanford University, 2010.

"The seemingly instinctive criterion of mutual intelligibility, according to which two largely mutually intelligible communication systems count as dialects and two unintelligible ones as languages, does not always hold up to real world examples. One only has to think of the mutually intelligible Scandinavian languages or the distance between BBC English and Scots. The well-known aphorism that "language is a dialect with an army and navy" has proved surprisingly useful in the face of this problem of defining a language and the related questions of inclusion and exclusion of specific "languages" and "dialects" in my dissertation.<sup>10

10</sup> The aphorism has often been attributed to the Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich (1894-1969) because the first instance of its use in an extant written document appears in his article "The YIVO Faces the Post-War World" (in Yiddish), YIVO Bletter 25, no. 1 (1945): 3-18. This text, however, attributes the adage to another scholar, whom it never explicitly identifies. The most popular candidates for the quote's authorship have been the Yiddish sociolinguist Joshua Fishman, the French linguist Antoine Meillet, and the French army general Louis-Hubert Lyautey."
(p. 12, 20)

Jamal, Abedin. 'Attitudes toward Hazaragi.' MA diss., Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 2010.

"However, categorizing language varieties into languages and dialects is not the task of linguists alone. As Beeman (2005, 1) writes, “a language is a dialect with an army;” there are more than linguistic criteria that determine what constitutes a language. Sociopolitical criteria more often affect the definition of a language or a dialect."
(p. 23)

Appleton, Robert. 'Vortex Visual Aural Textual. One language.' MFA diss., Ontario College of Art & Design, 2010.

"Context and usage splits languages into dialects which evolve over time into new languages. Italian and French for example developed from dialects of Latin. In time, a language which has developed from a dialect becomes protected from change by its users. “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”<sup>37

37</sup> Max Weinreich. Yivo and the problems of our time. Yivo-bleter. Israel, 1945. vol. 25, no. 1, p. 13."
(p. 22)

Tomlinson, Jr, John M. 'Talking it up: The role of temporal context in the interpretation of uptalk.' PhD diss., University of California - Santa Cruz, 2009.

"The past decade has seen a growing interest in how characteristics of intonation vary not only between languages, but also within languages and across dialects. In fact, many in psycholinguistics might be familiar with the saying "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" (Weinreich, 1945). This discussion is relevant here because one can plausibly conclude that much of the research in linguistic and psycholinguistic theory attempts to generalize aspects of a given language across all of the dialects within that nation-state or territory."
(p. 23)

Turkyilmaz, Zeynep. 'Anxieties of conversion: Missionaries, state and heterodox communities in the Late Ottoman Empire.' PhD diss., University of California - Los Angeles, 2009.

Bermejo, Encarna. 'Las construcciones progresivas: Un estudio comparativo en el espanol como lengua extranjera y lengua de herencia.' PhD diss., University of Houston, 2009.

"Wardhaugh (2006) propone que no hay criterios universales aceptados para distinguirlos, y que la diferencia es a menudo cuestion de grado o de clase. Sin embargo, para Weinreich (1974) la diferencia entre estos dos terminos se determina politicamente: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." Para el, son los politicos los que a menudo deciden lo que se llamara "variedad" o "lengua"."
(p. 3)

Strand, Thea Randina. 'Varieties in dialogue: Dialect use and change in rural Valdres, Norway.' PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2009.

"In this sense, the disciplinary axiom that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”¹ gets turned on its head in Norway, where the “language” of the nation-state has been a collection of local dialects and multiple, flexible written norms for over a century.

¹ The exact source of this turn of phrase is unclear, though it has been variously attributed to Antoine Meillet, Max and Uriel Weinreich, and Joshua Fishman. See Bright 1997 for a discussion."
(p. 12)

Carter, Phillip M. 'Speaking subjects: Language, subject formation, and the crisis of identity.' PhD diss., Duke University, 2009.

"There is a great deal of overlap between Bloomfield and Whitney with respect to the social forces involved in language change, for example, and it was only a decade or so after the publication of Language that Max Weinreich is credited with the aphorism, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."<sup>7

7</sup> Weinreich is frequently credited for the aphorism, which he originally wrote in Yiddish, but he acknowledges that he learned the saying elsewhere."
(p. 31)

Levy, Naomi. 'Learning national identity: Schooling effects in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.' PhD diss., University of California - Berkeley, 2009.

"The linguistic differences are harder to characterize, since Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, for the most part, are mutually intelligible.4 Moreover, precisely what comprises a distinct language is an inherently political question, as captured in linguists' aphorism "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."<sup>5

5</sup> This aphorism is cited by Kymlicka (1996, p.218)."
(p. 3)

Hoffmann, Erika Georgiana. 'Standardization beyond form: Ideologies, institutions, and the semiotics of Nepali Sign Language.' PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008.

"In both India and Nepal, the census is a major means by which languages acquire sociolinguistic recognition: a code is considered a language (with the accompanying political clout), only if it can muster enough people claiming to speak it as a "mother tongue" - otherwise it may be treated as a dialect with accompanying devaluation of the social group associated with it. Hence, while it is often said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, suggesting that it is social status and economic and political power that determines the evaluation of language status, it is also the case in many contexts that social status is pursued through manipulation of linguistic status (whether successfully or unsuccessfully)."
(p. 15)

McPherron, Paul Robert. 'Internationalizing teaching, localizing English: Language teaching reforms through a south Chinese university.' PhD diss., University of California - Davis, 2008.

"(ii.) Linguists, Chinese government officials, and local language and culture preservationists have long contested the terms "dialect" and "language" in the Chinese language context. In official government policy and in the majority of the Han Chinese public opinion, Cantonese and Chaoshanhua are dialects of Chinese (with Mandarin considered the "standard"). Linguists such as Li & Thompson (1981) often set aside political aspect of these distinctions by referring to the popular quote "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy," and they focus on cataloguing the differences in phonology, syntax, and semantics between what Li & Thompson (1981) call Chinese dialect families. This dissertation is not investigating these complex historical, social, and political definitions of Chinese languages, but the wide variety of first and second dialects/languages spoken on the CSU campus does play a role much of the identity choices and processes analyzed in the dissertation, and I will refer to students as Cantonese speakers or Chaoshanhua speakers throughout the dissertation, avoiding referring to them as dialects or languages."
(p. 12)

Haddix, Marcelle M. 'A study of the language practices of ethnolinguistic minority preservice teachers.' PhD diss., Boston College, 2008.

"In a study of preservice teachers’ opinions about Ebonics and Standard English, Wynne (2002) found that preservice teachers’ responses to questions such as “How would you describe ‘Standard English’?” or “How would you describe ‘Ebonics’?” revealed their unconscious expression of one of the basic tenets of linguistics: “that languages are defined politically, not scientifically - and that a ‘language is a dialect with an army and a navy’” (Wynne, 2002, p. 211). Wynne (2002) found that preservice teachers neglected to address the political nature of language when defining academic excellence in urban education; participants seemed to agree that all students needed to know “proper” or “correct” English."
(p. 16)

Smith, Karina Yarwood. 'Me llamo Lenika.' MA diss., McGill University, 2008.

""Governments can control who learns English, which English they learn, what they do with their English skills, and what information they have access to or not. You know the famous saying, 'A language is a dialect with an army and a navy,' meaning that the reason why rulers insist on everyone learning the dominant language is so that the rulers can decide on the official messages everyone receives, because they control the media. You know, Cheryl, it's the same thing that we are always complaining about!" They both laughed. Ms. Simpson knew what he was going to say. "When we read the newspaper and we are sure there is another side to the story, but they are not giving it to us. We have to go on-line or to alternative sources to find the info that is missing."
(p. 78)

Longboat, Roronhiakewen Dan. 'Owehna'shon:A (The Islands). The Haudenosaunee Archipelago: The nature and necessity of bio-cultural restoration and revitalization.' PhD diss., York University (Canada), 2008.

"There are estimates of between 4,000 to 6,700 languages²³¹ in the world today.

²³¹ Why the range? There are differing ideas about what is a language and what is only a dialect, and poor statistics on whether languages have any speakers left. I am not going to try to define what constitutes a language—though oddly enough, it has been suggested that, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy" (Max Weinreich, in Yivo-bleter 25.1.13,1945)."
(p. 156)

Gazzola, Giuseppe. 'The literature of history.' PhD diss., Yale University, 2008.

Sheyholislami, Jaffer. 'Identity, discourse, and the media: The case of the Kurds.' PhD diss., Carleton University (Canada), 2008.

"I have opted for the term Kurdish varieties because I find the terms language and dialect politically loaded.<sup>110

110</sup> Max Weinreich, a German linguist, is often quoted as saying, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" (as cited in Romaine, 2000, p. 13). Languages are traditionally perceived to belong to nation-states but dialects to ethnic groups and minorities."
(p. 182)

Ravindran, Indira Priyadarshini. 'Narrative silences, institutional ambiguities and the historiography of International Refugee Law.' PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2008.

"George Bernard Shaw once quipped that 'a language is a dialect with an army behind it'. In much the same way, it may be said that 'histories' are 'memories' that are backed by the institutional weight of academia and/or state power."
(p. 223)

Puckett, Jaye. 'The literary influence of Eleanor of Aquitaine in the long twelfth century.' PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2007.

"Prejudices might impel those who possess them to act upon them; however, they rarely have widespread cultural impact, for they tend to be passed on from one person to another (parent to child, friend to friend, etc.). A meme, on the other hand, can exert great influence once it has entered the cultural arena; this is because its purpose, as we saw above, is to propagate itself. Thus a meme containing a prejudicial idea could be considered a prejudice with an army and a navy 40, for an affective emotion (a prejudice) has been transformed into an active cultural agent (a meme).

40. Thus rewriting the familiar formulation “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”."
(p. 24)

Mabry, Tristan James. 'Nationalism, language and Islam: A cross-regional comparative study of Muslim minority conflict.' PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2007.

"A specific litmus test is the separatists’ view of education language policy. Joshua Fishman (and not Max Weinrich) may have quipped that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, though we should remember that armies and navies are instruments of state power.⁵¹³ An updated version of this aphorism might read a language is a dialect with a Ministry of Education.

⁵¹³ William Bright proposes the earliest known publication of the saying is in Yiddish and by Max Weinreich in his "YIVO and the problems of our time," Yivo-bleter, 1945, vol. 25, no. 1, p.13. But Weinreich himself credits the coining of the phrase to an unnamed student who attended his lectures in Germany. According to Bright, “Joshua Fishman believes that he may have been the young man who, as a student of Max Weinreich, originated the saying. ”William Bright, "A Language is a Dialect with an Army and a Navy," Language in Society 26, no. 3 (1997): 469."
(p. 228)

Hseu, Jane Willy. 'Racialized English(es): On Asian/American and Latino/a discourses of language.' PhD diss., University of California (Irvine), 2007.

"The necessary correlate of the presumed authoritative, superior, privileged standard language is the presumed subordinate, inferior, uneducated nonstandard language, otherwise called a dialect or vernacular. Because standard and nonstandard languages are deemed so in the context of power - linguist Max Weinreich’s oft-quoted remark underscores this, “A language is a dialect with an army and navy” - dialects of US English often correspond to such aspects as class, race, ethnicity, and region."
(p. 4)

Gross, Andrew David. 'Continuity and innovation in the Aramaic legal tradition.' PhD diss., New York University, 2006.

"The native language of the Achaemenids, however, was not Aramaic but Persian, and the reason they adopted Aramaic as their language of administration was due to its wide use in the ancient Near East at that time. One is reminded of what the Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich once wrote, “A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an army un a flot” (“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”). Aramaic managed to turn this pattern on its head by becoming a dominant, widespread language without there having been a militarily or economically dominant Aramaic political entity."
(p. 1)

Bugel, Talia. 'A macro- and micro-sociolinguistic study of language attitudes and language contact: Mercosur and the teaching of Spanish in Brazil.' PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006.

"Moreover, it is important to bear in mind Max Weinreich’s comment on the fact that a language is a dialect with an army; many other authors have explained the reasons why some languages are successful in spreading over extensive areas (Kavanagh and Mattingly, 1972: 128). According to Edwards, are infrastructural and ideological factors involved in the major language spreads (Mesthrie, 2000: 35). Without a doubt, Peninsular Spanish is gaining space in Brazil, and with it a specific dialect of Spanish."
(p. 82)

Palou, Marta Gomez. 'Translating into a non-native dialect: A corpus-based investigation.' PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 2006.

"Let us begin by exploring the concept that a priori seems to be the broadest: language. It is important to note that sometimes ‘language’ is more of a political term than a linguistic one. In fact, Chambers and Trudgill (1998: 4) go so far as to state that ‘“language is not a particularly linguistic notion at all” because “languages are recognized as such for reasons that are as much political, geographical, historical, sociological and cultural as linguistic”. Martinet (1967: 146), in turn, notes that when used in a restricted way, ‘language’ is indeed a politically created category achieved when a dialect becomes a State’s official communication vehicle. A famous quote from Yiddish scholar and linguist Max Weinreich (1945: 3-18) illustrates this idea a lot more colourfully: “A language is a dialect with an army”. According to these definitions, Argentinean Spanish and peninsular Spanish (i.e. the Spanish spoken in Spain) would be both languages and dialects. However, in the context of this thesis, I would like to distance this discussion away from political issues and adopt a more linguistic perspective."
(p. 14)

Soldat-Jaffe, Tatjana. '21st-century Yiddishism: The dialectic of Czernowitz and Yiddish pedagogical discourse of the present.' PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006.

"In Max Weinreich's famous words: "A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot" (1945, p. 16) A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Yet, without the support of a nation-state and its furnishings, the dialect managed to be a language with H-functions, yielding countless newspapers and journals, books, plays, political and pedagogical tracts. As Goldsmith (1987) puts it "[t]he prestige of Yiddish rose together with the growth of Jewish national sentiment and self-respect. Yiddishism evolved together with the developing Yiddish press and literature and with the Jewish political movements that employed Yiddish in order to reach the Jewish masses" (p.51)."
(p. 32)

Yildiz, Yasemin. 'Beyond the mother tongue: Configurations of multilingualism in twentieth-century German literature.' PhD diss., Cornell University, 2006.

McGowan, James John. 'Dynamic consonance in selected piano performances of tonal jazz.' PhD diss., University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music, 2005.

"“Lexico-statistics,” which measures similarities among languages based on related cognates, provides linguists with data to support the categorization of varieties.34 However, this data seldom supports what people in societies consider to be languages. Socio-political factors are often the primary rationale behind linguistic autonomy, among other languages or among dialects of a language. <sup>35

35</sup> In metaphoric terms: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” J.K. Chambers and Peter Trudgill, Dialectology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 12."
(p. 15)

Strand, Amy Dunham. 'Governing voices: Language, gender, and citizenship in American literature, 1789--1919.' PhD diss., University of Washington, 2005.

"Bearing in mind Max Weinreich’s famous formulation that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, I thus understand language as contributing to the formation of nation not as an intrinsic determinant of nationality but as “part of a complex process of cultural innovation, involving hard ideological labor, careful propaganda, and a creative imagination” (Weinreich cited in Lippi-Green 43; Eley and Suny 7)."
(p. 5)

Humphries, Steven E. 'English and social capital in an American university in the Republic of Panama.' PhD diss., Florida State University, 2005.

""A language is a dialect with an Army and a Navy" (Weinreich, M., 1945, p. 9)."
(p. 12)

Asgharzadeh, Alireza. 'The development and persistence of racist ideas in Iran: Politics of assimilation and the challenge of diversity.' PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2005..

"In pluralistic societies, language is more than a cultural symbol or a simple means of communication. It is an instrument of power, of unequal representation, uneven development, exclusion and inclusion. As Nash has observed,

"Language seems straightforwardly a piece of culture. But on reflection it is clear that language is often a political fact, at least as much as it is a cultural one. It has been said that ‘language is a dialect with an army and navy’. And what official or recognised languages are in any given instance is often the result of politics and power interplays." (Nash, 1989, p.6)"
(p. 210)

Benor, Sarah Bunin. 'Second style acquisition: The linguistic socialization of newly Orthodox Jews.' PhD diss., Stanford University, 2004.

"When I talk about adults’ acquisition of new ways of speaking, I do not include the acquisition of second languages, unless they have some degree of mutual intelligibility, such as Swedish and Norwegian (Nordenstam 1979).<sup>1

1</sup> I make this point, keeping in mind that the boundary between a language and a dialect is fuzzy. The famous quote, attributed to Max Weinreich, points to the importance of socio-political factors in distinguishing a separate language: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” Intelligibility and systematic difference cannot always be used as criteria, as they both exist on continua. Any attempt to talk about a linguistic variety as a bounded entity likely runs into problems: Along the Dutch-German border,where does Dutch stop and German start? In a Basque-Spanish contact setting, how much Basque lexical and grammatical material is necessary to consider a particular utterance Basque? Where is the boundary between African American English and European American English?"
(p. 10)

Munyankesha, Pascal. 'Les defis du plurilinguisme officiel au Rwanda. Analyse sociolinguistique.' PhD diss., University of Western Ontario, 2004.

"Vu cette dichotomie, la fonction sociale de la linguistique l’emporte sur sa fonction cognitive. Calvet (1974 :54) en vient à la conclusion suivante : «Tout ce qui précède montre à l’évidence que le dialecte n’est jamais qu’une langue battue, et que la langue est un dialecte qui a réussi politiquement.» Cette remarque de Calvet fait écho à celle attribuée au célèbre maréchal français Louis-Hubert Lyautey (1854-1934) qui a largement contribué à l’expansion coloniale de son pays : « Une langue, c’est un dialecte qui possède une armée, une marine et une aviation » (cité par Leclerc, 1992 : 186). Elle rappelle encore les mêmes propos tenus par Max Weinreich: « A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.² » (cité par Chambers et Trudgill, 1980: 3).

² «Une langue est un dialecte doté d’une armée et d’une marine.»"
(p. 26)

Strongman, Roberto D. 'Allegorical I/Lands: Personal and national development in Caribbean autobiographical writing.' PhD diss., University of California (San Diego), 2003.

"A re-evaluation of the stigmatization of Creole needs to take into account the ways in which European culture, with language as its referent, has been utilized as a standard by which everything else is measured and valued in Antilles. That the inferiorization of Creole has more to do with political colonization than with the linguistic ability of the language to convey information is aptly expressed in the truism that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.""
(p. 239)

Maxwell, Alexander Mark. 'Choosing Slovakia (1795--1914): Slavic Hungary, the Czech language, and Slovak nationalism.' PhD diss., University of Wisconsin (Madison), 2003.

"To explain the significance of the “language-dialect” dichotomy, consider how Trudgill’s “cultural and political” factors operate in the mind of taxonomizers. The famous bon mot that “a language is a dialect with and army and navy,” often credited to Max Weinreich,⁴⁹ suggests that the difference between the two concepts is not linguistic, but a question of political importance. Weinreich is right to leave linguistic “facts” behind, yet his memorable formula does not accurately describe the allocation of linguistic status.

⁴⁹ Noam Chomsky, on page 15 of Knowledge of Language, says that the quote is “attributed to Max Weinreich,” but scholars have had difficulty finding a citation from Weinreich himself. Joshua Fishman cites “Der yivo un di problemen fun undzer tsayt.” [YIVO and the problems of our time], Yivo-bleter.25.1.13, 1945 (Mendele, 10/28/96). I am unable to find a proper citation either way. See LINGUIST List 8.340, 8.306."
(p. 165)

Pine, Judith M. S. 'Lahu writing and writing Lahu: An inquiry into the value of literacy.' PhD diss., University of Washington, 2002.

"³. I follow the convention of using the spelling Tai to refer to all members of the Tai-speaking groups in SE Asia, which includes the Thai, Yuan (northern Thai), Lao, and Shan. The spelling Thai is reserved for citizens of Thailand, and, in some cases, Tai citizens of Thailand. Tai cannot include La'hu_, while Thai theoretically might (although this is rare in practice). The distinction between Tai and Thai is used throughout this dissertation to differentiate between the language family and a specific ethnonym and associated (dominant) dialect. The Tai languages/dialects include kham muang, the dialect spoken in the region in which I did my fieldwork, often treated as a dialect of standard Thai, as well as Lao, which, by virtue of its association with a political entity, more often gains the status of “language” in its own right. As Chomsky notes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, all human languages being in the end one language divided along a very broad spectrum. In SE Asia, the division includes the existence of a variety of orthographies, a topic which is further discussed in Chapter 4 below."
(p. 2)

McKeown-Green, Arthur Jonathan. 'The primacy of public language.' PhD diss., Princeton University, 2002.

"In Chapter 4 I tout this social practice model as a suitably scientific description of what real linguists do all day. Chomsky will resist.

“the commonsense notion of language has a crucial sociopolitical dimension. We speak of Chinese as "a language," although the various "Chinese dialects" are as diverse as the several Romance languages. We speak of Dutch and German as two separate languages, although some dialects of German are very close to dialects that we call "Dutch” and are not mutually intelligible with others that we call “German.” A standard remark in introductory linguistics is that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy (attributed to Max Weinreich). That any coherent account can be given of "language" in this sense is doubtful; surely, none has been offered or even seriously attempted. Rather, all scientific approaches have simply abandoned these elements of what is called "language” in common usage.” (Chomsky 1986, p. 15.)

I tease out various strands in this dismissal and then I “seriously attempt” “a coherent account of language in this sense”. I maintain that this account adequately characterizes, within my Communitarian framework, the ‘languages’ which linguists purport to study."
(p. 3)

Ciscel, Matthew Harvey. 'Language and identity: L2 acquisition in post-Soviet Moldova.' PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 2002.

"In the concluding remarks of his recent edited volume on language and ethnic identity, Joshua Fishman notes ‘the difficulty of making the dialect-versus-language distinction.' (1999:444) mentioning only the witticism commonly attributed to Uriel Weinreich that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Even though the boundaries between languages are clearly determined more precisely by social than linguistic criteria, it is difficult for even a renowned sociolinguist like Fishman, who has spent much of his career studying language and national or ethnic identity, to specify the social criteria that determine what a language is."
(p. 82)

Izenberg, Oren Jeremy. 'Being numerous: The twentieth-century poetic imagination of the ground of social life.' PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2001.

"Charles Bernstein's slogan "Language control = Thought control = Reality control" or as in Bob Perelman's Virtual Reality: "Normal usage is the art of channeling weapons so the majority of sentences willingly enforce the current meaning of money with a minimum of state body revealed in the headlines."19 The old linguist's joke that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" needs to be updated - it also has an educational system, powers of taxation, and a corporate ethos.<sup>20

20</sup> Note, however, Bertram Bruce and Andee Rubin, "Readability Formulas: Matching Tool and Task," in Alice Davison, ed., Linguistic Complexity and Text Comprehension: Readability Issues Reconsidered (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988). The designers and users of grammar checking software are under no illusions about its neutrality: "The ultimate judge of readability is the reader, not a formula. Formulas do not guarantee readable texts, even less do they grant people power or access in educational, medical, or legal information systems. Unfortunately, they have often helped to perpetuate cultural bias and protect existing power relationships" 20)"
(p. 111)

Hauck, Maurice Cogan. 'Public discourse about language and education: An analysis of newspaper opinion writing on the Ebonics controversy.' PhD diss., Columbia University, 2001.

"Linguists are fond of citing the aphorism that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” This statement is often used to emphasize that the distinction between languages and dialects is generally made in social rather than linguistic terms. The same aphorism, however, can also be used to interpret the OUSB's assertion of AAVE/Ebonics as “not a dialect of English” as a kind of rhetorical declaration of independence from the SAE-speaking United States."
(p. 291)

Baird, Peter Jesse. 'Children's song-makers as messengers of hope: Participatory research with implications for teacher educators.' Ed.D diss., University of San Francisco, 2001.

"Several participants join in naming multiculturalism as an important issue they try to raise with children, especially the aspect that helps children develop a critical analysis of social history and challenge biases developed over time. Francisco explains:

"One of the biggest issues I like to raise is multiculturalism, not just because of the emerging immigrant population, but also because of the history of this country. The history of controlled books is pretty much the story of European Americans. The reality of this country is African, is indigenous, is all the “Indians” from Europe that also came. So I like to use that Pete Seeger Song “ All Mixed Up,” of where you come from and those kinds of songs that get kids singing about the realities of this country and observing the real things in life. Multilingual education, singing in other languages, is part of watching the reality of life. I’ve heard it said, “The difference between a dialect and a language is — a language is a dialect with an army behind it”.""
(p. 118)

Nakamura, Karen. 'Deaf identities, sign languages, and minority social movement politics in modern Japan (1868-2000).' PhD diss., Yale University, 2001.

"I would like to emphasize that even more than “cultures,” “languages” do not exist singularly as there are no physical bounds that constitute a language system. By nature, languages are amorphous and gregarious beasts. Every language varies at the individual, familial, local, and regional levels. Even single speakers/signers can and will vary their register styles depending on the situation. Language independence can be challenged, since languages that are in contact with one another, as certainly spoken and sign languages in the same community are, will intermingle characteristics. The old sociolinguist's quip that a “language is a dialect with an army and navy” applies here."
(p. 234)

Vann, Elizabeth Reneau. 'Language, ethnicity and nationality in the German-Polish borderland.' PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2000.

"When linguists think about dialects, they are often thinking about the relationships among speech forms which developed out of a common proto-language, and became distinct from one another through centuries-long historical linguistic process. This provides a way of classifying speech forms as related to one another. Which speech form gets the honorific term, ‘language,” may follow the adage, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” But stating that, for example, “Silesian is a dialect of Polish,” means something more than that Poland has intermittently had the status of statehood, while Silesia has not. The statement means that the differentiation of a Common Slavic proto-­language yielded various groups of related languages, some of which are called West Slavic, within which group one sub-group of closely related languages includes the language institutionalized as the national language of Poland and the language socially maintained and transmitted as the regional dialect of Silesia."
(p. 130-131)

Gliesche, Jules D. 'Van der scheppung van coellesch: Netherlandic features of the dialect of Cologne.' PhD diss., University of Wisconsin (Madison), 2000.

"The old adage that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, while not wholly untrue, is also not without its problems. Belgium has an army and navy, but arguing that Flemish is an autonomous language rather than a Dutch dialect is problematic at best. On the other hand, Chinese is generally accepted to be a language, having been standardized through its writing system, yet Chinese speakers from one part of the country frequently do not understand Chinese speakers from other parts of the country due to the immense differences in spoken dialects. Mutual intelligibility is not a reliable way of classifying which dialects of a given language, just as defining a language standard does not make various spoken dialects conform to arbitrarily established language norms. Thus, the waters appear to be very muddy when one considers that, for instance, eastern Dutch border dialects frequently have more in common with western German border dialects than they do with standard Dutch and vice versa. The exact definition of “language" can be an elusive concept."
(p. 42)

Chomsky, Noam. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. Praeger, 1986.

"We speak of Chinese as “a language”, although the various “Chinese dialects” are as diverse as the several Romance languages. We speak of Dutch and German as two separate languages, although some dialects of German are very close to dialects that we call “Dutch” and are not mutually intelligible with others that we call “German”. A standard remark in introductory linguistics courses is that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy (attributed to Max Weinreich). That any coherent account can be given of “language” in this sense is doubtful; surely, none has been offered or ever seriously attempted. Rather, all scientific approaches have simply abandoned these elements of what is called “language” in common usage.1"
(p. 15)

Stone, William John. 'A.A.V.E.: An empirical and analytic study with implications for its syllable structure.' PhD diss., Northwestern University (Illinois), 2000.

"There is no doubt that, for the linguist, the terms “dialect” and “language” cannot be seen as referring to discrete categories. Perhaps the most famous and most frequently quoted definition ever given of these terms comes from Max Weinreich (1945):

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”¹⁶

In this he clearly brings out the fact that it is politics rather than linguistics which determines the classification of a speech variety as a language or a dialect. As Stephen Matthews (1996) p.26 says:

“The defining difference is socio-political rather than linguistic.”

This is not to say that linguists have not interested themselves in this distinction despite comments to the contrary such as the following from Peter Daniels17 with regard to the Ebonics debate:

"Whether it’s ‘a separate language,’ a ‘dialect of English,’ etc.... those are questions that aren’t particularly interesting to the linguist; we simply recognize that it exists and investigate its structure and use.”

This may be true of the theoretical linguist, but certainly not of the applied linguist because it is obvious from the furor that erupted over the Oakland school board resolution that how you categorize a variety of speech can have far reaching implications.

¹⁶ Originally in Yiddish: "A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit a armey un a flot.”"
(p. 23)

Waters, William Joseph Condon. 'The American bloom: Did an American language birth American literature?' PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2000.

"Speaking specifically about the inherently debatable nature of defining a nation's language, Max Weinreich, an exiled German Jew who had survived Nazi Germany’s xenophobic rage, claimed that “a language is a dialect with an army and navy” (p.40). In order to fully appreciate what Max Weinreich meant by his often quoted maxim, and in order to understand why I want to continue to use Mencken's insistence upon American English as its own language, let's look more closely at the geographical distribution of two of the languages mentioned above: German and Dutch.

Weinreich, Max. “A Bird's-Eye View of the History of the Yiddish Language,” Tr. Richard Zuckerman. in Yiddish 1.4 (1974): 40-64."
(p. 78)

Bucken-Knapp, Gregg Charles. 'The elite construction and manipulation of cultural identities: The Norwegian language conflict in a comparative perspective.' PhD diss., George Washington University, 1999.

""We have all heard the maxim that 'a language is a dialect with an army and a navy', but in actual fact an army and a navy are usually not sufficient." -- Peter Trudgill"
(p. 275)

Buxo, Camille Lizarribar. 'Something else will stand beside it: The African Writers Series and the development of African literature.' PhD diss., Harvard University, 1998.

"“A language is a dialect with an army.” Anonymous."
(p. 5)

Jones, Roberta Constance. 'A White teacher's experience with the education of Black children.' PhD diss., Mount Saint Vincent University, 1998.

"If statistics were collected, I wonder if we would discover that this so called “standard” English is not the one written or spoken by most Canadians. Would we find out that the “standard” English is spoken and written by the middle class segment of our population? Does this group of people make up the majority of people in Canada? If not, should they have the right to be the“standard” by which all others’ language is measured? If we extend this data collection to the entire English speaking population of the world would we find further evidence that shows that the “standard” may not be as global as we assumed. Linguist Max Weinreich says: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” (Dorsett, 1997)"
(p. 17)

Huffman, Stephen M. 'The genetic classification of languages by n-gram analysis: A computational technique.' PhD diss., Georgetown University, 1998.

"Though not generally recognized as a linguistic criterion, politics also plays a role in defining language boundaries. The oft repeated aphorism that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" is true. Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish would likely be considered simply local dialects of Scandinavian, were it not for the fact that nations proudly identify them as distinct languages and pursue policies to accentuate the differences between their languages. A similar case holds for Hindi and Urdu, though these are separated by religion in addition to politics. Most recently, Serbian nationalists are striving to make their language as distinct as possible from those spoken by their one-time countrymen, the Croats and Bosnians. On the other hand, dialects sufficiently diverse as to be mutually unintelligible are sometimes lumped together, as with the "dialects" of Romany. This is particularly true when the speakers are from little known and politically insignificant groups."
(p. 17)

Heap, David John. 'La variation grammaticale en geolinguistique: Les pronoms sujet en roman central.' PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1997.

"Dans ce sens alors, toutes les «langues» seraient des «dialectes» dont certains, pour des raisons historiques, jouissent du statut d’une «langue standard» d’un pays (ou d’une autre unité politique): d’après la célèbre phrase de Max Weinreich «A language is a dialect with an army and a navy» D’après ce critère, la seule différence entre langue et dialecte serait leur statut social: «D’une certaine façon, un dialecte est la contrepartie d’une langue; suivant ce point de vue, il serait tout simplement ‘une langue sans drapeau et sans armée’, ou encore, une langue dominée.» (Roberge et Vinet 1989) Mais si toutes les «langues» sont en fait des «dialectes» (et inversement), quel sens peut-on donc attribuer à l’idée qu’une «langue» puisse comporter plusieurs «dialectes»?"
(p. 9)

Hostetler, Ann Elizabeth. 'Telling the story of the past: History, identity, and community in fiction by Walter Scott, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Leslie Silko.' PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1996.

"Traditionally, war has been the medium for determining the outcome of competing versions of history. (“A language is a dialect with an Army”—attributed to Dell Hymes on the door of a Penn women’s room stall.)"
(p. 256)

Finn, Viktoria Sydney Herson. 'What is "NAS"? Toward a theory of ethnolect in the South Slavic dialect continuum.' PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1996.

"Often in response to the question "What is a language?," it has been said that "A language is a dialect with an army or a navy."⁹ Although this answer does little to provide insight into the problems of defining a dialect and a language, it does serve to point out some interesting perceptions about what constitutes a language. Namely, that a language is popularly regarded as either primarily a social, historical, and political phenomenon or - though an obvious and unsatisfactorily response - as a collection of formal linguistic features i.e., isogloss feature bundles at the phonological, morphological, syntactical and lexical levels to which sociopolitical and historical meaning becomes attached at some nonessential level. In this view, linguistic boundaries can really only be established by political means (an idea I return to below).

⁹ Pinker (1994:28), though he does not provide a reference for it, attributes this popular maxim to M. Weinreich. Others attribute it to Jespersen. I am unable to find the origin of this statement."
(p. 18)

Gallo, Ronald Vernon. 'Grantmaking in a cross-cultural setting: A case study of the role of foundation support to a language preservation project of the Native American peoples of Oaxaca.' Ed.D diss., Harvard University, 1995.

""A language is a dialect with an army." - Vicente<sup>6

6</sup> Vicente, a poet, was a participant in the Language Preservation Project. He is a Mazateco Indian."
(p. 20)

Wossen-Taffesse, Mikael. 'Educational reform and contradictions in peripheral capitalism: An evaluation of Namibia's post-apartheid initiatives.' M.Ed diss., University of Alberta, 1994.

"A French linguist is said to have once remarked that a national language is a dialect with an army and navy behind it. I am not certain about the origin of this statement but he might have included the security and race police, to accurately communicate the racist technologies of power involved in suppressing the full development of the different indigenous languages of Southern Africa. This linguistic dictum is certainly not unique to Namibia and in general summarizes the principles of power inherent in the language issue manifest throughout the continent of Africa."
(p. 90)

Reynolds, William Thomas. 'Variation and phonological theory.' PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1994.

Burnham, Clint. 'Marxism, postmodernism, theory: Rhetoric and figure in the works of Fredric Jameson.' PhD diss., York University (Canada), 1994.

"The body cannot be contained: it is a "Body without Organs." This figure seems to be even more of a mystification: "Why such a dreary parade of sucked-dry, catatonicized, vitrified, sewn-up bodies, when the BwO is also full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance?" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 150) The way to explicate Deleuze and Guattari's figure, and to reassert the importance of Frye's turn to the body, is to see it in terms of Jameson's transcoding. The BwO is another mediatory term between the text, the individual, and the social. The Body without Organs is also the State without organs, without the organs to defend itself or to purge itself (Chomsky's joke that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy is pertinent here)."
(p. 201)

Rugemalira, Josephat Muhozi. 'Runyambo verb extension and constraints on predicate structure.' PhD diss., University of California (Berkeley), 1993.

"The treatment of Runyambo is an apt illustration of the "standard joke that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" (Chomsky 1977:190)². The Banyambo have always regarded their language as distinct from that of the Bahaya of Buhaya (Hayaland). But the advent of German and, later, British colonialists set the stage for the characterization of Runyambo as a Ruhaya dialect.

² The larger context of this quote includes these questions and statements:

"What is the "Chinese language"? Why is "Chinese" called a language and the Romance languages, different languages? The reasons are political, not linguistic. On purely linguistic grounds, there would be no reason to say that Cantonese and Mandarin are dialects of one language while Italian and French are different languages. Furthermore, what makes French a single language? I suppose fifty years ago neighboring villages could be found which spoke dialects of French sufficiently different so that mutual intelligibility was limited...

Questions of language are basically questions of power, the kind of exercise of power that created the system of nation-states as in Europe. (Chomsky 1977:190-91)"
(p. 4, 26)

Grossman, Jeffrey Alan. 'The space of Yiddish in the German and German Jewish discourse.' PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1992.

"The argument whether Yiddish is or is not a language is now largely academic, since linguists have shown that the difference between language and dialect has notoriously eluded linguistic definition, but depends rather on social context (Trudgill 15-16). The difference is now commonly acknowledged, not without some irony, in sociological terms: a language is a dialect with an army behind it. In other words, if it has enough power, and in recent history preferably a nation-state to buttress it, a dialect will be recognized as a language."
(p. 12)

VanWagner, Lynette Sutton. 'Predicting the acceptance of standardized vernacular languages: The case of Tajumulco Mam, a Mayan language of Guatemala.' MA diss., University of Texas at Arlington, 1992.

"Haugen writes of the "ambiguities and obscurities attaching to the terms ’language’ and ’dialect’": "They represent a simple dichotomy in a situation that is almost infinitely complex... The use of these terms has imposed a division in what is often a continuum, giving what appears to be a neat opposition when in fact the edges are extremely ragged and uncertain" (1966a:922). What is in question here is not the popular notion of a dialect being some kind of inferior language, either in the social sense ("a dialect is a language that is excluded from polite society" [Haugen 1966a:925]) or the political sense ("A language is a dialect with its own army and navy"²).

² Attributed to Max Weinreich in Paikeday, T. M. 1985. The native speaker is dead! Toronto: Paikeday Publishing, p. 26. This quote has also been attributed to Bill Welmers, Paul Kiparsky, Roman Jakobson, Otto Jespersen, and doubtless any number of others."
(p. 11, 40)

Miller, Ivor Lynn. 'Aerosol Kingdom: The indigenous culture of New York subway painters.' MA diss., Yale University, 1990.

""A language is a dialect with an army behind it". Those with political power define which languages are taught in school, thus which languages we must speak to be taken seriously in our society. Yet because a standard language can articulate only certain experiences, those with power also define what experiences we are allowed to articulate."
(p. 55)

Mertz, Elizabeth Ellen. '"No Burden to Carry": Cape Breton Pragmatics and Metapragmatics (Nova Scotia).' PhD diss., Duke University, 1982.

"Thus equivalent linguistic units may be labelled "dialects" or "languages" depending not only on the numbers of speakers using them, but also on the political weight given certain groups. The observation that "a language is a dialect with an army behind it" (Mintz 1979) follows from this line of argument."
(p. 9)

Turaeva, Rano. 'From rhetoric to identification: miscommunication in inter-ethnic contact.' Anthropology of the Middle East. Vol. 8, No. 2 (Winter 2013): 21-45.

"Regarding the terms 'language' and 'dialect', it is well known that they can be, and often are, defined and used in different ways. On the one hand, there are linguistic and scientific definitions of 'language' and 'dialect'. On the other hand, there are definitions drawn from political reasoning. This is nicely reflected in the old linguistic saying: 'A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.'⁹ The two kinds of definitions do often not coincide with the distinction between both. 'Political' definitions are closely connected with national ideologies and the formation of national identities. They can differ significantly from the existing linguistic definitions and their ambiguities that are related to the field of historical linguistics and etymology of world languages and their varieties (Fishman et al. 1968; Gumperz 2005; Haugen 1966; Schlee 2001: 8286; Woolard 1998).

⁹ The author of this saying is unknown. Most often, it is ascribed to Otto Jespersen or to Max Weinreich. I am grateful to Prof. Wolfgang Klein for prompting me with this proverb."
(p. 24)

Cutler, Ann. 'Editorial: Beclouded.' Journal of College Science Teaching. Vol. 42, No. 2 (November-December 2012): 8.

"It's been said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. As a thought leader of science education, you (yes, YOU) are an officer in the armed forces of science. I urge you to consider including a new set of marching orders for the troops under your direction, and I urge you to follow them yourself. Practice communicating our good work to those others who truly need to know."
(p. 8)

Tumbahang, Govinda Bahadur. 'Classification of Chhatthare Limbu.' Contributions to Nepalese Studies. Vol. 34, No. 1 (January 2007): 59-76.

"4. Max Weinreich is often quoted as saying " A language is a dialect with an army and a navy'. It means that politics often decides what dialect will be a 'language'. Powerful or historically significant groups have a 'language' whereas smaller or weaker ones have 'dialects'. This expression is also contextual in determining the status of Chhatthare variant as a 'dialect' since it is weaker than other dialects in terms of the number of speakers and of the magnitude of the area. Moreover, government has set the 'standard dialect of Limbu' based on Panthare dialect and airs programs through radio in it. Apart from the use as a lingua franca among the Limbus, religious rituals are also performed in Panthare dialect It naturally follows that all variants including Chhatthare are separate 'dialects' of Limbu."
(p. 72)

Maxwell, Alexander. 'Why the Slovak language has three dialects: a case study in historical perceptual dialectology.' Austrian History Yearbook. 37 (2006):141-162.

"Most linguists and historians agree that a linguistic collective achieves the status of a "language" through extralinguistic factors. The famous bon mot that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy" usually credited to Max Weinreich, ⁶ correctly leaves linguistic "facts" behind, yet this memorable formula does not accurately describe the allocation of linguistic status. After the partitions of Poland, Polish retained its recognition as a distinct "language," even without a Polish army; neither Austrian German nor American English was proclaimed a distinct "language" despite significant military forces. The battle for the Slovak language had mostly been won before the 1938 Slovak state was founded; the existence of a Czechoslovak army, furthermore, did not noticeably assist the cause of the Czechoslovak language.

⁶ Noam Chomsky, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use (New York, 1986), 15, says that the quote is "attributed to Max Weinreich," but scholars have had difficulty finding a citation from Weinreich himself. Joshua Fishman cites "Der yivo un di problemen fun undzer tsayt," in Yivo-bleter, 25.1.13, 1945 (Mendele list, 28 October 1996). Yiddish-speaker Victor Friedman, suspecting that the quote is apocryphal, reports that some Scandinavian scholars attribute the quotation to Otto Jespersen; see his "Language in Macedonia as an Identity Construction Site," in When Languages Collide: Perspectives on Language Conflict, Language Competition, and Language Coexistence, ed. B. D. Joseph et al. (Columbus, 2002), 260. I am unable to find a proper citation either way. See "Sum: Weinreich quote," and "Disc: Army and Navy Quote" in LINGUIST List (2 and 9 March 1997), available at http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/8/8-306.html and http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/8/8-340.html, respectively (accessed on 2 Match 2005)."
(p. 142)

Romano, Carlin. ''The Tongue Is the Pen of the Heart': As Yiddish 'Dies,' Yiddish Lives.' The Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. 52, No. 14 (November 25, 2005)

"To which an appreciator of academe might reply, "If it's good enough for Plato and Aristotle, for Plautus and Cicero, it's nothing to complain about for Abramovich, Aleichem, and Peretz." In the modern world, Weinreich's well-known saw, "A language is a dialect with an army and navy," might be usefully adjusted to, "A language is a dialect with an academic department devoted to it.""

Costa, Jennifer, Gary McPhail, Janet Smith, and Maria Estela Brisk. 'Faculty first: the challenge of infusing the teacher education curriculum with scholarship on English language learners.' Journal of Teacher Education. Vol. 56, No. 2 (March-April 2005): 104-118.

"A great variety of indigenous nations with distinct languages inhabited U.S. territories prior to the arrival of colonizers and the eventual dominance of the English language, proving true, at least in the United States, the old adage, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Immigrants, refugees, and sojourners further increased the variety of languages and ethnic groups. Unlike first-language acquisition, second-language acquisition is supported and constrained by a host of personal as well as external factors. Sociohistorical events mold and change societal attitudes toward various ethnic groups, influencing which languages and their speakers are privileged in any one epoch."
(p. 108)

Coulmas, Florian. Sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

"More important for making it ‘standard’ is a different factor, its written form. Though often discounted as an extralinguistic artefact, writing does play a crucial role in establishing a standard.7 More to the point than the oft-quoted adage that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, it can be said that a (standard) language is a dialect with a written norm."
(p. 25)

Ludlow, Peter. 'Chomsky, Noam,' in Sahotra Sarkar and Jessica Pfeifer (eds). The Philosophy of Science. Psychology Press, 2006.

"Typically the question of who counts as speaking a particular language is determined more by political boundaries than actual linguistic variation. For example, there are dialects of German that, from a linguistic point of view, are closer to Dutch than to standard German. Likewise, in the Italian linguistic situation, there are a number of so-called dialects only some of which are recognized as “official” languages by the Italian government. Are the official languages intrinsically different from the “mere”dialects? Not in any linguistic sense. The decision to recognize the former as official is entirely a political decision. In the words attributed to Max Weinreich: A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. In this case, a language is a dialect with substantial political clout and maybe a threat of separatism."
(p. 110)

Wardhaugh, Ronald. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. John Wiley & Sons, 2010.

"The various relationships among languages and dialects discussed above can be used to show how the concepts of ‘power’ and ‘solidarity’ help us understand what is happening. Power requires some kind of asymmetrical relationship between entities: one has more of something that is important, e.g. status, money, influence, etc., than the other or others. A language has more power than any of its dialects. It is the powerful dialect but it has become so because of non-linguistic factors. ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy’ is a well-known observation. Standard English and Parisian French are good examples. Solidarity, on the other hand, is a feeling of equality that people have with one another. They have a common interest around which they will bond. A feeling of solidarity can lead people to preserve a local dialect or an endangered language to resist power, or to insist on independence. It accounts for the persistence of local dialects, the modernization of Hebrew, and the separation of Serbo-Croatian into Serbian and Croatian."
(p. 28)

Baker, Colin and Sylvia Prys Jones. Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. Multilingual Matters, 1998.

"The famous statement, 'A language is a dialect with an army and a navy’ underlines the important idea that the boundaries between languages in the modern world are largely determined by political power and sovereign nations. The modern concept of a language is closely linked with the idea of an autonomous standard norm. The existence and form of such a standard is decided mainly by cultural. social and political factors rather than linguistic considerations. The process of language standardization is discussed later (see page 210)."
(p. 142)

Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. Psychology Press, 1997.

"So where does accent end and dialect begin? This touches on one of the most intriguing and complicated questions of sociolinguistics. Why is Dutch considered a separate language from German, and Swiss German not? Why do many call the variety of English that many African Americans speak black slang (or a black accent) but call Cockney and Gullah dialects? Max Weinreich is widely quoted as pointing out that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy; I would like to add to that observation that a dialect is perhaps nothing more than a language that gets no respect. If it is possible to try to distinguish between accent and language variety on purely linguistic terms, then a rough division can be made as follows: Two varieties of a single language are divided by accent when differences are restricted primarily to phonology (prosodic and segmental features). If two varieties of a single language also differ in morphological structures, syntax, lexicon, and semantics, then they are different varieties, or dialects, of the same language. If two varieties of a common mother language differ in all these ways and in addition have distinct literary histories, distinct orthographies and/or geopolitical boundaries, then they are generally called different languages."
(p. 43)

Byrd, Dani and Toben H. Mintz. Discovering Speech, Words, and Mind. John Wiley & Sons, 2010.

"A reasonable estimate of the number of languages in the world is about 6,000 but estimates range as low as 5,000 and as high as 7,000. This is not a number that can be stated with surety. It is even rather difficult to provide a scientific definition of what a "language” is. The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich popularized (though apparently did not coin) the aphorism that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” This is, of course, meant to suggest that sociopolitical factors often play a large role in the lay definition of what is and is not a distinct language. A linguistic definition, which is by no means perfect, is that two linguistic communication systems can be considered to be one language (or dialects of one language) when they are mutually intelligible (this means that a speaker of System X can understand a speaker of System Y and vice versa), and can be considered to be two languages when they are not mutually intelligible. Of course, this is not a perfect definition since there are degrees of intelligibility, intelligibility isn't always bidirectionally equal, and experiences with a previously unintelligible ”dialect" can make it much more intelligible. Nevertheless, this is an adequate linguistic definition for our purposes."
(p. 72)

Coldiron, A. E. B. Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

""A language is a dialect with... a Navy"<sup>1

1</sup> The original quotation is in Yiddish, and has been rendered “A language is a dialect with an Army and a Navy,” attributed to Max Weinreich, in “YIVO and the problems of our time,” Yivo-bleter 25.1 (1945): 13. It has also been attributed to Uriel Weinreich and to Antoine Meillet; for details of attributions, see William Bright’s note, “A Language is a Dialect with an Army and a Navy,” Language in Society 26.3 (1997): 469. The context for the quotation, a discussion among sociolinguists about how to distinguish between dialect and language, is not my concern here."
(p. 199)

Lodge, R. Anthony. French: From Dialect to Standard. Routledge, 2013.

"Languages serve as more than vehicles for the communication of information — they commonly act as symbols of identity. A group such as a ’nation’ will often use language as a way of drawing lines around itself to distinguish itself from other ’nations’. A state may adopt a dialect as its ’national’ or ’official’ language, and citizens loyal to that state will generally prefer to call that dialect not a ‘dialect’ of some other language (shared with a perhaps alien group) but a ’language’ in its own right, the latter possessing greater dignity. Thus the decision about whether to refer to a variety as a ’dialect’ or as a ’language’ is usually tied in with questions of group identity and dialect status. We shall return to the question of language and group identity shortly. As for the social status of a dialect, this is generally linked to such things as the political and economic power of the people who speak it (’a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’; ‘a language is a dialect which has risen in society and the other dialects are its poor relations’), to the prestige of the writers who have used it for literary purposes, and perhaps most importantly to the degree of standardisation and uniformity which it has achieved. At all events, the distinction between ‘dialect’ and ’language’ is often a sociopolitical rather than a linguistic one."
(p. 19)

Saxena, Anju. 'South Asian Languages,' in Peter Austin (ed). One Thousand Languages: Living, Endangered, and Lost. University of California Press, 2008.

"How many languages are there?

The lndo-Aryan language group illustrates the problem of determining how many languages exist in a vast region without sharp linguistic borders. Here neighboring language varieties differ little but differences grow with distance so that at least the varieties at the edges of this region will not be mutually intelligible. This is known as a ‘dialect continuum.‘ In South Asia, there are several dialect continua, the largest being that of lndo-Aryan mainland languages covering most of northern and central South Asia, with the so-called "Hindi belt" at its center. Here there is conflicting information as to (i) whether a named language variety is a language in its own right or a dialect: and, if the latter, (ii) of which language it is a dialect. The issue is also influenced by social and historical factors, aptly summarized by the American linguist Max Weinreich as "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.""
(p. 126)

Janicki, Karol. Language Misconceived: Arguing for Applied Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Routledge, 2014.

"According to Zuengler (1985), “Tanzania’s linguistic composition is complex, for there are today over one hundred vernacular language groups. This is, however, only a rough estimate, since little analysis has been done as to what objectively constitutes a dialect, and what a language” (p. 242; italics added). From the nonessentialist view, distinguishing objectively between a dialect and a language is not possible. This is because neither can be defined objectively. Only if they could be defined objectively (which the essentialist seems to believe is possible) could we make a clear distinction between the two. The nonessentialist will be satisfied with a variety of definitions of both terms. One possible example of an acceptable definition is “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” (Weinreich; quoted in Romaine, 2000, p. 13). Of course, other definitions would also be acceptable."
(p. 16)

Borin, Lars. 'Supporting Lesser-Known Languages: The Promise of Language Technology.' in Anju Saxena and Lars Borin (eds). Lesser-Known Languages of South Asia: Status and Policies, Case Studies and Applications of Information Technology. Walter de Gruyter, 2006: 317-337.

"The old quip attributed to Uriel Weinreich, that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, is being replaced in these progressive days: a language is a dialect with a dictionary, grammar, parser and a multi-million-word corpus of texts - and they’d better all be computer tractable. When you’ve got all of those, get yourself a speech database, and your language will be poised to compete on terms of equality in the new Information Society. (Ostler, n.d.)"
(p. 317)

DeBose, C. The Sociology of African American Language. Springer, 2016.

"After the American Revolution, there was strong sentiment for the recognition of American English as a separate language; and had it come to pass, Americans would now be speakers, not of English, but American. As things stand, the language situation in the United States is a notable exception to the adage that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."
(p. 76)

Bakker, Peter and Khristo Kiuchukov. What is the Romani Language?. University of Hertfordshire Press, 2000.

"The term “dialect" is used for a form of speech which deviates from some established norm. This mm is often a written form which is used in official publications. newspapers and literature. The distinction between “dialect“ and “language" is a political one, and not based on the nature of the language. Some would even say that a language is a dialect with a state and an army behind it. The English standard language is also a dialect, which one could call ‘standard dialect.' English. like any other language, has a number of dialects. These dialects differ from the norm or standard language in pronunciation, in words or in structure. However, a dialect is not worth less than a standard language. People may think so because it is different from the generally accepted standard language used in writing and in the media. A decision whether for example Scots is an English dialect, or whether Alsatian, Low German, Swiss German or Luxemburg German (Letzebuergisch) are dialects of German or separate languages has to be made on political and social, not linguistic grounds."
(p. 23)

Gillam, Ronald B., Thomas P. Marquardt, Frederick N. Martin. Communication Sciences and Disorders: From Science to Clinical Practice. Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2010.

"At what point does a dialect become a language? According to Pinker (1994), the linguist Max Weinrich maintained that “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." That is to say, the primary determination of what is called a dialect and what is called a language is one of power - not of linguistics. Dialects are as linguistically legitimate as any language, but without the power to “promote" themselves to the level of language. Therefore, you can be sure that whatever the standard language is in any given community, it belongs to those with the most power."
(p. 58)

Shoba, Jo Arthur, Feliciano Chimbutane. Bilingual Education and Language Policy in the Global South. Routledge, 2013.

"As I pursued conversations about language and local linguistic varieties in the Kumaun, I became intrigued with the use of two Hindi words: Bhasha and boli. Bhasha can be translated as ‘language’, and boli, related to ‘speech’, is usually translated as ‘dialect’ but also implies ‘spoken language’. I noticed that the ways in which the term boli is used to talk about certain linguistic varieties did not parallel my own conceptions of the meaning of dialect. Similarly, when I heard the word dialect in the Indian context, it often seemed to carry different meanings and connotations than I had usually ascribed to it. My introductory linguistics courses had taught me to avoid the term dialect with its connotations of linguistic inferiority and rather to speak of language varieties, including standard and nonstandard varieties. While English speakers in India usually insisted that boli can be translated as ‘dialect’, I felt that the meanings were not parallel. Those introductory linguistics courses also taught me that ‘a language is a dialect with an army’. I wanted to be alert to the power issues involved, but yet to try to understand the distinction as locally perceived and learned. My understanding of dialect in the Indian context was expanded when I began to see it through the concept of boli."
(p. 193)

Coelho, Elizabeth, Dyanne Rivers. Adding English: A Guide to Teaching in Multilingual Classrooms. Pippin Publishing Corporation, 2004.

"Standard English is a dialect. Once known as the King's or Queen's English, it evolved from the dialect spoken at court and among the powerful in London. William Caxton chose to represent this dialect in print when he printed the first books in English, and its use as the printed form of the language helped establish it as the standard. The term standard is often used as if it were synonymous with correct; in fact, all varieties of English are equally correct, and standard English owes its status more to might than right. "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" is a famous saying among linguists. The standard dialect is the one spoken by those in authority and those with education; as a result, it has special currency as the dialect of prestige and power. Those of higher socioeconomic status - and those who aspire to this - usually speak the standard dialect."
(p. 115)

Wynne, Joan. 'We Don't Talk Right. You Ask Him,' in Larry A. Samovar, Richard E. Porter, Edwin R. McDaniel (eds). Intercultural Communication: A Reader. Cengage Learning, 2011: 119-126.

"She and a few of the other soon-to-be teachers were unknowingly expressing one of the basic tenets of linguistics: that languages are defined politically, not scientifically - and that a “language is a dialect with an army and a navy” (Dorsett, 1997, O’Neil, 1997). The responses of the pre-service teachers reflected no awareness that each dialect and language has an internal integrity unto itself; that one language clearly is not scientifically better than the other, but that one is politically more acceptable than the other - for one dialect belongs to the power structure (Dorsett, 1997; Fillmore 1998; Perry and Delpit, 1998)."
(p. 122)

Preschler, Heidi. 'Language and Dialect' in Steven R. Serafin, Alfred Bendixen (eds). The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature. A & C Black, 2005: 644-646.

"Dialect has thus been part of the American literary tradition from its very beginning. We could argue that all of American literature is written in “dialect," as is all British literature, for a dialect is “a variety of language used by one group with features of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar that distinguish it from other varieties." What the British considered a barbarous dialect has, however, come to consider itself a language in its own right, thus proving the linguistic adage that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Once the American colonies became the U.S., once Webster wrote his grammar and dictionary, once writers used the American dialect and publishing houses published it and readers bought books written in it, that which had been considered barbarous and ungrammatical became a language."
(p. 644)

Sihler, Andrew L. Language History: An Introduction. John Benjamins Publishing, 2000.

"The actual historical and linguistic relationship between a language and dialects in this definition is of no importance. Thus, Low German {Plattdeutsch) of northern Germany is called a dialect, or rather a collection of dialects, of (High) German, the standard language of the country. In fact, though, the closest relative to Plattdeutsch in terms of historical development is actually Dutch - itself (thanks to the sovereign status of the state where it is the vernacular) by this definition a language, not a dialect. Further, wholly within the genuine High German dialect continuum (116), as diachronically defined, one finds far greater structural differences than are to be found between the Danish and Swedish languages (so-called). Since the distinction between language and dialect as defined this way is based on cultural and political considerations rather than on linguistic ones, it has been aptly quipped that a 'language' is a dialect with an army and a navy."
(p. 167)

Montgomery, Martin. An Introduction to Language and Society. 3rd ed. Routledge, 2013.

"Comparisons such as these help to demonstrate how closely issues of national and linguistic identity are tied together, and why questions such as ‘What counts as a language?’ and ‘How does a dialect become the standard?’ are ultimately political and social as well as linguistic questions. ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy’ as someone once remarked. By the same token a question such as ‘What makes a speech community?’ is also a social and political question."
(p. 212)

Murray, Denise E., MaryAnn Christison. What English Language Teachers Need to Know: Volume I. Routledge, 2010.

"First, however, is the issue of how to differentiate a language from a dialect. While people may have folk notions about how they differ, linguistically, there are no definitive rules for identifying a language, only sociocultural conventions. One criterion that has been used is that of mutual intelligibility - if speakers can understand each other, then they speak the same language. However, this criterion does not stand up in practise. Swedish and Danish are mutually intelligible. In fact,speakers who live close to the borders are more easily able to understand speakers of the other language than speakers from the same country who live at great distances. Yet, all agree that Swedish and Danish are languages. On the other hand, speakers of different dialects of Chinese are not intelligible to each other; yet they agree that they all speak Chinese. It has therefore been said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. In other words, determining whether a variety is a language or a dialect depends on political history."
(p. 18)

Siegel, Jeff. Second Dialect Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

"Thus, standard English, French, Spanish, Mandarin, etc. are considered languages whereas Cockney, Provencal, Cantonese and African American English are considered dialects. Furthermore, many people think of a language, but not a dialect, as being associated with a particular country. This view is reflected in the well-known saying: “A language is a dialect with an army and navy” (attributed to the Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich). On the other hand, when talking about the different national standard varieties - such as American, British and Australian English - people often refer to these as different dialects of English."
(p. 2)

Burridge, Kate, Tonya N. Stebbins. For the Love of Language: An Introduction to Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

"A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot. [‘A language is a dialect with an army and navy.’]

Max Weinreich, Yiddish Scientific Institute Conference, 5 January 1945"
(p. 240)

Harding-Esch, Edith, Philip Riley. The Bilingual Family: A Handbook for Parents. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

"This is why, when there is disagreement about the status of a dialect, the conflict is inevitably political in nature. For example, when people argue as to whether Breton. Scots or Basque is ‘a language’, they are usually arguing about the degree of political autonomy of the speakers or the region where the variety in question is spoken. Because languages are not distinguished from dialects on linguistic grounds, it is quite possible to find separate official languages that have more in common than other dialects of the ‘same’ language. For example, we speak of the ‘Scandinavian languages‘ — Norwegian, Danish and Swedish — even though they are very similar and often mutually comprehensible. On the other hand. we speak of ‘dialects’ of the Chinese language even though at least eight of these dialects (or rather families of dialects) are mutually incomprehensible. Words like ‘Norwegian’ and ‘Chinese’ are political, not linguistic statements: they tell us that the area in question is a separate nation. As it has often been said: ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy of its own‘."
(p. 11)

Cook, Vivian. Second Language Learning and Language Teaching. 4th ed. Routledge, 2013.

"A starting point is to look at what a language is. Conventionally, one meaning of ‘language’ is political in the Lang₂ sense of Chapter 1, ’an abstract entity’: a language belongs to a nation, whether German, French, English or Chinese. An aphorism attributed to Ulrich Weinreich is that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. This definition in terms of a nation works when the everyday use of a language effectively stops at the borders of a country, say Japanese in Japan or Korean in Korea. In these cases, the native speakers of the language are born and live within the country. They are local languages spoken within the same area, whether a country or a section of a country. They usually have a single standard form based on a particular region or social class, regardless of dialects: standard Japanese derives from Tokyo, standard Korean from Seoul. The logical target of teaching for those local languages may indeed be the language and culture of the native speaker."
(p. 194)

Hudley, Anne Harper Charity. 'African American English' in Helen A. Neville, Brendesha M. Tynes, Shawn O. Utsey (eds). Handbook of African American Psychology. SAGE Publications, 2008: 199-210.

"The majority of linguists now View AAE as a dialect of Standard American English (SAE), but some researchers argue that the definition of a language is more deeply rooted in the histories of social and cultural power than in linguistic reality, following the idea that “A language is a dialect with an army and navy” (Unknown). Regardless of the perspective taken on whether AAE is a dialect or a language, many of the linguistic features of AAE and Standard American English as a larger entity do overlap. The focus of this chapter and of much of the work on AAE overall is the linguistic features that differ between AAE and SAE."
(p. 199)

Briggs, Ronald. Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolivar: Simon Rodriguez and the American Essay at Revolution. Vanderbilt University Press, 2010.

"Max Weinreich's famous dismissal of the distinction between a dialect and a language—“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”—draws its comic tension from the geopolitical pressures any discussion of language presupposes. An essential definition of language, it suggests, is nothing more than an ex post facto attempt to justify crass political realities in something other than crass political terms. In Spain’s case the military realities of conquest and discovery conspire with the 1492 publication of Nebrija’s Gramzitica de la Lengua Tastellana to cement Castilian as the dialect that will become the Spanish language. If the history of the English language lacks such a point of historical convergence, it, too, culminates around a single publication, Samuel ]ohnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. Another dictionary, 7796 Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary, credits Johnson with some of the particular discrepancies between pronunciation and spelling in contemporary English, noting that his work standardized English spelling even as pronunciation continued (and continues) to evolve (466—67)."
(p. 138)

Fishman, Joshua A. (ed). Handbook of Language & Ethnic Identity. Oxford University Press (USA), 2001.

"The definitional urge that marks the beginning of many chapters has largely been restrained in connection with “language.” The difficulty of impartially making the dialect-versus-language distinction is alluded to in a few cases. (“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" is a witticism that stems from the field of Yiddish linguistics. and one that neatly indicates the social rather than the linguistic basis of the distinction.) However, a thorough appreciation of the attachment of culture to languages—-even world or international languages—is required if we are to do our subject justice. Languages do not just symbolize their associated cultures (as the major symbol system of our species, they obviously come to symbolize the peoples and the cultures that utilize them), and they are not just indexically better suited to their related cultures than are any other languages (indeed. having “grown up together," it would be odd if that were not the case)."
(p. 444)

Errington, Shelly. The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress. University of California Press, 1998.

""What is the difference between a language and a dialect?" goes the joke. Answer: "A language is a dialect... with an army and a navy.""
(p. 208)

McFadden, Kevin. Hardscrabble: Poems. University of Georgia Press, 2008.

"Is it sufficient to leave these heaps? Of course abstractions are real,they’re real abstractions. I'm interested in how thoughts cluster around a word. lts real bones and its ghost limbs. Any word. Death. State. Statistic. Etymology, emphasis, pronunciation of words. "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”—Max Weinreich. A dialect is a citadel. Approaching the word as a mandala, square within circle within square, Adam within Adam within within within within.We often take circumlocution as evasion, it needn’t be. It might be a first step, a first form, triangluation: talk around something long enough and you can divine its center. Circumlocation. Perigraphs. I am going somewhere. Essay is related to exact, but this is not an essay. You Essay. My word."
(p. 38)

Chambers, J. K., Peter Trudgill. Dialectology. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

"It has been said that ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy‘. There is considerable truth in this claim, which stresses the political factors that lie behind linguistic autonomy.Nevertheless, the Jamaican situation shows that it is not the whole truth. Perhaps a time will come when Jamaican Creole will achieve complete autonomy, like Norwegian,or shared autonomy, like American English. Certainly there are educational grounds for suggesting that such a development in Jamaica would be desirable. It is also possible for autonomy to be lost, and for formerly independent varieties to become heteronomous with respect to other varieties. This is what has happened to those varieties of the English dialect continuum spoken in Scotland. Scots was formerly an autonomous variety, but has been regarded for most purposes as a variety of English for the last two hundred years or so. Movements are currently afoot, however, linked to the rise of Scottish nationalism. for the reassertion of Scottish English/Scots as a linguistic variety in its own right, and it is possible that some form of Scots will achieve at least semi-autonomy at some future date."
(p. 12)

Fishman, Joshua A. 'Languages Late to Literacy: Finding a Place in the Sun on a Crowded Beach' in Brian D. Joseph, Johanna DeStefano, Neil G. Jacobs, and Ilse Lehiste (eds). When Languages Collide: Perspectives on Language Conflict, Language Competition, and Language Coexistence. Ohio State University Press, 2003: 97-108.

"While it is clear that the absolute number of languages of literacy increased precipitously starting in the mid-nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century, it is nevertheless quite difficult to say what proportion of the world's languages are now carriers of literacy. This is primarily due to the fact that the total number of languages in the world is variously estimated as between five and ten thousand. The language/dialect distinction is a highly perspectival issue and essentially not a linguistic one (recall the well-known aphorism “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”). Whenever this distinction is made (particularly in sharply contested individual cases). political and self-interest concerns, rather than scholarly interests, are normally decisive. None the less, the number of literate languages is clearly growing, just as it is clear that this growth has gone on steadily for the entire millennium that has recently come to a close."
(p. 97)

Gelderen, Elly van. A History of the English Language: Revised Edition. 2nd ed. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014.

"In Chapter 1, we mentioned an interesting quote attributed to Uriel Weinreich: “a language is a dialect with an army.” It is often difficult to distinguish varieties (or dialects) from languages, and, as the quote suggests, in many cases the distinction is politically motivated. When the United States gained political independence from Britain, for example, it also wanted an independent language, as different from British English as possible. This need to create a distinct identity is language-external and results in diverging Englishes. Modern mass communication and globalization are also external forces, but they function as converging factors."
(p. 251)

Gubbins, Paul and Mike Holt (eds). Beyond Boundaries: Language and Identity in Contemporary Europe. Multilingual Matters, 2002.

"However, this does not mean that we automatically move ever closer to the ’one language, one state’ model. There are two good reasons for this; the first concerns the nature of language variation itself and the other the consequences of European colonialism. Briefly, all standard languages share territory with linguistically related nonstandard varieties. Whether these varieties are seen as separate languages, as low-status dialects or as prestige-dialects is not really a linguistic matter but depends on history and politics. Yesterday's dialect may become tomorrow's language claiming political independence for its speakers. As Weinreich famously said, ’a standard language is a dialect with an army and a navy’."
(p. 1)

Soldat-Jaffe, Tatjana. Twenty-first Century Yiddishism. Sussex Academic Press, 2012.

"In Max Weinreich’s famous words: “A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot.”²⁶ A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Yet, as Weinreich knew well, Yiddish is an exception to this ironic formula. The Yiddishist political line of argument — that Yiddish speakers constituted an overwhelming transnational language minority in central and eastern Europe — claimed Yiddish ipso facto as a modern language because minorities are defined on vernacular grounds. Yiddish had to be counted therefore as a minority language in the modern European context and should hence be granted all the attendant privileges. This move clearly rode the wave of immense political as well as cultural changes in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Many other minority populations — Romanians, for example — sought autonomy and received political recognition, so many Jews thought that Yiddish was not only theoretically but also practically best qualified to receive this attention."
(p. 26)

Dorren, Gaston. Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe. Profile Books, 2014.

"A language is a dialect with an army. If this cliché applies anywhere, it’s in the former Yugoslavia. For most of the twentieth century, Yugoslavia was one country, with one army and one dominant language: Serbo-Croatian, the mother tongue of more than three-quarters of its population. Then, between 1991 and 2008, Yugoslavia split into seven parts, each with its own army. In three of the new countries — Slovenia, Macedonia and Kosovo — the majority of the population spoke Slovenian, Macedonian and Albanian, respectively, and these became their national languages. But each of the other four countries also claimed its own language: Croatian in Croatia, Serbian in Serbia, Montenegrin in Montenegro and Bosnian in Bosnia-Herzegovina (although the ethnic Croats in this lacerated country tend to speak Croatian, and the Serbs Serbian). In so doing, they abolished Serbo-Croatian."
(p. 90)

Kühl, Karoline, Kurt Braunmüller. 'Linguistic Stability and Divergence: An Extended Perspective on Language Contact' in Kurt Braunmüller, Steffen Höder, Karoline Kühl. Stability and Divergence in Language Contact: Factors and Mechanisms. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014: 13-38.

"A focus on dialects and factors relevant for dialect convergence and dialect divergence prevails in research and publications. Since history shows that dialects acquire the status of languages in their own right through socio-politically motivated decisions, there seems to be no need to assume fundamental structural differences between dialects and languages that would make a comparison between dialect contact and language contact impossible when investigating structural changes or stability in language contact (cf. Weinreich 1953/1968: 1f.)<sup>1

1</sup> Cf. The dictum "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" [originally in Yiddish: "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot"], attributed to Max Weinreich (Weinreich 1945: 13)."
(p. 14)

Echevarria, Roberto Gonzalez. 'Latin American and Comparative Literatures' in Sophia A. McClennen, Earl E. Fitz (eds). Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America. Purdue University Press, 2004: 89-104.

"Work on colonialism and literature is giving currency in literary studies - properly translated - to the linguistic dictum that a language is a dialect with an army. Many would now say that a literature is a body of texts with an army and an Alliance Francaise. It would probably be a shock to the founders of comparative literature, who acted to combat the scourge of nationalism, that the field is now seen as the reflection of only a slightly more encompassing kind of cultural arrogance: Eurocentrism."
(p. 89)

Murphy, James J. A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Contemporary America. Routledge, 2012.

"As the television commentator Alistair Cooke once remarked, "Language is a dialect with an army and a navy," and history does in fact tell us that for more than half a millennium, the Latin language and its schools served as a kind of social cement throughout the Western World.¹⁵"
(p. 112)

Trudgill, P. 'Title Unknown' in E. K. Brown, R. E. Asher, J. M. Y. Simpson (eds). Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, Volume 12). 2nd ed. Elesevier, 2006.

"Max Weinreich's (unpublished) dictum that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" contains much truth, but it is a partial truth."
(p. 647)

García, Ofelia. Bilingual Education in the 21st Century. Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.

""Indeed, when states want to ensure that people who engage in certain languaging practices remain oppressed, these practices are often referred to as dialects; although when the speakers of these so called dialects achieve political power, they are often designated as languages. Max Weinreich is often quoted as having said that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy"..."
(p. 33)

Synak, Brunon, Tomasz Wicherkiewicz (eds). Language Minorities and Minority Languages: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Minority Languages, Gdańsk, 1-5 July, 1996. Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 1997.

"Third, in all these considerations it is history and politics which matter far more than anything to do with linguistic facts: a dialect is, indeed, a "language that failed," and a language is "a dialect with an army" or (in East Africa, ki-benzi) "what is spoken by the man who drives the Mercedes-Benz.""
(p. 116)

McArthur, Thomas Burns, Feri McArthur. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press (USA), 1992.

"Max Weinreich's often-quoted dictum, 'a language is a dialect with an army and a navy,' attests the importance...."
(p. 291)

Liebe-Harkort, Marie-Louise. 'A Comparison of Apachean Languages, Exemplified by the Verb Stem System for Handling Verbs' in Herwig Krenn, Jürgen Niemeyer, Ulrich Eberhardt. Sprache und Text: Akten des 18. Lingustischen Kolloquiums : Linz 1983, Volume 1. Walter de Gruyter, 1984: 77-92.

"It was Jesperson, I think, who said that a language is a dialect with an army. The Apache Indians, living in the South-west of the United States, lost their armies long ago, and since then, the talk has been of Apachean dialects. When the Chiricahua Apache, who were held prisoner of war for 27 years (all of them, men, women, children, even men who had married into the tribe), were brought from the camp in Alabama to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the Plains Apache (also called Kiowa-Apache) wanted to welcome them. They arranged a big gathering of all of the members of both tribes at a big meeting area. The leaders of each tribe advanced to the middle of the gathering, and the Plains Apache leaders spoke their words of welcome. These words, however, were not understood, and the consternation was great. The leaders went back to their tribesmen, and there each found a young man who had been educated at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. These returned to the center and served as interpreters to their elders, translating the speeches into English for the other translator, who in turn translated what had been said into the Apache of the tribe. It thus became clear that Apachean dialects are not mutually intelligible."
(p. 77)

Deutscher, Guy. The Unfolding of Language: The Evolution of Mankind's Greatest Invention. Random House, 2006.

"Incidentally. the decision about when to start calling such varieties different ‘languages’, rather than ‘dialects’ of the same language, often involves factors that have little to do with the actual linguistic distance between them. An American linguist once quipped that ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’, and his point is illustrated by recent cases such as Serbian and Croatian, which before the break-up of the former Yugoslavia were regarded as dialects of one language, Serbo-Croatian, but afterwards were suddenly proclaimed to be different languages. So ultimately, the decision about whether something is a language or a dialect relies on what the speakers themselves consider it to be. But from a purely linguistic perspective, and as a rule of thumb, when two varieties of what used to be the same language are no longer mutually intelligible, they can he called different languages."
(p. 55)

Bauer, Laurie. The Linguistics Student's Handbook. Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

"One of the problems of linguistics is drawing a distinction between language and dialect. It might seem that people who cannot understand each other speak different languages, while those who can understand each other but who show consistent differences in their speech speak different dialects of the same language. Matters are not that simple, though. On the basis of examples like Cantonese and Mandarin, which may not be mutually comprehensible but which are commonly termed ‘dialects’, and Danish and Swedish, which (with some good will) are mutually comprehensible but are usually termed different ‘languages’, it is often pointed out that the distinction between language and dialect is more a political division than a linguistic one. Serbian and Croatian have gone from being viewed as dialects of Serbo-Croat to being viewed as independent languages as the political situation has changed. Tyneside English and Texan English may be mutually incomprehensible. Max Weinreich (1945) is credited with the encapsulating aphorism that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

(relevant endnote reads:
Weinreich, Max (1945). Der YIVO un di problemen fun undzer tsayt. YIVO Bletter 25 ¹: 3-18. [In this article, Weinreich quotes an unnamed source for the aphorism cited in this section. The point is, of course, since the original is in Yiddish, that by this definition Yiddish would not be classified as a language.]"
(p. 10)

Burke, Peter. Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

"The question, how many languages existed in early modern Europe, is at once obvious and deceptive. When is a language a language, and when is it a dialect? The classic answer takes the form of the epigram attributed to more than one famous linguist to the effect that a language is a dialect with an army, navy and air force. The political criterion is indeed an appropriate one in the case of the last two hundred or two hundred and fifty years, the age of what has been called the ‘politicization of language’, its increasingly close association with nations and nationalism (below, p. 166). It is much less applicable to early modern times."
(p. 7)

Michalowski, Piotr. 'The Universe in Early Mesopotamian Writings' in Kurt A. Raaflaub, Richard J. A. Talbert (eds). Geography and Ethnography: Perceptions of the World in Pre-Modern Societies. John Wiley & Sons, 2009: 147-168.

"This was the end of the city—state regime in the land, although its ideals died hard and rebellions greeted every new member of the dynasty. The kings of Agade transformed the organization of the land and began to impose the use of the language of their own city on many areas of Western Asia, to be used alongside the older Sumerian tongue for written communication. Max Weinreich’s old saw (1945: 13), that a language is a dialect with an army (and a navy), finds here its first historical affirmation, as the Semitic vernacular of the town of Agade became what we call Old Akkadian (Sommerfeld 2003), the earliest well-attested form of what is otherwise known as the Akkadian or Babylonian language (Hasselbach 2005).⁵ Such widespread use of this new written language - as well as of a new artistic style - was driven by administration and politics; it had nothing or little to do with ethnic or national identity in the broad sense, and therefore the cultural uniformity of the empire that philologists and art historians recognize is in many ways an illusion. Underneath the veneer of representation,social and psychological diversity undoubtedly flourished much as before."
(p. 151)

Woll, Bencie, Rachel Sutton-Spence and Frances Elton. 'Multilingualism: The Global Approach to Sign Languages' in Ceil Lucas. The Sociolinguistics of Sign Languages. Cambridge University Press, 2001: 8-32.

""A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." - Anon."
(p. 8)

Kamusella, Tomasz. The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

""A language is a dialect with an army and navy" (in Weinreich 1945: 13)"
(p. 1)

Pereltsvaig, Asya. Languages of the World. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

"Another way of defining languages is in geopolitical terms, as in the popular aphorism commonly attributed to the Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich (although there is some debate as to whether he actually coined it or just published it): “A language is a dialect with an army and navy”. Indeed, it is often the case that we consider two linguistic varieties as distinct languages (rather than dialects of the same language) when they are associated with distinct flags and other trappings of a national state. For example, a language that was known up to the beginning of 1990s as Serbo-Croatian has recently “broken” into not just two but four languages, each claiming distinctness from the others and attempting as hard as they can to purge each other’s influences: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. Similarly, the differentiation between Danish, Norwegian and Swedish as three separate languages might not have existed were it not for the fact that these are spoken in three different countries."
(p. 4)

Paikeday, Thomas M., Noam Chomsky. The native speaker is dead!: an informal discussion of a linguistic myth with Noam Chomsky and other linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and lexicographers. Paikeday Publishing, 1985.

"While this point is not entirely relevant to your concern, it's worth recalling that the definition of language communities tends to be based on traits outside of language. Max Weinreich (the great Yiddishist) is reputed to have said: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." (I got it from one of his students who heard him say it; his son also recalls it, but doesn't know of it in print)."
(p. 26)

Wilson, Richard, Jon P. Mitchell (eds). Human Rights in Global Perspective: Anthropological Studies of Rights, Claims and Entitlements. Psychology Press, 2003.

"¹⁰ In his summing up of the multiculturalism panel, Ralph Grillo distinguished between rights and claims by making the analogy of the realpolitik distinction between a language and a dialect, where ‘a language is a dialect with an army.' Thus rights are claims with the backing of the coercive apparatus of a state or transnational institution (such as the lntemational Criminal Court). Rights are, in this formulation, hegemonic claims."
(p. 13)

Edwards, John. Sociolinguistics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2013.

"Finally, suppose that there are four dialect communities, A, B, C, and D. Suppose that speakers of A and B can easily understand one another, that those in groups A and C have some considerable difficulty, and that speakers of A and D simply cannot communicate. Does this mean that A and D are actually different languages? Those unaware of groups B and C might be forgiven for thinking so, but they might not if the full continuum were revealed to them. The suggestion made by the linguist and Yiddishist Max Weinreich that “a language is a dialect that has an army and navy” illustrates another point of confusion between languages and dialects. Speakers of Norwegian and Danish can understand each other Well - Swedish might go into the mix, as well - but the demands of political identity require that their varieties are styled languages. A similar situation applies to Hindi and Urdu, to Czech and Slovak, and to other pairs and triplets.

(from Endnotes) Max Weinreich reported (but did not coin) the phrase, “a language is a dialect that has an army and navy” in “Der YIVO un di problemen fun undzer tsayt,” YIVO-Bleter 25 (1945): 3-18."
(p. 9)

Adams, Karen L. 'Ebonics - Language or Dialect? The Debate Continues.' in Neal A. Lester (ed). Understanding Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Greenwood Press, 1999: 33-35.

"Let's start with the difference between a language and a dialect. Linguists are always fond of saying that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." We have come to understand that what gets called a “language" or what gets called a “dialect” has nothing much to do with the actual ways that people talk, but with the status of the speakers who are doing the talking. As a matter of fact, to a linguist, a language is a kind of abstraction. Take English, for example. You know that people speak English in a multitude of ways - e.g., British English, Canadian English, Singapore English or American English. And for speakers of American English, there are varieties associated with different regions of the country, with different social groups in these regions, e.g., Valley girl talk, with speakers from different language backgrounds. e.g.. Finglish in the North, and so on. No one of these is the English language; it is all of these together, all of its dialects or varieties."
(p. 33)

Romaine, Suzanne. Language in Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Oxford University Press, 2000.

"The dividing line between the languages we call Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish is linguistically arbitrary but politically and culturally relevant. Max Weinreich's often quoted dictum, ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’, attests the importance of political power and the sovereignty of a nation-state in the recognition of a variety as a language rather than a dialect. Situations in which there is widespread agreement as to what constitutes a language arise through the interaction of social, political, psychological, and historical factors, and are not due to any inherent properties of the varieties concerned."
(p. 13)

Becker, Robin. Tiger Heron. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.

"Yiddish ran from a posse of hazards when
my Bubbe left her shtetl, Russians at her back
and a mongrel, Middle High German in her mouth.
A language is a dialect with an army and a navy
the saying goes. To which my peasant relatives reply,
Spare us what we can learn to endure."
(p. 42)

Strubell, Miquel. 'When Sticking Your Tongue Out Is Even Ruder!' in Gerhard Stickel (ed). Duisburger Arbeiten zur Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft, Volume 81 : National, Regional and Minority Languages in Europe: Contributions to the Annual Conference 2009 of EFNIL in Dublin. Peter Lang AG, 2010: 23-34.

"As you all know, the Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich gave us an insightful definition of a language: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”.² A 15th century Latin specialist in Castile, Antonio de Nebrija, came to a similar conclusion, just as Christopher Columbus was sailing to the west across the Atlantic, a feat that was to pave the way to Castile's building its own empire. In the prologue to the first Gramática Castellana to be published Nebrija wrote: “siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio” (language has always accompanied empires)

² "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un a flot.""
(p. 23)

Fuhrmann, Konrad. 'Opening Speech' in Gerhard Stickel (ed). Duisburger Arbeiten zur Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft, Volume 81 : National, Regional and Minority Languages in Europe: Contributions to the Annual Conference 2009 of EFNIL in Dublin. Peter Lang AG, 2010: 17-18.

"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Or to say this in the minority language the quotation was initially formulated, in Yiddish: “A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot”. This expression brilliantly demonstrates the close link between official language and repression: to begin with, all our languages were regional or minority languages, until a nation state chose one of them to become the official language across its territory or at least part of it. Since the rise of the modern nation state, this evolution has usually been accompanied by violence against all other languages spoken in the country. In this way, the relationship between official national languages and all the other regional or minority languages remains tense, even though this attitude is now in the process of changing in most countries. Nevertheless, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages clearly highlights that “the protection and encouragement of regional or minority languages should not be to the detriment of the official languages and the need to learn them”. I am therefore extremely curious to find out what the experts will say about this persisting uneasy relationship between official and regional and minority languages in Europe."
(p. 17)

Görlach, Manfred. Varieties of English Aroung the World, Volume G28: Still More Englishes. John Benjamins Publishing, 2002.

"Further criteria have been offered which can be seen as complementary to these. Disregarding silly witticisms such as a "language is a dialect with an army and a navy", and not much more illuminating statements like "a language is a dialect with a dictionary, a grammar and a New Testament", 21 we may wish to add to the four a's Stewart's (1968) typology for successful language planning which is based on "standardisation, autonomy, historicity and vitality". Stewart's paper was written with reference to "the new and developing nations", and if we accept for the moment that this qualification applies to Northern Ireland, we can see that his standardization, "the codification and acceptance of a formal set of norms defining 'correct' usage", largely coincides with Kloss's ausbau. Autonomy, "the function of the linguistic system as a unique and independent one" is less close, but close enough, to abstand. However, historicity, the fact that "the linguistic system is known or believed to be the result of normal develop­ment over time" is difficult to apply to our case; we might wish to say that it was the borrowed historicity of mainland literary Scots that kept Ulster Scots alive as a positively charged norm - in whatever restricted understanding of the term. (On another level, trade, visits to relatives in Scotland, and frequent traffic across the water certainly helped to stabilize the use of everyday spoken Scots in Ulster). Finally, vitality, the use of the linguistic system by a non-isolated community of native speakers is always impossible to measure objectively in the case of coexisting related languages in which the minority form is drifting towards the structures of the higher, more prestigious variety. As a consequence, not many texts (spoken or written) can be unambiguously attributed to the one language system rather than the other, nor can the number of speakers of the minority language/dialect be counted. Frequently for the native speakers the distinction between the two becomes blurred or gets entirely lost. Stewart's grid (1968:537) offers seven types of varieties based on his parameters (viz. 'standard', 'classical', 'artificial', 'vernacular', 'dialect', 'creole' and 'pidgin') but none of these provides a perfect match for Ulster Scots, so Ullans might come out as a type by itself."
(p. 71)

Gzella, Holger. Languages from the World of the Bible. Walter de Gruyter, 2011.

"For approaches other than a straightforward historical-genealogical model, by contrast, the distinction between inherited linguistic traits and innovative, at times even contact-induced, phenomena is less crucial. One can also attempt to focus on the gradual transitions within a continuum of adjacent, mutually intelligible dialects across the speech area by plotting distinctive linguistic hallmarks of coexisting idioms on a map. As certain features cross dialect boundaries, the subclassification of Northwest Semitic has to incorporate some flexibility. This method, “dialect geography,” was developed for studying modern regional varieties, but it has also been successfully applied to Iron Age Northwest Semitic. 16 The distinction between languages and dialects is usually based on sociopolitical criteria and is thus, to a certain extent, arbitrary from a linguistic point of view. Using a variant of the well-known dictum “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy,” ascribed to various linguists, one could say with regard to Syria-Palestine: “A language is a dialect with a palace and a temple." Nonetheless, a sociolinguistic dimension must also come into play..."
(p. 7)

Gilyard, Keith. African American Life Series: Let's Flip the Script: An African American Discourse on Language, Literature, and Learning. Wayne State University Press, 1996.

"A deficit model of language differences is also authoritarian. Deviations from standard or target usage are treated as deficiencies. Black English is "Broken English" and has to be repaired. Jamaican Creole is "Broken English" and has to operated upon. There is a line on the back of the City University of New York Writing Assessment Test booklet on which students are to indicate their native language. Many students from the Caribbean indeed write "Broken English" on this line. The first few times I saw this, I thought the students were being facetious. But I soon changed my mind. The rate at which they were failing the exam was no joke. Students, not dialects, have been broken, and negative responses to language differences have been much of their problem. An equality model of language variation, the only one supported by modern sociolinguistic scholarship, does not support repair-model instruction. Understanding, as George Bernard Shaw did, that "a language is a dialect with an army behind it," democratic educators focus upon repertoire expansion. They accept the legitimacy of various types of English and study them so as contribute to an enlightened discussion of learning and teaching with respect to the various speaking populations to be served."
(p. 83)

Leitner, Gerhard. Contributions to the Sociology of Language [CSL]: Australian English: The National Language. Walter de Gruyter, 2013.

"The second inference is that the 'wide' definition permits one to talk about languages as involved in political action. Writing about language politics in Australia, Ozolins argues that:

"Manning Nash poses this issue most sharply, in describing language as both a cultural and a political phenomenon, and it is the interaction between them that must be explained:

"Language seems straightforwardly a piece of culture. But on reflection it is clear that language is often a political fact, at least as much as it is a cultural one. It has been said that 'language is a dialect with an army and a navy'. And what official or recognized languages are in any given instance is often the result of politics and power interplays.... (1993: 27f)"

The metaphor that language is a dialect with an army shows that one cannot reduce the study of a language situation, such as Australia's, to language abilities, whether innate or socially acquired, and to attendant sets of expressions. Most of the changes that have occurred rest on a link between language and culture and language politics and planning - a major theme in this study - cannot be done without the wide notion."
(p. 19)

Lüpke, Friederike, Anne Storch. Repertoires and Choices in African Languages. De Gruyter Mouton, 2013.

"A view of language as variety actually makes a proper linguistic definition of “language” and “dialect” extremely difficult. Another view makes it extremely easy, as exemplified by Weinreich’s famous quote: A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot [a language is a dialect with an army and a navy] (Weinreich 1945: 13). Weinreich’s comment on the problem makes it quite clear why “African dialects” often are not conceptualized as “languages”: they don’t serve as national languages⁵ and they don’t get any specific political attention.⁶ Why is this so? The answer has something to do with language as a symbol and instrument of power, but in a fairly different way than in the context of linguistic manipulation explored further above.

⁶. This has changed in some ways. A recent redraft of Weinreich’s quote says “A language is a dialect with a missionary”; the field-based work of SIL (and others) has been viewed by many speakers as an affirmation of the existence of individual languages. In analogy to Blommaert’s (2008) remark that grammars and dictionaries serve as “birth certificates” of languages, one might also coin the following variation: “A language is a dialect with a grammar and a dictionary.”"
(p. 143)

Fishman, Joshua. 'A Week in the Life of a Man from the Moon,' in Ofelia Garcia, Rakhmie Peltz, Joshua A. Fishman. Language Loyalty, Continuity and Change: Joshua A. Fishman's Contributions to International Sociolinguistics. Multilingual Matters, 2006.

"When I was a graduate student, my major mentor was Max Weinreich, the 20th century's most outstanding Yiddish linguist I became a co-translator of his crowning work, The History of the Yiddish Language (1980), as an expression of the deep admiration that I felt for him. Weinreich's major admonition to me was that, if research on Yiddish-related topics was to have any resonance in the outside academic world, it would have to be intellectualized so as to address general academic interests, needs and theories. If Margaret Mead can do so when she writes about coming of age in Samoa, he was fond of saying, then why can't we do so when writing about the modernization of Shnipishok (the proverbial shtetl)? The world attributes to Weinreich the aphorism that 'A language is a dialect with an army and a navy' (1945) (an attribution that I once amended slightly), in his reply to the then-common view that Yiddish was only a mangled dialect of German. This aphorism, now widely quoted throughout the world in connection with weaker languages that live in the shadow of much stronger and structurally very similar big brothers, is itself an example of intellectualization in the Weinreichian sense."
(p. 117)

Piller, Ingrid. Intercultural Communication. Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

"Max Weinreich (1894-1969), a famous scholar of Yiddish, is widely quoted as quipping that ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.’ Or, to put it differently, ‘a dialect is a language that gets no respect’, as Lippi-Green (1997: 43) adds. The constructed nature of ‘a language with a name’ is old hat in sociolinguistics. ‘No one who has studied the history of any national or standard language (unless for partisan purposes) has come up with a different conclusion’, as Joseph (2004: 120) remarks. However, intercultural communication scholarship has to date by and large chosen to ignore this central sociolinguistic insight. It has done so at the cost of intellectual integrity. If intercultural communication scholarship is to be more than the reproduction of nation-language stereotypes, it will need to stop treating a specific language as a given."
(p. 52)

Juaristi, Patxi, Timothy Reagan and Humphrey Tonkin. 'Linguistic Diversity in the European Union: An Overview' in Xabier Arzoz (ed). Respecting Linguistic Diversity in the European Union. John Benjamins Publishing, 2008: 47-72.

"Should Luxembourgian, Alsatian, Mocheno, Francique, Walser, or Zimbrian be considered dialects of German, or are they different languages? The answer, of course, is ultimately extra-linguistic in nature; as the American linguist Max Weinreich is credited with observing early in the 20th century, “A language is a dialect with an army and navy.”"
(p. 48)

Moro, Andrea. Boundaries of Babel: The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages. MIT Press, 2008.

"Imagine an ark of speakers instead of animals - an ark of Babel where the dream of a collection of all possible languages could be realized. Most catalogues listing the world’s spoken languages (see, for example, Comrie 1981) claim that there are six to seven thousand in the world today - and that’s not counting the dialects within individual languages.⁶⁹ Noah the linguist would need an entire fleet to carry (a pair of) people for each language or dialect.

⁶⁹. Max Weinreich's saying is now a classic: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.""
(p. 99)

Doniger, Wendy. Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth. Columbia University Press, 2010.

"It has been said that a language is a dialect with an army;⁷³ I would say that a dogma is a myth with an army.

⁷³ And was often cited during the Ebonics fracas in 1997."
(p. 113)

Gordon, Matthew J. Labov: A Guide for the Perplexed. Bloomsbury Academic, 2012.

"Uriel Weinreich was the son of Max Weinreich, a scholar of Yiddish. The elder Weinreich popularized the quip “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” as a comment on the fact that whether we label a speech code a “language” or a “dialect” is a matter of politics, not linguistics."
(p. 20)

Wyatt, Nicolas. 'The Religious Role of the King in Ugarit' in K. Lawson Younger Jr. (ed). Ugarit at Seventy-Five: Proceedings of the Symposium Ugarit at Seventy-Five Held at Trinity International University, Deerfield, Illinois, February 18:20, 2005. Eisenbrauns, 2007: 41-74.

"We can readily see the force of this sort of grandiloquence in the policies of great kings— of Hatti, Assyria, or Egypt. But both Ugaritic and Israelite evidence show that the great were aped by the humble, every petty local king presenting himself to his people in the same guise. It really had become a cliché for legitimacy. It perhaps lends a serious note to the joke that a language is a dialect with an army. A language apparently needs a military tradition to justify itself. A king needs enemies to prove his indispensability."
(p. 45)

Hilton, Barry, E. M. Rickerson. Five Minute Linguist: Bite-Sized Essays on Language and Languages. 2nd ed. Equinox, 2012.

"Similarly, dialects can be politically determined. The linguist Max Weinreich is often quoted as saying, ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.’ His point was that politics often decide what will be called a ‘dialect’ and what will be called a ‘language’. Powerful or historically significant groups have ‘languages’; their smaller or weaker counterparts have ‘dialects’."
(p. 17)

Landers, Clifford E. Literary Translation: A Practical Guide. Multilingual Matters, 2001.

"First, a definition. In popular usage, ‘dialect’ often denotes a supposedly substandard or ‘inferior’ speech pattern varying in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, or syntax from the societally accepted norm. But standard English – or standard Latvian, for that matter – is merely the dialect spoken by a privileged segment of society that includes its political leaders, its opinion-makers, and its literati. Max Weinreich’s famous definition of a language comes to mind: ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.’ That we seldom think of ‘BBC English’ as a dialect is reflected in the lack of difficulty in choosing a suitable register for translating it into another language. ‘Good’ and ‘correct’ language is always easier to translate than is the speech of the uneducated or speech that displays strong characteristic regional markers."
(p. 116)

Linde-Laursen, Anders. Bordering: Identity Processes between the National and Personal. Ashgate, 2012.

"Thus, in Gellner’s understanding, the minimum size of a nation-state is decided by the minimum size of a rational educational system, which is carried by at least one university that teaches in the language of the nation. An earlier suggestion that “a language is a dialect with an army,” often attributed to Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich, can be rightly rephrased as “a national language is a dialect with a university,” even if an army might be necessary to defend that learning institution."
(p. 83)

Jackendoff, Ray. User's Guide to Thought and Meaning. Oxford University Press, 2011.

"The distinction between dialects and languages is slippery, because it’s so often overlaid with political connotations. The linguist Max Weinreich is famous for saying: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” Many of the varieties of the “language” called Arabic are mutually incomprehensible. So are many of the varieties of Chinese, even though they use the same mutually intelligible writing system. So it might make sense to talk about the Arabic and Chinese “families” of languages."
(p. 9)

Spencer, Edmund T. Languages and Linguistics: Sociolinguistics. Nova, 2010.

"There are frequent allusions in sociolinguistic literature to a "standard language", a hypothetical form of the language that some would consider to be pure, correct, and official. In fact, some countries have official bodies that make judgments on the acceptability of linguistic forms, for example, Spain and France. Nevertheless, the hypothetical notion of a "standard language" is illusory, though written language allows an individual to hone individual linguistic skills in terms of orthography and grammatical correctness (syntax, agreement, lexical choice, and so forth). The existence of grammars, dictionaries, and books about language usage testify to the widespread belief that there is a prevailing concept of a "standard language". The somewhat cynical aphorism "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" has been widely attributed to Max Weinrich (1894-1969) who published it, though he did not coin it. What is of interest with respect to the concept of "standard language" is the notion of variation from this putative norm. In this sense, it is possible to speak of dialects and the dialectology, or the study of dialects. A dialect is distinct from a language in that it must be related to an official, or "standard language". While it may have different forms (pronunciation, morphology, syntax, lexicon), it must be mutually intelligible to other speakers of the language from other geographical regions or other socio-economic strata, even though people will be aware of these differences."
(p. 125)

Robinson, Douglas. Schleiermacher’s Icoses: Social Ecologies of the Different Methods of Translating. Zeta Books, 2013.

"It is sometimes said that a language is a dialect with an army— but there were lots of armies in Europe at the time that might have been said to speak some variety of German. Bavaria and Prussia were then separate kingdoms speaking mutually incomprehensible languages. But in an ideal world, which is to say a nationalist world, there is only One German Language, and everyone who speaks it should belong affectively, and one day will belong politically, to the One German Country. Or rather, in that ideal vision, they already do belong affectively and politically to that One Country— they just have to be made aware of that belonging."
(p. 277)

Heinrich, Patrick. The Making of Monolingual Japan: Language Ideology and Japanese Modernity. Channel View Publications, 2012.

"Max Weinreich’s (1945: 13) assertion that ‘a language is a dialect with an army and navy’ is as over-used as it is accurate. In his negotiations with the Ryukyuan, Japanese and Chinese authorities, Ryukyu Disposition Superintendent (Ryukyu shobun-kan) Matsuda Michiyuki highlighted historical, cultural and linguistic similarities between Japan and the Ryukyu Islands, which, he concluded, were evidence of the fact that the language used in the Ryukyuan Islands were simply varieties of Japanese (see Oguma, 1998: 28–29)."
(p. 85)

Davies, Alan. The Native Speaker: Myth and Reality. Multilingual Matters, 2002.

"What we find in distinguishing dialect from language is exactly what we find in distinguishing one language from another language. The distinction is partly a linguistic one and partly a sociolinguistic, political one. In linguistic terms a dialect is intelligible with another dialect while a language is not intelligible with another language; or to put this another way languages do not share a recent history of similar origins while dialects do. They share some kind of common origin as well as a current identity of system, morphological and syntactic, such that a speaker of one dialect will find another at least partly intelligible. The need for a sociolinguistic distinction arises from the fact that the linguistic one does not hold up on its own – it is exactly the same dilemma as we found earlier in distinguishing on linguistic grounds alone between languages, indeed it is precisely the same problem because there are languages which are mutually intelligible (for example Hindi–Urdu, Norwegian–Danish) and which could therefore be called dialects of one another but are in practice called languages for political and national reasons. On sociolinguistic grounds therefore dialects are dialects of the same language because their speakers claim them to be so, and they are distinguished from languages in terms of power. ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy’ (Briand in Haugen, 1966) it has been said; and again ‘a dialect is a language that did not succeed’."
(p. 58)

Myhill, John. Language in Jewish Society: Towards a New Understanding. Multilingual Matters, 2004.

"The question of ‘What is a [distinctive] language’, then, cannot be given any universal answer: in each case, a variety of factors dictate the boundaries of a ‘language’, and linguistic criteria are only part of these. In practice, political considerations are usually central – something is considered to be a different ‘language’ in the context of an ideology associated with political independence or at least autonomy (e.g. Norwegian/Danish, Ukrainian/ Russian, etc.): in the oft-quoted saying of Max Weinreich, ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy’. Political considerations in such cases focus general public attention upon the question of whether something is or is not a distinctive language and make a definitive answer more likely."
(p. 30)

Sorensen, Roy A. Pseudo-Problems: How Analytic Philosophy Gets Done. Routledge, 1993.

"Speech act ambiguity causes insincere disputes because speakers often acquiesce to their challenger’s mischaracterization of their utterance. This compliance may be conscious when the speaker is pugnacious or when he disdains a wimpy plea of being misunderstood. But acceptance of the distortion can also be unwitting. Habits of conversational cooperation make you go along with the speaker’s interpretation of your speech act. (Fighting takes a lot of cooperation.) For example, a speaker who quotes the deflationary definition ‘A language is a dialect with an army’ is readily goaded into defending it as if were a serious assertion. The real function of epigrams (‘Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility’, ‘Rap is musical graffiti’, ‘An agnostic is a chicken atheist’) is to direct attention to a few interesting features of the ‘definiendum’, not to assert literal generalizations."
(p. 179)

Segal, Miryam. A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics, Politics, Accent. Indiana University Press, 2010.

"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy - Max Weinreich"
(p. 20)

Green, Eugene, Charles F. Meyer. The Variability of Current World Englishes. Topics in English Linguistics, Volume 87.1. De Gruyter, 2014.

"After all, as Max Weinreich pointed out long ago (1945: 13) in a language whose speakers took it to the far corners of the world as emigrants in the 19th century and who suffered vicious persecution in the same language’s historic home-base in the 20th: [image missing] This Yiddish aphorism transliterates as “a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un a flot,” which instantly makes it accessible to any reader with a knowledge of Yiddish or German, and is most widely known in its English translation “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” The fact that intellectual insights are much more visible if they are presented in the English language and in the Roman alphabetic script is in itself a commentary on language and power in the contemporary world."
(p. 66)

Wright, Sue Ellen, Gerhard Budin. Handbook of Terminology Management, Volume 1: Basic Aspects of Terminology Management. John Benjamins Publishing, 1997.

"The grizzled witticism that a language is a dialect with an army (and most probably a navy as well) has its roots in historical reality. Parallel to the Babel legend, we know that the first documentable translators (and translators are inevitably terminologists to some extent) were cuneiform scribes who recorded taxes owed by the subject peoples of the Babylonian empire. Imperialism has traditionally militated against linguistic variation, resulting in the ascendancy of so-called world languages such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, English, French, Spanish, and Russian. From their beginnings as languages of national unity, all of them were used at one time or another at least in areas of government and economics to impose varying degrees of monolingualism within their expanding spheres of influence."
(p. 247)

Bonfiglio, Thomas Paul. Race and the Rise of Standard American. Walter de Gruyter, 2010.

"My curiosity on this subject was stimulated by the observation that the process of standardization in the United States occurred in a fashion quite dissimilar from standardization in other countries, especially as regards phenomena of economic, social, and cultural power. Economic power is an important determinant of the status of a kind of speech and generally marks the difference between a language and a dialect. There are some jokes in linguistics that demonstrate this; one is that a dialect becomes a language when the dialect speakers get rich; another is that a language is a dialect with an army. In general, the standard language of a nation will derive from the speech area that is also the center of economic and cultural power in that nation."
(p. 2)

Levine, Glenn. Code Choice in the Language Classroom. Channel View Publications, 2011.

"What is a code, and how is the notion of code related to that of language? In my language courses over the years I have often cited Max Weinreich’s (1945) maxim, ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’, to help students think about language as the object of learning and see, in relative terms, relationships between the prescribed norms presented in the language textbooks and the vernacular forms they encounter everywhere but the textbooks."
(p. 48)

Epstein, B. J. Translating Expressive Language in Children's Literature: Problems and Solutions. Peter Lang AG, 2012.

"The common saying has it that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, and there is some truth to the view that power plays a role in defining language (and plays a role in how dialects are translated as well); this again relates back to postcolonialism and how those in power try to define or control those over whom they have the power. Each language has multiple dialects and in fact what has been accepted as the standard form of a language is simply another dialect."
(p. 197)

Mangelsdorf, Kate. 'Spanglish as Alternative Discourse: Working against Language Demarcation' in Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda (eds). Cross-Language Relations in Composition. Southern Illinois University Press, 2010: 113-126.

"There is disagreement among linguists about the status of Spanglish— is it a dialect, a variety, or an emerging language? The distinction between a language and a dialect is political; the aphorism “a language is a dialect with an army and navy” alludes to the connection between language demarcation and nation building. In particular, the assumption that languages were fixed entities connected to particular ethnic and cultural groups was a key tenet of colonialism (Pennycook 3). Accordingly, rather than use the terms “languages” and “dialects,” Robert Phillipson uses “dominant” languages and “dominated” languages (39). Nonetheless, the language/dialect debate has been examined in linguistic terms."
(p. 115)

Colvin, Stephen. A Brief History of Ancient Greek. John Wiley and Sons, 2013.

"Modern linguistics does not recognize any linguistic difference between a “language” and a “dialect”: the difference between them is political or ideological, not linguistic. Mutual intelligibility, for example, does not work as a criterion. Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are mutually intelligible, but have the status of separate ­ languages; while many “languages” have dialects which are not mutually intelligible (Arabic, Chinese, and Italian, for example). National borders are not always or even often linguistic borders: around the Dutch border German and Dutch dialects are extremely similar to each other, and around the Franco-Italian border the same is true of the local dialects of French and Italian. The modern notion of a language is to a certain extent a construct, very much associated with the modern notion of the nation state. In practice, although one talks of the French language, there are in France numerous dialects, both social and regional: the modern standard that foreign­ ers learn is based on the language of the cultural and political elite in the Île-de-France (Parisian region), and much influenced by the literary language. The best definition of a language is perhaps one attributed to the Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich (1894– 1969): a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."
(p. 93)

Queen, Robin. Vox Popular: The Surprising Life of Language in the Media. Wiley Blackwell, 2014.

"A curious fact about these bundles is that there are no straightforward criteria for determining whether or not some particular bundle is a language or a dialect . That’s because the relative differences and similarities in the grammar present only part of the picture. The other part involves criteria outside the elements in the bundle, including especially what people believe about the package of features. There is a famous saying in linguistics (generally attributed to Max Weinreich) that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. This saying highlights the complex calculus involved in deciding which codes constitute languages and which dialects, and captures the relationship of labels like “language” and “dialect” to intricate social, political, and economic dynamics among people. The saying also points out that knowing what a language is goes beyond aspects of the sounds, words, and sentences. Knowing what a ­ language is includes knowing something about the social context in which those sounds, words, and sentences are used and evaluated."
(p. 28)

Ku, Robert Ji-Song. Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA. University of Hawai'i Press, 2014.

"The field of cultural linguistics proves instructive here by way of analogy. So-called authentic cuisines are to standard languages (e.g., Standard American English or middle-class Parisian French) as apocryphal foods are to pidgins and creoles (e.g., Hawaiian Creole English or Haitian French). As any self-respecting linguist will concede, however reluctantly, the belief that a standard language is inherently more proper, superior, or pure is spurious at best. As argued by Peter Trudgill, James Milroy, and many others, standard languages, by definition, are simply dialects within the category of languages to which they belong—no more and certainly no less.² The high status enjoyed by standard languages is not a function of inherent linguistic endowments but of cultural and political prestige and power. (Hence the quip generally attributed to Max Weinreich: “A language is a dialect with an army and navy.”) Standard British English, for example, is the dialect of the privileged class in the United Kingdom; it is a variety of English native to perhaps less than 12–15 percent of its inhabitants.³ Those who insist that Standard English is the correct, proper, pure, or authentic English betray their ideological dogma— one that favors a uniform, standard nation, a place where cultural differences, heterogeneity, and hybridity are viewed as undesirable. By stigmatizing alternative forms of English—a notable example is African American English Vernacular—language purists, aka prescriptivists, attempt to discipline the nation by punishing the tongues of its heteroglossic citizenry."
(p. 4)

Wong, David. 'Response to Geisz and Sadler,' in Yang Xiao, Yong Huang (eds). Moral Relativism and Chinese Philosophy: David Wong and His Critics. State University of New York Press, 2014: 193-213.

"Many linguists now acknowledge that the line between what constitutes two dialects of the same language on the one hand and two different languages on the other hand is not at all precise and is affected by various pragmatic and historically contingent factors. The Yiddish linguist, Max Weinreich, is often credited with the saying that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. The import of this saying, as I interpret it, is that the crucial determining factors for a language’s being a distinct language rather than a dialect among others include not only the semantic and grammatical characteristics of the language but also the interests of its users and of others in seeing them as a distinct group with boundaries in part marked by a common and distinct language."
(p. 196)

Kuzar, Ron. Hebrew and Zionism: A Discourse Analytic Cultural Study. Walter de Gruyter, 2012.

"A language does not have to be totally uniform in order to be still considered one language. In order to make the concept "language" more fluid, it can be expanded through the idea of "dialects". But linguistic theory does not provide us with a clear definition of these terms. All attempts to base a clear classification of languages and dialects on objective criteria, such as mutual understanding or concentration of isoglosses, have failed. Linguists often use these terms as convenient pre-scientific designations, and the usage may differ according to the context. The same linguist may call Italian a language in one context, but a dialect of the Romance family in another. No linguist can clearly say when French stopped being a dialect of Vulgar Latin and started being the French language. We all call Dutch a language, not a dialect of German, but we may call the speech-form spoken in the German areas bordering Holland a German dialect, even though it is much closer to Dutch than to standard German, just because it is in Germany. The saying: "a language is a dialect with a navy and an army" is part of linguistic folklore and has been attributed to almost all the founders of the discipline. To summarize, the issue of language and dialect is primarily politico-cultural, not linguistic in the narrow sense."
(p. 234)

Schuller, Bjorn. Computational Paralinguistics: Emotion, Affect and Personality in Speech and Language Processing. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

"4.3 The Non-Distinctive Use of Linguistics Elements

A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot. – A language is a dialect with an army and navy. (Max Weinreich, who attributed this statement to a participant in one of his seminars)

In traditional linguistics, the system of a language is conceived of as being rather monolithic, based on paradigmatic and syntagmatic distinctive traits and elements. There are many more degrees of freedom in the use of a language. Each variety thereof could be seen as a language system in itself, although there have been many attempts to define the relationship of language with dialect or regional accents or varieties. Varieties can be regional (horizontal) or social (vertical), or both; additionally, and within these horizontal and vertical varieties, there are individual varieties characterising a single speaker. For each of these varieties, there exist linguistically distinctive and non-distinctive traits. Again, it is a matter of which language system or variety we take as ground, that is, as typical, when we model atypical variations within this system (in phonological terminology, allophones or free variants) as figure standing out from the ground.¹ In this section, we deal with units of mostly but not exclusively written (‘natural’) language that can indicate more or less specific paralinguistic functions, again on an exemplary basis, that is, at the word level, and thus with the lexicon, with word classes, and at the phrase level. We will concentrate on object language, that is, on the use of linguistic elements by individuals or groups, and not on metalanguage, which is employed for describing paralinguistic phenomena and dealt with in Section 5.3."
(p. 91)

Salminen, Tapani. 'Endangered Languages in Europe' in Matthias Brenzinger (ed). Language Diversity Endangered. Walter de Gruyter, 2007: 205-232.

"Another source of confusion is the normative usage of speech dictated by elite groups of nation-states. Most readers have probably heard that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. It seems that many people have not understood the critical and ironic nature of this slogan, but this becomes obvious from the fact that it was first stated in a language without an army or a navy, namely Yiddish."
(p. 212)

Dennett, Daniel C. 'Can Unselfishness Be Taught?' in Oscar Vilarroya, Francesc Forn i Argimon (eds). Social Brain Matters. Rodopi, 2007: 31-36.

"Sometimes, as Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich instructs, a language is a dialect with an army. But more often the boundary between one language and another is crossed by nothing more or less than a series of cumulative variations. No ingenious designer exists: that’s the import of the Darwinian idea of evolution by natural selection. We find a nice illustration in folk music. We know of many authorless melodies which have evolved from ancient times, without any identifiable composer. If we could build a time machine to trace back the origin of one of those songs, we would discover many gradual changes until we could not recognize the song as we know it today. They have undergone so much modification, their authorship spread through so many eras and generations, that no single composer deserves the title of author of these songs. Ironically, to make these changes does not require the cleverest of musicians, but only mediocre ones, with poor memory or those unable to sing the song properly as originally composed. They transmitted the song not as it was passed to them but as they knew it or remembered it, possibly making unconscious errors in the replication process that come down to us as the version with which we are familiar."
(p. 34)

Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. 'Greek Language-Standardizing, Past, Present and Future' in Michael Silk, Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds). Standard Languages and Language Standards – Greek, Past and Present. Ashgate, 2013: xi-xxviii.

"The authors of the chapters in Part I broadly subscribe to the idea that standardization is a never-ending and gradual process and that crystallizing moments or cases for analysis serve the purpose of affording us glimpses of standardization at work. They would also, no doubt, agree with the familiar claim that a language is a dialect with an army: standardization is mostly the outcome of socio-political and cultural considerations, sometimes accidents as well, and in that process strictly defined linguistic criteria tend to have little impact."
(p. xiii)

Asgharzadeh, Alireza. Iran and the Challenge of Diversity: Islamic Fundamentalism, Aryanist Racism, and Democratic Struggles. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

"In pluralistic societies, language is more than a cultural symbol or a simple means of communication. It is an instrument of power, of unequal representation, uneven development, exclusion, and inclusion. As Nash has observed,

"Language seems straightforwardly a piece of culture. But on reflection it is clear that language is often a political fact, at least as much as it is a cultural one. It has been said that “language is a dialect with an army and navy.” And what official or recognised languages are in any given instance is often the result of politics and power interplays." (Nash, 1989, p. 6)"
(p. 130)

Warren-Rothlin, Andy. 'West African Scripts and Arabic-Script Orthographies in Socio-Political Context' in Meikal Mumin, Kees Versteegh (eds). Arabic Script in Africa: Studies in the Use of a Writing System. Brill, 2014: 261-289.

"In his Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington refers to language and religion as ‘the central elements of any culture or civilization’, and the primary factors in the formation of socio-cultural macro-blocs (Huntington 1996: 59– 66). However, history tells us that scripts, such as Roman, Arabic, Cyrillic and Chinese, are yet more powerful than languages. Scripts divide languages into cultures, make dialects into new distinct languages,⁸ and create new dialects (since the use of a particular script is usually closely related to the acceptance of a particular body of loanwords). And digraphia, the coexistence of two scripts for the same language, has been described as typically “an outer and visible sign of ethnic or religious hatred”⁹ (Collin 2005: 6, citing King 2001: 10).

⁸ If, as is often said, ‘A language is a dialect with an army and navy’, how much more is it ‘a dialect with a distinct script’!"
(p. 264)

Davies, Alan. 'The Social Component of Language Teacher Education' in Hugh Trappes-Lomax, Gibson Ferguson (eds). Language in Language Teacher Education. John Benjamins Publishing, 2002: 49-65.

"The distinction between, and relationship between, dialects and languages introduces further complexity. The distinction is partly a linguistic one and partly a sociolinguistic, or political, one. In linguistic terms a dialect shares intelligibility with another dialect while a language does not share intelligibility with another language; or to put this another way languages do not share an unbroken history of similar origins while dialects do. Dialects share some kind of common origin as well as a current identity of system, both morphological and syntactic, such that a speaker of one dialect will find another at least partly intelligible. The need for a sociolinguistic or political distinction arises from the fact that language users do not necessarily take account of the linguistic distinction. There are, after all, languages which are mutually intelligible on linguistic grounds (for example Hindi-Urdu, Norwegian-Danish) and which could therefore be called related dialects but are in practice called languages for political and national reasons. There are also varieties which do not have a common linguistic history but which for political reasons are regarded by a speech community as mutually intelligible: some may consider them to be dialects rather than languages. On sociolinguistic grounds dialects are dialects of the same language because their speakers claim them to be so, and they are distinguished from languages in terms of power. ‘A language is a dialect with an army’ (Briand in Haugen 1966) it has been said; and again ‘a dialect is a language that did not succeed’."
(p. 52)

Harman, Gilbert. Explaining Value: And Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Clarendon Press, 2000.

"The dialect of a particular person that is in certain respects unique to that person is that person's ‘idiolect’. Different people speak at least slightly different idiolects. The serious study of language therefore takes an idiolect to be the unit of language. The more popular, nonscientific notion of a language, like French or German or Chinese, is a political notion. ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.’"
(p. 220)

Grohmann, Kleanthes K., Evelina Leivada. 'Interface ingredients of dialect design: Bi-x, socio-syntax of development, and the grammar of Cypriot Greek' in Anna Maria Di Sciullo (ed). Towards a Biolinguistic Understanding of Grammar: Essays on interfaces. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2012: 239-262.

"CG has been argued to be “the last surviving Modern Greek dialect” (Contossopoulos 1969: 92, 2000: 21). Regardless of whether one subscribes to this view or not, when coupled with the fact that CG has the prerequisites to be considered a language (in the Weinreichian sense²) but has not yet acquired official status, its study and the connections with the “high” official variety become intriguing.

² An army and navy, following the frequently quoted “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy” (Weinreich 1945)."
(p. 242)

Kaye, Alan S. 'Arabic Phonology' in Alan S. Kaye (ed). Phonologies of Asia and Africa: Including the Caucasus, Volume One. Eisenbrauns, 1997: 187-204.

"There are, from a purely descriptive point of view, many recognizably distinct, major Arabic dialects. The peripheral Arabic dialects are, in fact, so radically different from those of the main Middle Eastern core (in which there is somewhat of a cultural solidarity) that they are better referred to as separate languages, by any satisfactory definition of what a language is (see Kaye 1994: 47). Certainly mutual unintelligibility is an overriding factor here. (I am familiar with the old adage that the major difference between a language and a dialect is that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.)"
(p. 190-191)

Szabó, Zoltán Gendler. 'Chomsky, Noam Avram' in John R. Shook (ed). Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers. Thoemmes Continuum, 2005: 480-486.

"The traditional notion of a language (like Bulgarian or Swahili) and the traditional notion of a dialect (like the Norfolk or the Yorkshire dialect of British English) are of no scientific use. Variations among competent speakers may be considered significant or insignificant for a variety of purposes and there is nothing systematic to be said about these classifications. Chomsky often mentions the bon mot that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy; occasionally he even expresses doubts about the very coherence of the notion of an E-language."
(p. 482)

Durston, Alan. Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550-1650. University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

"A “language” in the second of the two senses is a heterogeneous “bundle” of different elements: styles, vocabularies, and tropes; textual genres and media; performance conventions and contexts; as well as a discursive and ideological order (sets of topics, modes of argumentation, etc.). Languages in the first sense are certainly more characterizable entities— their basic structural workings can be defined with some precision at levels such as grammar and phonology. However, identifying them and discerning their boundaries is not as straightforward as may appear. Languages tend to exist in a continuum of variation where it is hard to say where one begins and the other ends. The study of linguistic variation is one of the least developed branches of linguistics— that of synchronic (geographical or social) as opposed to historical variation is known as “dialectology,” a term that is something of a misnomer as it presumes clear boundaries between languages. In practice, the ways in which people distinguish, classify, and hierarchize linguistic varieties has little to do with their structural characteristics, and everything to do with the groups that speak them, and how they in turn are perceived— a point expressed in the well-worn adage “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy” (cf. Irvine and Gal 2000)."
(p. 5)

Piller, Ingrid. Bilingual Couples Talk: The discursive construction of hybridity. John Benjamins Publishing, 2002.

"As a matter of fact, linguists are notoriously unable to define “a language” in linguistic terms. They typically fall back on Max Weinreich’s famous dictum “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”<sup>7

7</sup> Irvine and Gal (2000) point out that Max Weinreich may or may not be the actual source. They consider the saying simply as part of linguistics’ oral tradition."
(p. 132)

Lowrie, Michele. 'Making an Exemplum of Yourself: Cicero and Augustus' in S. J. Heyworth (ed). Classical Constructions: Papers in Memory of Don Fowler, Classicist and Epicurean. Oxford University Press, 2007: 91-112.

"With Augustus, the rhetorical strategies of the Res gestae are analysable, but it takes more work. Students laugh at Cicero’s posturing, but we need a Tacitus or a Syme to see through Augustus. The relation of textuality to reality differs. Why? Is this merely a rhetorical problem, or is his supreme power blinding? The sovereign rhetoric of the Res gestae remains, even when we know he omits and distorts. Is Augustus an exemplum with an army, as linguists say ‘a language is a dialect with an army’? Would he have been able to maintain this dignity if his autobiography had survived?²⁸ Can we extricate rhetoric from power?"
(p. 103)

Poel, Kris van de, W. A. M. Carstens, John Linnegar. Text Editing: A Handbook for Students and Practitioners. UPA, 2012.

"A standard language is a dialect with an army.
- Popular saying among linguists"
(p. 60)

Harder, Peter. Meaning in Mind and Society: A Functional Contribution to the Social Turn in Cognitive Linguistics. Walter de Gruyter, 2010.

"Beyond fluctuation we find the ‘lectal’ kind of variation that goes with social differentiation within the speech community. In a structural view of language, this kind of variation is typically handled simply by transposing the idea of a ‘whole system’ to lower ‘lectal’ levels – dialects, sociolects and idiolects. A ‘lect’ thus inherits the same kind of structural integrity that is traditionally ascribed to a language, as reflected, for instance, in the critical maxim that ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’."
(p. 273)

Marinov, Tchavdar. 'In Defense of the Native Tongue: The Standardization of the Macedonian Language and the Bulgarian-Macedonian Linguistic Controversies' in Roumen Daskalov and Tchavdar Marinov (eds). Entangled Histories of the Balkans: Volume One: National Ideologies and Language Policies. Brill, 2013: 419-488.

"Apart from disclosing the double standards of the Balkan linguists, this study sought to substantiate the following, more general conclusion. It is clear that national languages cannot be regarded as isolated and immutable realities. But one must also take into account to what extent they have historically constructed each other both in dialogue and in antagonism. They are much more the results of national ideologies than the source of them, and these ideologies are themselves always intertwined. Finally, every national language is a “dialect with an army” precisely because it has both allies and adversaries."
(p. 487)

Menn, Lise. Psycholinguistics: Introduction and Applications. Plural Publishing, 2010.

"Now we have to take a step back and talk about two different ideas: languages being similar and languages being related . Languages change over time; grandparents have been complaining about the way their grandchildren talk, undoubtedly, since language began. A language that’s spoken by people who lose contact with each other— settlers in two different mountain valleys, for example, or colonists who settle new countries across oceans— will change in different ways in the separate places. Very quickly, then, within a generation or two, different ways of speaking develop in the new places, and these become recognizably different DIALECTS in another generation or two. If changes keep accumulating to the point where people from the different groups can barely understand each other, so that translators and language lessons are necessary, the two forms of the original language are now separate languages. (Unless politics intervenes: If they both have the same government, they will probably still be called dialects of the same language. Everybody who is interested in how language is affected by politics should know the famous saying by Max Weinreich [originally stated in Yiddish, a dialect of German]: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”)"
(p. 64)

Cutler, Anne. Native Listening: Language Experience and the Recognition of Spoken Words. MIT Press, 2012.

"Languages shape listeners’ perceptual processing but so do the varying forms of a language.<sup>1

1</sup> This has to be true if only because there is no hard and fast line that defines when two similar linguistic systems are dialects of the same language or separate languages. “A language is a dialect with an army” is the cynical summary of this ineluctable continuity (but this would make British English and Canadian English separate languages, and Canadian English and Quebec French dialects of the same language). Mutual intelligibility, either in speech or in writing, provides no diagnostic either; dialectal pronunciation variants can inhibit understanding (consider a Glaswegian visiting Alabama), and writing systems differ along quite independent dimensions (the distinct Chinese languages do share an orthography, whereas the Serbian and Croatian varieties of Serbo-Croatian do not). Varieties of the same language share most of their syntax, and most of their lexicon, and hence most of their repertoire of phonemic contrasts, but the thresholds cannot be quantified."
(p. 458)

Vollebaek, Knut. 'Ten Years after the Oslo Recommendations and Beyond: Linguistic Rights in the work of the HCNM: New and Old Challenges in Promoting Comprehensive Security - Opening Address to the Conference on Linguistic Rights of National Minorities, June 2008' in Kristin Henrard (ed). Double Standards Pertaining to Minority Protection. Brill Academic Publishers, 2009: 342-345.

"The prevention of inter-ethnic conflicts goes hand in hand with the establishment of an adequate system of protection for linguistic rights. This is easily said, but not easily done, as linguistic rights – perhaps even more so than other minority rights – are used by political entrepreneurs to incite extreme nationalism, among the majority as well as among minorities. As the famous Yiddish linguist Max Weinrich pointed out, “A shprakh iz a dialect mit an armey un flot.” (A language is a dialect with an army and a navy)."
(p. 343)

Mair, Christian. 'Why the World is Becoming More Monolingual and More Multilingual at the Same Time' in Claudia Lange, Beatrix Weber, and Goran Wolf (eds). Communicative Spaces: Variation, Contact, and Change: Papers in Honour of Ursula Schaefer. Peter Lang AG, 2012: 431-440.

"A second unresolved issue is that there is no principled criterion to distinguish a language and a dialect. As Max Weinreich famously put it long ago (in Yiddish): “A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un a flot” [a language is a dialect with an army and a navy] (1945: 13)."
(p. 432)

Ornstein, Jacob, Paul W. Goodman. 'Socio-Educational Correlates of Mexican-American Bilingualism' in William Mackey, Jacob Ornstein (eds). Sociolinguistic Studies in Language Contact: Methods and Cases. Walter de Gruyter, 2011: 393-421.

"In this connection, certain sectors of Mexican-American militant movements go so far as to clamor for the recognition of a "Chicano language" which would, of course, in linguistic terms equate with the Southwest Spanish dialect or variety (a quip among linguistic scholars is that a language is a dialect with an army! )."
(p. 409)

Baltin, Mark. 'Remarks on the relation between language typology and Universal Grammar: Commentary on Newmeyer' in Martina Penke, Anette Rosenbach (eds). What Counts As Evidence in Linguistics: The Case of Innateness. John Benjamins Publishing, 2007: 75-79.

"One might first ask what it means to say that two languages differ with respect to the value of a parameter. Most linguists do not believe that the distinction between a language and a dialect has any linguistic import (recall Max Weinreich’s famous dictum that “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” (Weinreich 1945: 13))."
(p. 78)

Land, Christopher D. 'Varieties of the Greek Language' in Stanley E. Porter, Andrew Pitts (eds). Language of the New Testament: Context, History, and Development. Brill, 2013: 243-260.

"By this point, it should be clear why I have repeatedly resorted to the somewhat awkward phrase language specimens. This circumlocution is necessary because English stubbornly reserves the phrase languages for a rather hodgepodge collection of prestigious language systems.<sup>14

14</sup> As the linguist Max Weinreich has famously quipped: “A language is a dialect with an army and navy.” For a more detailed (but less pithy) presentation of this claim, see Richard Hudson, Sociolinguistics (2nd ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 32–34."
(p. 248)

Chomsky, Noam. 'Language from an Internalist Perspective' in David Martel Johnson, Christina E. Erneling (eds). Future of the Cognitive Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1997: 118-135.

"We may also contrast I-language to the notion "common language" or "shared language" that is assumed in virtually all work on externalist semantics. The status of such notions is highly questionable. A standard remark in an undergraduate linguistics course is Max Weinreich's quip that a language is a dialect with an army and navy; and the next lecture explains that dialects are also nonlinguistic notions, which can be set up one way or another, depending on particular interests and concerns. There are various subcultures with their particular practices, demands, and authority structures; there are colors on maps and ways of associating oneself with others for one or another purpose. Under some conditions, one can select privileged systems to which some might choose to conform. This can be done in virtually any way one likes, depending on interests and circumstances, often raising questions of great human importance. But there are no real entities to be discovered, a conclusion supported by both descriptive and theoretical considerations."
(p. 125)

Campbell, Gordon, Thomas N. Corns. John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought. Oxford University Press, 2008.

"The evidence of work on intercepted letters is two letters written on 13 April 1649 by Princess Sophia (princess palatine of the Rhine) in The Hague to her brothers Prince Maurice (then serving in a royalist squadron off the coast of Ireland) and Prince Rupert; the latter letter was in French, and the former in what would now be described as a mixture of Dutch and German forms (Dutch was not yet universally regarded as a separate language). 174 The margins of the Dutch/German letter are annotated with corrections and additions in Milton’s hand. Roger Williams was later to recall that he taught ‘Dutch’ to Milton in return for instruction in other languages. The common meaning of ‘Dutch’ was German (Deutsch, or in modern Dutch, Duits), whereas Dutch was usually known as Low German or Low Dutch; as Williams had acquired some of the language in ‘New Amsterdam’, it was probably the Dutch ‘dialect’ of German that Milton learned. A language is a dialect with an army, so the dialect would soon be recognized as the Dutch language."
(p. 247)

Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct. Penguin, 1994.

"But though the language engine is invisible to the human user, the trim packages and color schemes are attended to obsessively. Trifling differences between the dialect of the mainstream and the dialect of other groups, like isn’t any versus ain’t no, those books versus them books, and dragged him away versus drug him away, are dignified as badges of “proper grammar.” But they have no more to do with grammatical sophistication than the fact that people in some regions of the United States refer to a certain insect as a dragonfly and people in other regions refer to it as a darning needle, or that English speakers call canines dogs whereas French speakers call them chiens. It is even a bit misleading to call Standard English a “language” and these variations “dialects,” as if there were some meaningful difference between them. The best definition comes from the linguist Max Weinreich: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy‘"
(p. 28)

Newman, Richard J., “Preface,” in: Ramin Khanbaghi, ed., Persian Classical and Modern Poetry: A Bibliography (New York: International Scholarly Publications, 2004), i.

"When I was in graduate school studying linguistics, one of my professors, Dr. Aaron Carton, asked the students in a class on language acquisition to define language in such a way that it could not also be applied to dialect. We struggled mightily to use everything we had learned about the formal properties of language – syntax, semantics, phonetics, phonology – to arrive at the distinction we believed Professor Carton was looking for, but every definition we proposed failed. Finally, with a cat-that-had-just-swallowed-the-mouse smile on his face, Professor Carton gave us the answer. ‘A language,’ he said ‘is a dialect with an army.’"
(p. i)

Leibert, Burt, Linguistics and the New English Teacher: an Introduction to Linguistics Approaches in Language Instruction (London: Macmillan, 1971), 51.

"Leo Rosten quoted Max Weinrech's playful remark that "A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy.""
(p. 51)

Trudgill, Peter, “Language and Dialect: Linguistic Varieties,” in: Keith Brown, ed., Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Amsterdam: Elesevier, 2006), 12:647.

"Max Weinreich's (unpublished) dictum that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" contains much truth, but it is a partial truth."
(p. 647)

Laird, Charlton, “German and Related Languages”, in: James Miller, Robert O’Neal, Helen McDonnell, eds., Teutonic Literature in English Translation (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and co., 1970), 13.

"... so that Professor Uriel Weinreich has remarked, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." In fact we should probably call Portuguese a dialect of Spanish except that Portugal was the center of a great empire; and we might now call Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic all..."
(p. 13)

Kozelka, Paul. Paul Kozelka, The Development of National Languages: A case study of language planning in Togo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984) 35;

"One of Uriel Weinreich's responses to the question of how to define a language is reported to have been: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." (Geoffrey Nunberg, personal communication.)"
(p. 35)

Beyer, Stephan, The Classical Tibetan Language (New York: SUNY Press, 1992), 21;

"²¹ The distinction between a dialect and a language is not often clear, and the distinction is frequently political rather than linguistic: Dutch, for instance, is a language, but Yiddish is often called a dialect of German, which prompted Uriel Weinreich to define a dialect as a language without an army or navy. "Bhutanese" may thus be a language rather than a dialect by virtue of the fact that the independent kingdom issues its own postage stamps."
(p. 21)

Ostler, Nicholas. Nicholas Ostler, “Language Engineering for Less-Studied Languages: Linguistic Aspects” in: Kemal Oflazer, Language Engineering for Lesser-studied Languages (Amsterdam: IOS, 2003), 16

"Uriel Weinreich once remarked drily that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. The new prospect is that a language will remain a mere dialect unless it acquires not only a computer-tractable dictionary, grammar and parser, but also multi-million word text corpus, and a speech database to boot."
(p. 16)

Keller, Jörg, Helen Leuninger, eds., Grammatische Strukturen, kognitive Prozesse: Ein Arbeitsbuch (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2004), 305;

"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."
(p. 305)

Ramanujan, A.K., “Introduction,” Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu by Nammalvar (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2005), 129;

"The late Uriel Weinreich is credited with the epigram: "a language is a dialect with an army.""
(p. 129)

Bickerton, Derek. Derek Bickerton, Bastard Tongues (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), 7

"So what's a language, anyway? According to the mid-century linguist Uriel Weinreich, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." That's true because some people try to use language as an instrument of power, to build artificial barriers, keep other people in line, stamp them all into the same mold, but language itself resists power: it's demotic, it's subversive, it slips through the cracks of dictatorships, it makes fools of the powerful."
(p. 7)

Bordelois, Ivonne. Ivonne Bordelois, El país que nos habla (Buenos Aires, Huberto, 2005), 32

"La lengua se define como un dialecto con suerte o bien, dicho mas crudamente, como lo expreso el linguista Uriel Weinreich en su tiempo, un lengua es un dialecto con un ejercito."
(p. 32)

Winkler, Elizabeth, Understanding Language: A Basic Course in Linguistics (New York: Continuum, 2007), 13

""To get their point across, there are a couple of sayings that linguists like to teach their classes:

1. The Golden Rule of Dialects: Those with gold get to make their dialect the standard.
2. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

These sayings tell us many things about the relationship between a standard language and who holds power."
(p. 13)

Sallabank, Julia, Attitudes to Endangered Languages: Identities and Policies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 4.

"As well as the well-known saying 'A language is a dialect with an army and a navy' variously attributed to Max Weinreich, Uriel Weinreich, Joshua Fishman or Antoine Meillet (Bright 1997), such attitudes are, in part, linked to whether a community considers itself to have a distinct ethnolinguistic identity - but members of a community may not agree about this."
(p. 4)

Mintz, Mike, Robert Ekendahl, Hardware Verification with C++ (New York: Springer, 2006), 8.

""A language is a dialect with an army" - Old proverb"
(p. 8)

Rosten, Leo, The Joys of Yiddish (London: Cox and Wyman, 1971 [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968]), xxi.

"Professor Max Weinreich has given us an exhilarating epigram: ‘A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy.’ Yiddish, unlike Hebrew, the official language of Israel, has neither army, navy, police, nor governmental mandate. It has only ardent practitioners and sentimental protectors."
(p. xxi)

Parvis, Paul, “Williams, Ward, and the Unity of Theological Language,” New Blackfriars, vol. 70, no. 829 (July / August 1989), 345.

"Now, in neither case should our hypothetical farmers feel linguistically inferior to those whose native variety is the standard language. Linguistically, no variety is intrinsically better or worse than any other. Standard German evolved from a particular local variety, marked out from other local varieties only by non-linguistic factors such as the social and political power of its speakers. These non-linguistic factors led to its recognition as a prestige form, as 'correct' speech, far beyond its original geographical extension. It became codified in grammars and dictionaries; it acquired technical vocabularies and was adapted to a wide range of special functions. It became 'good German', by which all other varieties were to be judged. A language, they say, is a dialect with an army and a navy."
(p. 345)

Jamieson, Robert Alan, “A ‘quite-right’ upon the Sacred Peatbank,” Forthright, no. 442 (March 2006), 24.

"It has been said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy but this overemphasizes the potential for conflict in the political context, which language is inevitably a part of, and doesn't take full account of what language is in itself, the way it crosses borders and runs through them."
(p. 24)

Shapin, Steven, “Proverbial Economies: How an Understanding of Some Linguistic and Social Features of Common Sense Can Throw Light on More Prestigious Bodies of Knowledge, Science for Example,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 31, no. 5 (2001), 756.

"A linguist commenting on the 'Ebonics' controversy said that 'A language is merely a dialect with an army'."
(p. 756)

Waxenberger, Hans Sauer and Gaby, “Dialects,” in: Alexander Bergs, ed., English Historical Linguistics (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 1:345.

"... (there is a saying among linguists that a standard language is a dialect with an army and a navy)."
(p. 345)

Chan, Mimi, Roy Harris, Asian Voices in English (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1991), 90.

"There is a great deal of truth in the witticism familiar to linguists which says that the difference between a dialect and a language is that a language is a dialect with an army."
(p. 90)

Büchi, Christophe, Mariage de raison: romands et alémaniques: une histoire suise (Geneva: Zoé, 2001), 85.

"linguiste american Robert R. Hall, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy": une langue est un dialecte qui dispose d'une armee et d'une marine."
(p. 85)

Li, Jinling, Kasper Juffermans, “Chinese Complementary Schooling in the Netherlands,” in: Francesco Grande, et al, eds., Mother Tongue and Intercultural Valorization, (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2012), 63.

"It is indeed one of the truisms of sociolinguistics that a standard language is nothing more but a dialect with an army and a navy."
(p. 63)

Bezuidenhout, A. "Nonstandard Language Use," in Alex Barber, Robert Stainton, eds., Concise Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language and Linguistics (Oxford: Elsevier, 2010), 528;

"Everyone has heard the old saw about a language being a dialect with an army and a navy."
(p. 528)

Edwards, Viv, “Language, Diversity and Education in Europe: Implications for Resources,” in: Andreas Papapavlou, Pavlos Pavlou, eds., Sociolinguistic and Pedagogical Dimensions of Dialects in Education (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 36.

"However, decisions about linguistic status are political and therefore contentious; in the words of a Yiddish saying: 'A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.'"
(p. 36)

Alexander, Ronelle, In Honor of Diversity: The Linguistic Resources of the Balkans (Ohio State University, 2000), 5.

"Another, somewhat whimsical definition of the difference between a dialect and a language is the oft-quoted maxim that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."<sup>5

5</sup> Linguists differ as to the original author of this maxim, some ascribe it to Otto Jespersen and others to Max Weinreich."
(p. 5)

Isaacs, Harold Robert, Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1975), 103.

"A language, a famous linguist once said, "is a dialect with an army and a navy.""
(p. 103)

Boase-Beier, Jean, Ken Lodge, The German Language: A Linguistic Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 216.

"Standard language refers to the linguistic system used in formal contexts such as education, the media, the law and central government. It is also the variety taught to foreigners. For many linguists it is a non-regional dialect: "a dialect with an army and a navy' (attributed to Max Weinreich by Chomsky 1986: 15)."
(p. 216)

Parkvall, Mikael, Limits of Language: Almost Everything You Didn't Know You Didn't Know about Language and Languages (London: Battlebridge, 2006), 311.

"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy

Again, no one seems to be really sure who first came up with this now classic aphorism, which has been attributed to Max Weinreich, Uriel Weinreich, Joshua Fishman, Antoine Meillet, and Louis-Hubert Lyautey (see e.g. Bright 1997). The first known occurrence in print, however, is Weinreich (1945:13) (a shprakh iz a diyalect mit an armey un a flot)"
(p. 311)

Irvine, Gary Anderson and Patricia, “Informing Critical Literacy with Ethnography,” in: Colin Lankshear, Peter McLaren, eds., Critical Literacy: Politics, Praxis, and the Postmodern (New York: State University of New York, 1993), 95.

"When nonstandard speakers learn how language standardization operates (the West Indian students referred joyfully and often to Noam Chomsky's famous quip that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy to back it up), they can choose to learn the standard for certain functions without having to reject their own language, family, and community."
(p. 95)

Fabbro, Franco, The Neurolinguistics of Bilingualism: An Introduction (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1999), 104.

"On another occasion Chomsky stated that behind a language there are always a flag and an army (Chomsky, 1977)."
(p. 104)

Palmer, Jerry, Taking Humour Seriously (London: Routledge, 1994), 134.

"This historical dimension reinforces Noam Chomsky's famous remark to the effect that a language is a dialect that has an army."
(p. 134)

Steinberg, Jonathan, “The Historian and the Questione della Lingua” in: Peter Burke, Roy Porter, eds., The Social History of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 199.

"As the Toronto sociolinguist Gianrenzo Clivio explained, 'from a strictly linguistic point of view... a language is a dialect that has an army and a navy and an air force; that is the only difference really from a linguistic point of view.'⁵"
(p. 199)

Sandøy, Helge, “Nation und Sprache: Das Norwegische,” in: Andreas Gardt, ed. Nation und Sprache: Die Diskussion ihres Verhältnisses in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Amsterdam: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 866.

"Halt man sich das Zitat A. Meillets vor Augen, wonach eine Sprache ein Dialekt mit einer Armee und einer Flott sei (Gundersen 1995, 840), dann wird der machtpolitische Aspekt des Begriffs deutlich."
(p. 866)

Jacom, François Lo, “Rapport” in: François Lo Jacom, ed., Plurilinguisme et communication: rapport du séminaire (Paris: Peeters, 1986), 55.

"En simplifiant a l'extreme, "une langue, cite Michel Duc Goninaz, c’est un dialecte qui a réussi, ou bien un dialecte qui a une armée""
(p. 55)

Ahlqvist, Anders, “Language and languages,” in: B. Synak and T. Wicherkiewicz, eds., Language Minorities and Minority Languages in the Changing Europe (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 1997), 28.

"Rather, one may follow the often repeated somewhat jocular obiter dictum, according to which, "a language is a dialect that has an army and a navy." In other words, the definition is not a linguistic one, but a political one, or one based on speakers' perceptions of things, rather than on facts."
(p. 28)

Prins, Harald, Dana Walrath, Bunny McBride, Anthropology: The Human Challenge, 14th edition (Belmont: Thompson, 2013), 113.

"Distinguishing dialects from languages and revealing the relationship between power and language, the noted linguist-political activist Noam Chomsky often quoted the saying that a dialect is a language without an army.² (Shook, et al., 2004)

² This saying is attributed to Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich."
(p. 113)

Philip, Marlene, “Managing the Unmanageable,” in: Selwyn Reginald Cudjoe, ed., Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference (Calaloux Publication, 1990), 299.

"All of this, however, brings me back to language and power, for as Noam Chomsky, the linguist, has noted, language is nothing but a dialect with an army..."
(p. 299)

Burnham, Clint, The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 117.

"(Chomsky's joke that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy is pertinent here)"
(p. 117)

Carson, Lorna, Multilingualism in Europe: A Case Study (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003), 22.

"In other words, as the quotation attributed to Max Weinreich goes, ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.’ The status of a language variety, moulded by socio-political events, is not immutable."
(p. 22)

Kymlicka, Will, Ruth Rubio Marín, “Liberalism and Minority Rights: An Interview,” Ratio Juris, vol. 12, no. 2 (June 1999), 141.

"Linguists often joke that a language is a dialect with an army."
(p. 141)

Perry, Theresa, Lisa Delpit, The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 41

"A second commonsense definition of language, central to this discussion, lies in the quip that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy - or a school system. This definition suggests, correctly, that languages are defined politically not scientifically."
(p. 41)

Grossman, Jeffrey, The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (Rochester: Camden, 2000), 14.

"Indeed, as sociolinguistics has acknowledged for some time now, the difference between a language and a dialect notoriously eludes linguistic definition, but depends rather on social context. The now widely acknowledged difference is defined in sociological terms: a language is a dialect with an army behind it."
(p. 14)

Borin, Lars, “Language Technology Resources for less prevalent Languages: Will the Münchhausen Model Work?” in: Henrik Holmboe, ed., Nordisk Sprogteknologi 2003 (Århus: Museum Tusculanum, 2004), 71;

"The old quip attributed to Uriel Weinreich, that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, is being replaced in these progressive days: a language is a dialect with a dictionary, grammar, parser and a multi-million-word corpus of texts - and they'd better all be computer tractable. When you've got all of those, get yourself a speech database, and your language will be poised to compete on terms of equality in the new Information Society. (Ostler, n.d.)"
(p. 71)

Yinger, John, Ethnicity: Source of Strength? Source of Conflict? (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), 302.

"As someone has said, a language pure and simple is a dialect with an army and navy. The variations closest to the "center" vary mainly by accent, a little by vocabulary, only slightly by grammar. The language politics of a society are part of the larger political process."
(p. 302)

Nordhoff, Sebastian, Harald Hammarström, “Glottolog/Langdoc: Defining dialects, languages, and language families as collections of resources,” Oslo Studies in Language, vol. 3, no. 2 (2011), 1. See URL: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-783/paper7.pdf, accessed 25 December 2014.

"The classical quotation summarizing the problems of defining a language was popularized by Max Weinreich: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy". This highlights the socio-political dimensions of declaring something a `dialect' or a `language'. To give an illustration: Before the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croatian was considered a single language, whereas now Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian are considered three distinct languages despite their grammars not having undergone any change. The reason for this change in status is clearly political and not linguistic."
(p. 1)

Weiß, Helmut, Syntax des Bairischen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 10.

"In dieser Arbeit wird darauf verzichtet, definitorisch zwischen Dialekt/Mundart und Sprache zu unterscheiden, weil dies mit linguistischen Begrifflichkeiten nicht zu leisten und in unserem Zusammenhang allein die N1-/N2-Scheidung ausschlaggebend ist. Ansonsten gelte die Definition Uriel Weinreichs: "Eine Sprache ist ein Dialekt mit einer Armee und einer Flotte" (mach Pinker 1996: 33)."
(p. 10)

Tétu, Michel, La francophonie: histoire, problématique et perspectives (Paris: Hachette, 1987), 198.

"On sait d'alleurs la facon humoristique de marquer la difference entre une langue et un dialecte: une langue, c'estun dialecte avec une armee..."
(p. 198)

Mansour, Gerda, “Reflections on Arabic Dialectology,” Al-Logha, no. 3 (May 2002), 49.

"Needless to say, dialects can become languages once they are standardised, written and adopted as the official language/s if an independent country. In other words, the humorous definition "a language is a dialect with an army" gives a fairly realistic picture of the situation."
(p. 49)

Hitchings, Henry, The Language Wars: A History of Proper English (London: Macmillan, 2011), 20.

"There's an old joke that a language is 'a dialect with an army and a navy,' which spread and defend it. (The line is often attributed to the linguist Max Weinreich, although it was certainly not Weinreich who coined it). It makes more sense to say that a language is a system of signs, where there is a standard way of writing those signs, and that it is promoted through formal education and government endorsement."
(p. 20)

Stotsky, Sandra, Losing Our Language: How Multiculturalism Undermines Our Children’s Ability to Read, Write and Reason (San Francisco, Encounter, 1999), 209;

"As linguist Noam Chomsky puts it, "What differentiates a dialect and a language is who has the Army and Navy."

Despite Chomsky's attempt to put a neo-Marxist spin on the matter, the argument is a specious one."
(p. 209)

Mancuso, Carolina, “The Changing Faces of Literacy,” in: Joe Kincheloe, Alberto Bursztyn, Shirley Steinberg, eds., Teaching Teachers: Building a Quality School of Urban Education (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 201.

"It is also useful to know that, according to Weinreich, a standard language is a dialect with an army and a navy behind it. (Pinker, 1994)."
(p. 201)

Mulroy, David, The War Against Grammar (Portsmouth: Boynton, 2003), 81;

"Pinker is generally unimpressed by the phenomenon of standardized languages. He explicitly endorses a remark attributed to linguist Max Weinreich that a standard language is a dialect with an army and a navy. In fact, there are important differences between standard languages and dialects. A standard language has a written literature with classical works, dictionaries and grammars, and systems of education."
(p. 81)

Carter, Ronald, Keywords in Language and Literacy (London: Routledge, 2008), 149.

"The whole process illustrates the unambiguous connection between standard language and social and political power and helps to explain the much-quoted statement that any standard language is no more than a dialect with an army and a navy."
(p. 149)

Sparke, William, ed., Prisms: A Self-Reader (Harper’s, 1975), 88.

"A standard language is a dialect with an army and a navy. -- Roman Jakobson"
(p. 88)

Harder, Peter, “Variation, structure, and norms,” in: Martin Pütz, Justyna Robinson, Monika Reif, Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014), 68.

"For socially aware linguists, this is especially obvious in the case of a standard language that is associated with the rich and powerful: a (standard) language is a dialect with an army and a navy - but it is not inherently better than other languages."
(p. 68)

McWhorter, John, The Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of ‘Pure’ Standard English (New York: Basic, 2008), 28.

"It is always this way: Parisian French is the standard because Paris is the capital of France, for example. As the axiom in linguistics goes, a standard is a dialect with an army and a navy."
(p. 28)

Bakkum, Gabriël, The Latin Dialect of the Ager Faliscus (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2009), 3.

"The exclusively sociolinguistic definition of dialect is perhaps best summarized by the wisecrack about a language being 'a dialect with an army': in other words, it is the politics behind the language that decide, language being something used by a group that has some measure of political independence, and dialect, by a group that is an identifiable subgroup of a larger community but has no independent status."
(p. 3)

Sansone, David, Ancient Greek Civilization (Maiden, Mass: Wiley, 2009), 219

"In fact, the terms "dialect" and "language" are themselves subject to controversy, and language was once defined by a speaker of Yiddish as "a dialect with an army and navy." In other words, the issue was (and is) an entirely political one."
(p. 219)

Reagan, Timothy, Language, Education, and Ideology: Mapping the Linguistic Landscape of U.S. Schools (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 58.

"As the linguist Max Weinreich is reputed to have said, "The difference between a language and a dialect is who's got the army and the navy." In other words, the distinction between a language and a dialect is merely where a society wishes to draw it, based on social, political, economic, and even military factors."
(p. 58)

Herk, Gerard Van, What Is Sociolinguistics? (Malden, Mass: Wiley, 2012), 14.

"The variously attributed relevant saying here is, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." In other words, a way of speaking is seen as a separate language when various subgroups of speakers have the political power to convince people they're distinct."
(p. 14)

Paul, Rhea, Language Disorders from Infancy Through Adolescence (St. Louis: Elsevier, 2007), 167.

"The relative value or status of dialects is not inherent, though. It is said that a language can be defined as "a dialect with an army and a navy." In other words, the choice of which dialect has the role of the "standard" form of the language has more to do with power relations with the society than with anything intrinsic to the linguistic structure of any of the dialects involved."
(p. 167)

Christensen, Linda, Teaching for Joy and Justice: Re-Imagining the Language Arts Classroom (Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 2009), 209.

"Max Weinreich, a Yiddish linguist, wrote, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." In other words, it's about power. In order for students to understand how some languages came to be dominant, they need to understand how and why indigenous languages were wiped out or marginalized."
(p. 209)

Woolard, Kathryn Ann, Double Talk: Bilingualism and the Politics of Ethnicity in Catalonia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 13.

"Linguists do not agree on a technical definition of a language as opposed to a dialect, and the distinction is as often political as linguistic (Gumperz 1972). One facetious definition of a language relevant in the Catalonian case is "a dialect with an army.""
(p. 13)

Morris, Paul, Bob Adamson, Curriculum, Schooling and Society in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 154.

"There is a saying that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." In other words, a high-status language is often linked to political power."
(p. 154)

Mackey, William, “Forecasting the Fate of Languages,” in: Jacques Maurais, Michael Morris, eds., Languages in a Globalising World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 68.

"Subsuming all sister languages under a politically dominant tongue has long been the practice of nation-states, giving credence to that facetious definition of 'language' as a dialect with an army and a navy."
(p. 68)

Sanders, Ruth, German: Biography of a Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 103.

"The language-dialect distinction is not a firm one and is often made on cultural or political rather than linguistic grounds. Weinreich's much-quoted, humorous but not entirely unserious remark, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy," illustrates the point."
(p. 103)

Mackridge, Peter, “The Pontic dialect: a corrupt version of ancient Greek?.” Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 4, no. 4 (1991), 338-339.

"Is Pontic a dialect or a language? This is a question that is often asked; but it is impossible for the linguist to answer it categorically. It has often been said that a language is 'a dialect with an army and a navy', which implies that the difference is a political rather than a linguistic one. Related to this is the popular view that languages are written down, but dialects aren't. There is of course no structural difference between a written and an entirely spoken language, the distinction here being a cultural one."
(p. 338)

Ng, Sik Hung, “Language and Power,” Keith Dowding, ed., Encyclopedia of Power (London: Sage, 2011), 371.

"Power behind language can be illustrated by the well-known saying that a dialect with an army behind it becomes a language."
(p. 371)

Adams, Paul C., “Multilayered regionalization in Northern Europe,” GeoJournal, vol. 77, no. 3 (2012), 297.

"State borders have positioned a host of speech patterns; most local dialects were understood as “low” languages within the shifting borders of Danish and Swedish control which imposed one or the other of these “high” languages. An adage of uncertain origin defines a language as “a dialect with an army and a navy,” meaning that state power confers on a particular dialect the authority to speak on behalf of the state through the media, schools and academic institutions,making one dialect a language while defining other dialects as dialects (Sandøy 2010; Anderson 1983)."
(p. 7)

Brown, Clarence, “Into the Heart of Darkness: Mandelstamm’s Ode to Stalin,” Slavic Review, vol. 26, no. 4 (1967), 590.

"What is a language? What is a dialect? Where is the boundary between two "languages" that blend one into the other almost imperceptibly as one proceeds across some great linguistically variegated portion of the earth's surface? Uriel Weinreich, the foremost modern student of the problem, finally threw up his hands and concluded with a joke: a language is a dialect that has an army and navy."
(p. 590)

Saka, Paul, “The Demonstrative and Identity Theories of Quotation,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 103, no. 9 (2006), 456.

"To put the point less allegorically, ordinary beliefs about individuating language are simply mistaken. Few nonlinguists realize that a language is little more than "a dialect with an army" - that there is no linguistically principled distinction between languages and dialects - and few even have the vocabulary for referring to idiolects."
(p. 456)

McCrone, David, “Nations and Regions: in or Out of the State?” Gerard Delanty, Krishan Kumar, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Nations and Nationalism (London: Sage, 2006), 247.

"In short, they are understated nations, but only in the sense that they are not nations with an army and a navy.<sup>2

2</sup> The allusion here is to the aphorism "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy," in other words, that cultural differences frequently have to be backed up by state force to be taken seriously."
(p. 247)

Rosemont, Henry, “On Representing Abstractions in Archaic Chinese,” Philosophy East and West, vol. 24, no. 1 (1974), 71.

"Given the large number of fundamental disagreements between their contending schools it is significant that the languages studied by linguists of all persuasions essentially involve speech and only accidentally involve written forms. According to one light-hearted description - which may actually be the most accurate - a natural language is simply a dialect with an army behind it."
(p. 71)

Gold, David L., “Disquisitiunculae Etymologicae,” Eurasian Studies Yearbook, vol. 75 (2003), 99.

"To such great an extent does politics (thus, non-linguistic factors) play a role in lay circles when people try to distinguish "real languages" and "mere dialects" that Max Weinreich one[sic] quipped that a loshn iz a dialekt mit an armey un a flot (Yiddish for 'a language is a dialect with an army and a navy'). The quip is sometimes miscited as if he said it in English; it is sometimes cited in the original by misromanized..."
(p. 99)

Klarberg, Manfred, “Sound Patterns and Hebrew Names,” Jewish Language Review, vol. 1 (1981), 102.

"Let us correct this quip (hardly a 'personal anecdote') before it becomes "established" in this incorrect (and stylistically unhappy) form. It originated with Max Weinreich (Uriel's father). He said, "A loshn iz a dialekt mit an armey un a flot." 'A language is a dialect with an army and a navy' (the sense being that in the eyes of laypeople languages that are not official may be seen as "mere dialects") [D. L. G.]."
(p. 102)

Onyshkevych, Larissa, “Language Policies in Ukraine, 1933-1998” Ukrainian Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 2 (1999), 161.

"So, perhaps Baudovin de Courtenay's statement made in the last century, claiming that a literary language is a dialect with an army and police (and, some have added cannons to the list), should now be reconsidered, because Ukraine has an army, a police force, and cannons, even if it does not use them."
(p. 161)

Dor, Daniel, “A Language is a Dialect That Has a Search-Engine,” in: Wolf Lepenies, Entangled Histories and Negotiated Universals (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2003), 211-233.

"As nation-states are gradually losing their grips over language, the economic center - most importantly the supranational software industry - is taking over. We are gradually approaching a condition in which a language will no longer be "a dialect with a navy and an army" - but something like "a dialect with a search engine.""
(p. 217)

Quirk, Rudolph, in: Barbara Rosen, “Is English Really a Family of Languages?” International Herald Tribune, (15 October 1994), cited from: The English Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 205.

"'People have been so silly about these things... Every language on Earth has recognizable dialects.' He says the difference may be only that 'a language is a dialect with an army and a flag and a defense policy and an airline,' but calling a dialect a language doesn't make it so. 'Nobody in Mexico would say "I'm speaking Mexican." [And] very, very few Americans would describe themselves as speaking American.' (Rosen, as above)"
(p. 205)

Hendry, Joy, “No Bad Language,” Fortnight, no. 318, Supplement: Talking Scots (June 1993), 20.

"The language has been in decline for centuries, a downfall caused by political and social factors - the loss of the Scots monarch to the British throne in the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the loss of political sovereignty in the parliamentary Union of 1707 and the steadily stronger pull of the English economy. A language is a only a dialect with an army, a navy, and an airforce, after all."
(p. 20)

Giolláin, Diarmuid Ó, Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 69.

"Diglossia is not necessarily relevant to national questions. If the informal variety can be construed as a dialect of the formal variety (let us here remember the ironic definition of a language as 'a dialect with an army and a navy,' attributed to Max Weinreich), whether linguistically the two varieties are close to or distant from one another, then its ideological weight in national terms is slight."
(p. 69)

Venkatachalapathy, A. R., “The ‘Classical’ Language Issue,” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 44, no. 2 (10-16 January 2009), 13.

""A language", the Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich is said to have observed, "is a dialect with an army and a navy". To extend this cynical definition, a classical language would be any Indian language that is so notified by a weak-kneed central government in a fractured polity."
(p. 13)

Postill, John, Media and Nation Building (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 93.

"The linguist Max Weinreich once described a language as 'a dialect with an army and a navy' (Pinker 1997: 28). In the context of Malaysia's nation-building project, the Saribas ideolect can be seen as 'an ideology without an army and a navy,'..."
(p. 93)

Spolsky, Bernard, “Overcoming Language Barriers to Education in a Multilingual World,” in: Bernard Spolsky, Language and Education in Multilingual Settings (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1986), 184.

"A second critical feature of a school language is that, like a standard language, it is believed to be independent, autonomous, not a modified version dependent on some other language; it is not in other words a dialect. (Fishman, 1974: 1639). This reminds one of the definition of a language as a dialect with an army and a flag behind it."
(p. 184)

Mićanović, Krešimir, “Standardni jezik i razgraničavanje jezika,” Filuminensia, vol. 16, no. 1-2 (2004), 96.

"Tvrdnje pak da je dijalekt jezik koji nije imao uspjeha (Haugen 1974), da je dijalekt samo jezik koji je izgubio bitku, a jezik samo dijalekt koji je politicki uspio (Calvet 1981), da je dijalekt jezik koji se ne postuje (Lippi-Green 1997) odnosno da je jezik dijalekt koji ima vojsku i mornaricu (Chambers & Trudgill 1998) sugeriraju da je razlika izmedu dijalekta i jezika u njihovu drustvenom statusu, ana je ovaj put «kvalitativna»: jezik uziva visi status spram dijalekta."
(p. 96)

Skrukwa, Grzegorz, “Ukraińcy i Morze Czarne. Nacjonalistyczna: geografi a w postradzieckiej rzeczywistości,” Sensus Historiae, vol. 12, no. 3 (2013), 32.

"Eksponowanie bandery na morzu było w XX w. postrzegane jako element budowy prestiżu państwa i narodu. Zresztą dostrzegane jest to przez etnolingwistów i badaczy procesów tworzenia się narodów: znane powiedzenie mówi, że „język to dialekt, który posiada armię i fl otę wojenną”⁹.

⁹ A. Ahlqvist, Language and languages, [w:] Language minorities and minority languages inthe changing Europe, eds. B. Synak and T. Wicherkiewicz, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, Gdańsk 1997, s. 28."
(p. 32)

Klípa, Ondřej, Review of “Etnické konflikty by Filip Tesař,” Český lid, vol. 95, no. 4 (2008), 431.

"Jediným řešením, jak se nezaplést do nekonzistentních tezí, je vůbec etnikům existenci samu o sobě nepřipisovat. Přij- meme-li fakt, že etnikum není jednotkou reálnou (subjektem), ale jednotkou pomy- slnou a konstruovanou, pak nejenže nelze určit počet osob nutných pro jeho tvorbu, ale přestává mít smysl analyticky ho ucho-povat. Spolu s R. Brubakerem lze tvrdit, že národ (potažmo etnikum), může fungovat jen jako jednotka praxe. Někomu pak stačí jeho deklarativní vyhlášení, někdo potře-buje kodifikaci jazyka, někdo existenci stá- tu a jiný až píchnutí bodákem etnické/ národní armády (srovnej analogický výrok H. R. Isaacse o jazyku jako dialektu, „ který má armádu a válečné loďstvo")."
(p. 431)

Korajac, Aida, “Jezik kao stvar društva, a ne stvar pojedinca, (Review of Mate Kapovic, Čiji je jezik),” Lahor vol. 11 (2011), 100.

"Knjigom Ciji je jezik? Kapovic kroz znanstveni pristup konkretnim primje-rima odgovara na pitanja kao što su: cime se bavi lingvistika, kvari li se jezik s vremenom, treba li govoriti “pravilno”, treba li nam standardni jezik, kome pripada jezik, smiju li lingvisti utjecati na jezik i kako te jesu li hrvat-ski, srpski, bosanski (bošnjacki) i crnogorski jedan ili cetiri jezika. Usto se bavi jezicnim purizmom i odnosom jezika, lingvistike i ideologije te komen-tira stanje pravopisne norme i ulogu lektora u njezinu provo.enju. Knjiga je plod autorova višegodišnjeg bavljenja jezikom, lingvistikom i razmišlja-njima o jezicnim problemima. U predgovoru autor najavljuje da je rijec o knjizi koja pokušava na jednostavan nacin, pristupacan i nelingvistima, govoriti o nekim jezicnim pitanjima koja se u javnosti cesto javljaju. Iz citave bi knjige, naglašava autor, trebala proizlaziti tvrdnja da je jezik društvena cinjenica, stvar društva, a ne stvar pojedinca.

1. Poglavlja u knjizi

I. poglavlje

U prvome poglavlju autor iznosi osnovne znacajke lingvistike kao znans-tvene discipline nastojeci time dokinuti uvriježene stereotipe o lingvistici i lingvistima. Istice da smisao lingvistike nije u tome da se zna velik broj jezika ili da se znaju sve rijeci koje postoje u nekom jeziku, nego da se odre-deni jezik, ili dio jezika, istražuje i proucava. Lingvisticko poznavanje jezika, objašnjava autor, nije istovjetno komunikacijskom ili poliglotskom poznava-nju jezika. Prakticna upotreba jezika i njegovo izucavanje ne mogu se svesti na isto. Kao kljucnu ulogu lingvistike autor istice opisivanje jezika i jezicnih elemenata. Time postavlja jasne granice izme.u jezicne standardologije, tj. discipline koja se bavi prakticnom standardizacijom jezika (propisom), i lingvistike koja se bavi opisom i analizom funkcioniranja jezicnih elemenata u jeziku."
(p. 100)

Lucas, Belén Martin, “Postmodern, postcolonial and feminist: Marlene Nourbese Philip’s poems at a Theoretical Junction,” in: Sophie Marret, Claude Le Fustec, eds., La fabrique du genre: (dé)constructions du féminin et du masculin dans les arts et la littérature Anglophones (Rennes: Presses universitaires, 2008), 182.

"Philip uses Noam Chomsky's idea that language is nothing but a dialect with an army and navy to challenge the linguistic hegemony of..."
(p. 182)

Cavero, Mercedes Eurrutia, “El francés para fines específicos: delimitación del concepto y propuestas metodológicas para su didáctica,” VII Coloquio Asociación de Profesores de Francés de la Universidad Española (Cádiz: Servicio de Publicaciones, 1999), 363.

"Tales factores nos conciernen directamente e inducen a representaciones concretas científicas,psicológicas y pedagógicas. Pero existen otras representaciones con motivaciones y aspectos que interfieren las aquí enunciadas. Chomsky señala que "[...] une langue, c'est ce qui a une armée et une marine. [...] les questions de langue sont toujours liées à celles de pouvoir" (1997:196), con ello hace referencia a -factores políticos y económicos que también están presentes en la comunicación específica."
(p. 363)

Salmon, Laura, “La marcatezza funzionale: un parametro per la resa di codici e sottocodici regionali in traduzione,” in: Antoniette Dettori, ed., Dalla Sardegna all’Europa. Lingue e letterature regionali (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2014), 309.

"¹⁶ Anche accettando la definizione di lingua, secondo la vulgata attribuita a Chomsky, come "un dialetto con un esercito e una marina," non si da ragione delle differenze di ricezione del rapporto lingua/dialetto in una specifica area territoriale."
(p. 309)

Ilo, Isaiah, Language Aesthetics of Modern African Drama (Morrisville: Lulu, 2013), 16; citing Rudolf Botha, Twentieth Century Conceptions of Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 81.

"According to Chomsky, what is ordinarily taken as "the commonsense notion of languages" is defective because it possesses "a crucial socio-political dimension," the view that language is "a dialect with an army and a navy" (Chomsky qtd. in Botha 81)."
(p. 16)

Gauthier, Guy, “Moselle,” in: Robert Lafont, ed., Langue dominante, langues dominées (Paris: Edilig, 1982), 88.

"Une langue, dit a peru Garaudy, c'est un dialecte qui a une armee et une marine. Quand on n'a pas de marine, comme le Luxembourg, une academie peut faire l'affaire: le francique pourrait alors etre considere comme une langue, et la "platt" - que parle Jean Bettenfeld..."
(p. 88)

Franolić, Branko, An Historical Survey of Literary Croatian (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1984), 138;

"The French philosopher Roger Garaudy once said that: "a language is a dialect which possesses an army and a navy." When the political power is lacking, the national culture is reduced to folklore, the subordinate language withers away, crushed by a centralizing bureaucracy..."
(p. 138)

Laumesfeld, Daniel, La Lorraine francique: culture mosaïque et dissidence linguistique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), 48;

"Une langue, dit a peu pres Garaudy, c'est une dialecte qui a une armee et une marine. Quand on n'a pas de marine, comme le Luxembourg, une academie peut faire l'affaire: le francique pourrait alors etre considere comme une langue, et la "platt" - que parle Jean Bettenfeld..."
(p. 48)

Garcá, Laura Morgenthaler, Identidad y pluricentrismo lingüístico (Madrid: Iberoamericana Editorial, 2008), 169.

"³ Es conocida la frase de Garaudy: "une langue c'est un dialecte qui a une armee et une marine"."
(p. 169)

Oesterreicher, Wulf, “Plurizentrische Sprachkultur – der Varietätenraum des Spanischen,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch, vol. 51, no. 1 (2002), 287.

"Von Roger Garaudy stammt der Satz "Une langue, c'est un dialecte qui a une armee et une marine."<sup>1

1</sup> Zit. in Muljacic 1986, 59."
(p. 287)

Muljačić, Žarko, “L’enseignement de Heinz Kloss (modifications, implications, perspectives),” Langages vol. 83 (1986), 59.

"Le rapport des forces y compte pour quelque chose, pas exclusivement la force militaire comme pensait le philosophe Roger Garaudy qui aurait dit : «Une langue, c'est un dialecte qui a une armée et une marine»²⁵.

²⁵ Selon Pierre Viansson-Ponté, «La crise de l'État-nation», Le Monde, 9-10 juillet 1978, p. 9."
(p. 59)

Bigot, Nicole, “le créole écrit, le créole à l’ecole,” in: Lambert-Félix Prudent, Frédéric Tupin, Sylvie Wharton, eds., Du plurilinguisme à l'école (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 114;

""Une langue est un dialecte qui a une armee et une marine" (Marechal Lyautey)"
(p. 114)

Mesnil, Marianne, “Anthropologie de l’Europe et les Balkans,” in: Maria Bulgaru, Elemente de antropologie (Chişinău: CEP USM, 2007), 20;

"Nous empruntons notre premier exemple de "construction nationale" au domaine linguistique.

"Qu’est-ce qu’une langue? – Un dialecte qui a une armée et une marine", disait le maréchal Lyautey*, dernier conquérant colonial français.¹

* Lyautey: notamment résident général au Maroc, 1912.

¹ Voir: BIJELJAC, R. et BRETON, R. Du langage aux Langues, Paris, Gallimard, Découvert, 1997."
(p. 20)

Gutu, Ana, “Les clichés du totalitarisme: des langues et des identités dans l’espace de la République de Moldova,” Communication interculturelle et littérature, vol. 3, no. 7, (2009). (no page numbers)

"Le conflit linguistique est la source y compris des guerres. Le générale Lyautey qui avait accédé à l’Académie Française en 1921, lors d’une discussion sur la définition de la langue avait postulé : « La langue est un dialecte qui a une armée et une marine ». Hélas, aujourd’hui nous avons l’armée russe sur le territoire de la Moldova, et, la morale ancienne « La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleurs » résonne avec une signification modernisée."
(n.p.)

Nadeau, Jean-Benoît, Écrire pour vivre - Conseils pratiques à ceux qui rêvent de vivre pour écrire (Montreal: Québec Amérique, 2007), n.p.;

""Une langue, c'est un dialecte avec une armee et une marine", disait le marechal Lyautey. Il aurait put ajouter: avec une industrie, une diplomatie, des idees et un peu de chance!"
(n.p.)

Nadeau, Jean-Benoit, Julie Barlow, The Story of Spanish (London: Macmillian 2013), 4.

"As the French general Hubert Lyautey famously said to the French Academy in 1912, "A language is a dialect that possesses an army, a navy, and an air force." In our view, Lyautey's list should include politics and economics, demographics, visionary leaders, creators, and more."
(p. 4)

Laponce, Jean, “Retour à Babel,” Revue française de science politique, vol. 51, no. 3 (2001), 488.

"Illustrons le cas du contact ponctuel à l’aide de l’anglais, la plus puissante des langues universelles que le monde ait connues¹, et dont la puissance ne tient nullement à quelque supériorité sémantique ou grammaticale, pas plus qu’au nombre de ses locuteurs (bien que ce soit un atout non négligeable), mais essentiellement à des facteurs économiques et politiques. Ces facteurs, le maréchal Lyautey les identifiait fort bien lorsqu’il disait qu’une langue est un dialecte possédant une armée et une marine. L’anglais, entraîné par l’Angleterre d’abord, les États-Unis ensuite, mène le retour à Babel, du moins le retour partiel, pour la construction d’une nouvelle tour que l’optimiste pense mettre au service de la connaissance et de la prospérité, dans une citémonde où le sceptique voit une tombe plutôt qu’un berceau."
(p. 488)

Laponce, Jean, “La gouvernance du français au Canada en cinq ou six lois,” in: Jan-Pierre Wallot, ed., La gouvernance linguistique: le Canada en perspective (Ottowa: University of Ottowa Press, 2005), 13;

"Lors d’une des réunions hebdomadaires de l’Académie francaise qui, selon la petite histoire, débattait de la définition du mot « langue », le Maréchal Lyautey aurait dit « une langue, c’est un dialecte qui a une armée et une marine ». J’éléve cette boutade an rang de lei, tout en lamodifiant un pen. Il y a des langues importantes qui n'ont ni armée ni marine, par example les langues régionales des Etats de l’Union indienne. Lyautey voulait dire qu’une langue, pour étre admise au cénacle des langues, doit montrer ses titres de puissance, et que ces titres sont bien mains linguistiques que politiques.

Pour se protéger de la concurrence, pour maintenir son autonomie, pour bien assuxer sa survie, une langue a de plus en plus besoin d’étre langue de gouvemement, d’étre la langue privilégiéeclans laquelle se fait et se maintient le contact entre les individus et les autorités publiques. Ces derniéres peuvent étre des gouvemements locaux, régionaux ou étatiques, et mieux vaut le régional que le local, et mieux vaut le national que le régional. Plus l'autorité publique serapuissante, plus puissante sera sa langue."
(p. 13)

Laponce, J. A., Loi de Babel et autres régularités des rapports entre langue et politique (Paris: Laval, 2006), 113.

"Lors d’une réunion de l’Académie franqaise qui, selon la petite histoire, débattait de la défnition du mot « langue » , le maréchal Lyautey aurait dit : « une langue, c’est un dialecte qui a une armée et une marine ». J’éléve cette boutade au rang do loi, tout en la modifiant un pen. Il y a de grandes langues qui n’ont ni armée ni marine, par exemple lea langues régionales des Etats de l’Union indienne. Ce que Lyautey voulait signi?er, c'est qu’une langue, pour étre admise au cénacle des langues, doit montrer ses titres de puissance, titres qui sont bien moins linguistiques que politiques."
(p. 113)

Cardinal, Linda, “Bilinguisme et territorialité: l'aménagement linguistique au Québec et au Canada,” Hermes, vol. 51 (2008), 140.

"Loi de Lyautey. Du nom du maréchal Lyautey, cette loi met l’accent sur le pouvoir ou l’autorité publique d’une langue. Selon le maréchal, une langue est un dialecte avec une armée et une marine."
(p. 140)

Liu, Amy, Standardizing Diversity: The Political Economy of Language (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania, 2014), 6, 234.

"An alternative distinction, coined by Marshal Hubert Lyautey of France, is that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy" (see Laponce 2006: 113). This political definition highlights the role of the state. It is the state that takes a folk dialect; standardizes the orthography, grammar, and alphabet; disseminates it systematically; and institutionalizes its uses (Safran 2010)."
(p. 6)

Vanneste, Alex, Le français du XXIe siècle: introduction à la francophonie, éléments de phonétique, de phonologie et de morphologie (Antwerp: Garant, 2005), 27.

"... Louis-Hubert Lyautey (1854-1934), qui contribua a l'expansion coloniale de son pays, fit un jour declaration suivante: "Une langue, c'est un dialecte qui possede une armee, une marine et une aviation.""
(p. 27)

Escudé, Pierre, “Les langues selon Henri Van Lier: l’océan, les poissons et la nasse,” Synergies Monde Mediterranéen, vol. 2 (2011), 192.

"Le pouvoir génère alors un savoir savant (historique, linguistique, littéraire, poétique, culturel) transmis au sein d’une machinerie sociale contraignante (l’école, l’université). La « causalité circulaire » selon Van Lier fonctionne à plein : le produit d’une création foncièrement politique devient sa propre cause, et la légitime en retour. Le « génie » de LA langue mène à un eugénisme des autres langues. Pour le dire sans détour, comme le fit le Maréchal Lyautey qui n’était pas linguiste, mais vraiment militaire : « Une langue, c’est un dialecte qui possède une armée, une marine et une aviation. »"
(p. 192)

Mané, Djiby, “As concepções de língua e dialeto e o preconceito sociolinguístico,” Via Litterae: Revista de Linguística e Teoria Literária, vol. 4, no. 1 (2012), 47.

"A distinção entre língua e dialeto leva em consider ação, ao mesmo tempo, seu status social e a extensão geográfica de sua utilização: enquanto uma língua tem, em muitos casos, status institucional correspondente à área de um país, e uma tradição de escrita e de literatura, um dialeto não tem o status cultural e social da língua, apesar de poder ser falado em uma área extensa. Ele não será, por exemplo, ensinado na escola, e muito poucas pessoas tentam escrevê-lo. Esta conceituação mostra que a língua é um dialeto que tem poder, enq uanto o dialeto é uma língua que não tem poder. A afirmação de Max Weinreich ilustra muito bem isso ao afirmar que “a língua é um dialeto com um exército e uma marinha” (1945, p. 13), salientando o fato de que línguas são criadas por assimilação cultural. Mas, acredita-se que a primeira pessoa a proferir a expressão foi Hubert Lyautey ao afirmar que: “Une langue, c ́est un dialecte qui possède une armée, une marine et une aviation” (Uma língua é um dialeto que possui um exército, uma marinha e uma aviação”)."
(p. 47)

Paci, Paolo, Alpi: Una grammatica d’alta quota (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003), 9;

""Una lingua e un dialetto con un passaporto e un esercito." - Noam Chomsky"
(p. 9)

Aime, Marco, Eccessi di culture (Turin: Einaudi, 2004), 4.

"Alcuni sostengono che una lingua alto non e che un dialetto che ha fatto fortuna, altri, come Noam Chomsky, affermano che "una lingua e un dialetto con un passaporto e un esercito." Che cosa sono esercito e passaporto se non i segni evidenti di uno stato-nazione, con il suo monopolio della forza e il suo controllo sui confini..."
(p. 4)

Czerwiński, Maciej, “Language Planning and Lexical Networks in Croatian Media,” NCS/NKW / Kakanien Revisited (29 April 2004) 1; available online from Czerwiński’s homepage, see “Wposzukiwaniu nowego kanonu,” URL: http://www.kakanien-revisited.at/beitr/ncs/MCzerwinski1/, accessed 27 March 2016.

"Standard languages should be understood as languages that are to some extent artificially constructed, created by centripetal forces that aim to establish and maintain something we are used to calling nations. Standard languages are cultural, political and most importantly national languages, particular choices made at a moment of national revival. In sociolinguistic literature there is a joking phrase that says that a language is a dialect within an army and a navy or that a standard language is a dialect that was lucky. From this perspective, every standard language is standardized in a very arbitrary way."
(p. 1)

Lüdi, Georges, “Sprachverhalten, Sprachpolitik, Diskurs über Sprache: Staatlichkeit in Europa zwischen dem einsprachigen Nationalstaat und dem mehrsprachigen Vielvölkerstaat,” in: Marek Nekula, Ingrid Fleischmann, Albrecht Greule, eds., Franz Kafka im sprachnationalen Kontext seiner Zeit (Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 2007), 16

"Grenze zwischen einer ,Sprache‘ und einem ,Dialekt‘ ausgesprochen flicbend; nicht vergebens wird mit dem Satz, Eine Sprache ist ein Dialekt mit einer Armee und einer Flotte‘ auf die (macht—)politische Dimension dieser Frage verwiesen. Und grundsatzlich braucht es fur den sprachlichen Ausdruck einer nationalen Zugehorigkeit keineswegs einer eigenen Sprache; eine als eigen empfundene Varietat einer ubergreifenden Sprache genugt."
(p. 16)

McRae, Kenneth, Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies: Switzerland (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1983), 5.

"The rather cynical maxim that a language is simply "a dialect with an army behind it" contains an element of truth, but the reality is more complex."
(p. 5)

Dalbera-Stefanaggi, Marie José, Langue corse: une approche linguistique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978), 127.

"Mais cette "normalisation" sera operee sur des bases politiques, et non sur des bases linguistiques. "Une langue," ne l'oublions pas, "c'est un dialecte avec son armee.""
(p. 127)

Haviland, William A., Harald E. L. Prins, Dana Walrath, Bunny McBride. The Essence of Anthropology (Boston: Cengage: 2015), 189.

"Distinguishing dialects from languages and revealing the relationship between power and language, the famous U.S. linguist Noam Chomsky often quoted the saying that a dialect is a language without an army. (Shook et al., 2005, p.482)"
(p. 189)

Twilhaar, Jan Nijen, Generatieve fonologie en de studie van Oostnederlandse dialecten (Amsterdam: P. J. Meertens-Instituut voor Dialectologie, Volkskunde en Naamkunde, 1990), 2.

"Hierin onderscheidt het SN zich niet van andere standaardtalen zoals die in landen als Engeland en Frankrijk ontstonden. Een taal is volgens een gezegde dan ook niet meer dan 'een dialect met een leger en een vloot.'"
(p. 2)

Maas, Sabine, Twents op sterven na dood? Een sociolinguïstisch onderzoek naar dialectgebruik in Borne (Münster: Waxmann Verlag, 2014), 16.

"naar zelfstandige discrete systemen" (Hoppenbmuwers 1990: 14). Uit verschillende dialectvormen koos men in de 17e eeuw bepaalde vormen en verhief die tot norm van de schrijftaal. Meestal kwamen deze vormen uit het dialect van prestigieuze mannen dat daardoor veel aanzien kreeg en ook door andere leden van de Nederlandse taalgemeenschap werd erkend (Vgl. Appel e3. 2002: 313). Het verschil tussen het Standaardnederlands en een Nederlands dialect is daarom niet formeel, maar ligt in buitentalige zaken: in het Standaardnederlands zijn spelling, grammatica en woordkeus geuiniformeerd. Het is tot staatstaal verheven, is genotmeerd en gecodificeerd. Daarom noemt men de standaardtaal ookwel een “dialect met een leger en een vloot“ (Vgl. Nijen Twilhaar 2003: 6). Vooral als schrijftaal was het Standaardnederlands vanaf de 17e eeuw van groot aanzien, terwijl de gesproken taal nog grote regionale verschillen liet zien."
(p. 16)

Gold, David L., “Jewish Intralinguistics as a Field of Study,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, vol. 30 (October 1981), 35.

"The layperson's belief that only official status legitimizes a language prompted Max Weinreich to quip that "a loshn iz a dialekt mit an armey un a flot" [a language is a dialect with an army and a navy]."
(p. 35)

Schenato, Luca, Veneto è chi il Veneto fa: Indipendenti e Contenti (Raleigh: Lulu.com, 2010), 17.

"La distinzione dialetto — lingua ha si a che fare con parametri scientifici, ma in mezzo c’é molta, molta e molta politica. Il linguista esperto di yiddisch Max Weinreich diceva che una lingua e un dialetto con un esercito e una marina ed io penso che avesse ragione da vendere. Il veneto é una di quelle lingue mortificate e abbruttite dal non essere stata usata per molto tempo in ambiti formali e alti, surclassato da una lingua imposta, ossia l’italiano."
(p. 17)

Šatava, Leoš, “Jazyk a identita etnických menšin – možnosti zachování a revitalizace,” Svět literatury, 2005, vol. 15, no. 31 (2005), 10.

"Přesný počet řečí na Zemi není vzhledem k vágnosti a flexibilnosti definice „jazyka“ možno stanovit. V této souvislosti se s nadsázkou „definuje“, že jazyk „je takový dialekt, který má armádu a válečné loďstvo.“ Přesto lze přibližně uvést, že z ca pěti až šesti tisíc v současnosti dosud existujících jazyků se více než desetina nachází v poslední fázi své existence a dalších ca 80 % je ohroženo zánikem. Odhaduje se, že v roce 2050 zbyde na Zemi pouze okolo tisíce živých jazyků."
(p. 10)

Engelstoft, Sten, Henrik Gutzon Larsen, Territorium, stat og nation (Lund: Samfundslitteratur, 2013), 124.

"Det samme gor sig gaeldende for sprogets status som sprog eller dialekt, hvilket understreges af den beromte aforisme, der tilskrives den yiddishtalende lingvist Max Weinrich[sic]: “Et sprog er en dialekt med en haer og flade" (pa yiddish: “A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot")."
(p. 124)

Fedinec, Csilla, Mikola Vehes, Kárpátalja, 1919-2009 (Budapest: Argumentum, 2010), 619.

"... szeru megallapitas szerint (melyet gyakran Max Weinreich nyelvész nevéhez kapesolnak) kulon "nyelv az, amelyik mogott egy hadsereg es flotta all" (angolul: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy.")"
(p. 619)

Sijs, Nicoline van der. "Voorwoord bij de reeks 'Taal in stad en land'" in: Sera de Vriendt, Taal in stad en land - Brussels (Den Haag: Lannoo, 2004), 6; This series of books had twenty seven entries, each of which reprinted the same essay as a foreword. Of these, I checked four. See also: Hugo Ryckeboer, Taal in stad en land – Frans-Vlaams (Den Haag: Lannoo, 2004), 6; Jan Nijen Twilhaar, Taal in stad en land – Den Haag (Den Haag: Lannoo, 2004), 6; Miet Ooms, Jacques Van Keymeulen, Taal in stad en land – Vlaams-Brabats en Antwerps (Den Haag: Lannoo, 2005), 6; Magda Devos, Reinhild Vandekerckhove, Taal in stad en land – West-Vlaams (Den Haag: Lannoo, 2005), 6.

"Vandaar dat taalkundigen op de vraag wat het verschil is tussen een taal en een dialect, hun toevlucht nemen tot one-liners zoals ‘taal is een dialect met een leger en een vloot‘ en ‘taal is een dialect met een nationale vlag‘. Standaardtaal en dialect hebben een verschillende maatschappelijke positie gekregen, en daardoor ook een verschillende maatschappelijke waardering."
(p. 6)

Bourges, Hervé, Pardon my French: La langue française, un enjeu du XXIe siècle (Paris: Karthala, 2014), 159 & 185.

""Une langue, c'est un dialecte qui possede une armee, une marine et une aviation." Lyautey (1854-1934)
...
Resume du chapitre precedent: la Francophonie n'a pas d'armee, pas de marine, pas d'aviation... Heureusement, elle a une langue en partage. Et de nombreux parlers qui lui ressemblent."
(pp. 159 & 185)

Blum, Susan, “China’s Many Faces: Ethnic, Cultural, and Religious Pluralism,” in: Timothy Weston, Lionel Jensen, China Beyond the Headlines (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 85;

"This issue is long-standing; Uriel Weinreich, a famous sociolinguist, claimed that "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" - pointing out the arbitrary division between the two. (This quip is also attributed to George Bernard Shaw)."
(p. 85)

Spitzer, Manfred, Denken: zu Risiken und Nebenwirkungen (Stuttgart: Schattauer, 2015), 72.

"¹ Geht man von Amsterdam nach München, wird man nacheinander Menschen begegnen, die sich jeweils recht gut verstehen, sofern sie nahe beieinander (sagen wir: bis zu 50km) wohnen. Je weiter entfernt sie jedoch voneinander leben, desto geringer wird die Wahrscheinlichkeit eines ungetrübten Sprachverständnisses sein (52). Die Frage, wo Holländisch aufhört und Deutsch anfängt, ist rein linguistisch nicht zu klären! ,,Eine Sprache ist ein Dialekt mit einer Armee und Marine“, sagen daher manche Linguisten im Rekurs auf Max Weinreich, dem dieses Bonmot in einer Vorlesung zugerufen wurde und der es dann verbreitete. Das Zitat weist mit Recht darauf hin, dass ,,Fragen der Sprache im Grunde Fragen der Macht sind“, wie es Noam Chomsky einmal ausgedrückt hat (23)."
(p. 72)

Dresden, Sem, Vervolging, vernietiging, literatuur (Amsterdam: Athenaeum Boekhandel Canon, 2006), 165.

"Hij kan er ongetwijfeld op wijzen dat Jiddisch niet voor niets een taal is die nooit over leger, vloot of luchtmacht heeft kunnen beschikken, dat joden te allen tijde machteloos waren, bij deze vervolging en vernietiging over geen enkel materieel hulpmiddel beschikten en het bovendien niet zouden kunnen hanteren."
(p. 165)

Muljačić, Žarko, "Wie heißen die ‘Tochtersprachen’ des Lateins?”, Radovi, Razdio filoloških znanosti, vol. 24-25 (1995-1996), 22.

"In unseren Zeiten ist es aber nicht ganz uberflussig, die Meinung des Philosophen Roger Garaudy kennenzulernen. Er hatte angeblich gesagt (cfr. P. Viansson-Ponte, "La crise de l'etat-nation", Le Monde, 9-20. VII. 1978, S. 9; v. auch Muljačić, 1986, 59): "Une langue, c'est un dialecte qui a une armee et une marine.""
(p. 22)

Viansson-Ponté, Selon Pierre, “La crise de l’État-ńation,” Le Monde (9-10 July, 1978), 9.

"Une langue, a dit un jour Roger Garaudy, c’est un dialecte qui a une armée et une marine."
(p. 9)

Patnaik, B. N., “Oriya Language Movement and Oriya Linguistics,” in: International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, vol. 31, no. 2 (2002), 22.

"There is that well known saying, which by now has become almost a cliche in linguistics: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy (see Chomsky 1986)."
(p. 22)

Safran, William, “Political Science and Politics,” in: Joshua Fishman, Ofelia García, eds., Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 1:55.

"According to Lyautey's Law, a language is a dialect that has an army and a navy (Laponce 2006). It is the state that creates a language out of a folk dialect by means of the standardization of orthography and grammar (and, if necessary, alphabetization), institutionalization, systematic dissemination, and protection against perceived internal and external challenges."
(p. 55)

Zenderland, Leila. 'Social Science as a “Weapon of the Weak”: Max Weinreich, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, and the Study of Culture, Personality, and Prejudice.' Isis, Vol. 104, No. 4 (December 2013): 742-772.

"As a linguist, Weinreich knew how scholars distinguished a “language”from a “dialect”; instead, he would later popularize a definition offered by a Yiddish speaker at one of his lectures. “A language,” it stated, “is a dialect that has an army and navy.”¹³ As this definition suggests, the choice of language in itself spoke of power—and of state making. This was particularly true for European Jews seeking their own identity after World War I, an era shaped both by intense nationalism and by the Communist Revolution,the reconstitution of Poland, the Balfour Declaration, and the rise of fascism. These events led to sharp political divisions as well as bitter language battles within Poland’s intensely vibrant Jewish community, particularly among activists who envisioned Jews of the future speaking Hebrew, Russian, Polish, or Yiddish. By the 1930s, postwar optimism had been drastically tempered by worldwide depression, growing antisemitism, internal political instability, and looming external threats. In responding to the experiences of European Jews, both in this decade and in the far darker one that followed, Weinreich focused his attention on social scientific research—and on keeping alive the institution he hoped would generate it, the Yiddish Scientific Institute.

¹³ Max Weinreich, “Der YIVO un di problemen fun undzer tsayt,” YIVO Bleter, Jan.–Feb. 1945, 25(1 ):13."
(p. 747)

Czerwiński, Maciej, Język, ideologia, naród. Polityka językowa w Chorwacji a język mediów (Kraków: Scriptum, 2005), 40.

"Druga teoria, probujaca ustalic stosunek dialektu do jezyka — nazwijmy ja socjolingwistyczna — odrzuca w zasadzie aspekt lingwistyczny jako decydujacy. Wedlug niej jezyk to standard, ktory powstal poprzez communis consensus spole-czenstwa (czy raczej konsensus dominujacych w nim elit). Jezyki standardowe ("ogolne”, "dialekty kulturalne”, "literackie”, wspolne dla jakiejs spolecznoéci) sa efektem procesow normatywnych i standardowych, u podstaw ktorych lezy polityczna, ekonomiczna i kulturalna unifikacja spoleczenstw w grupy zwane "narodami”. W literaturze (socjo)lingwistyczne, ktora zajmuje sie tym fenomenem, mozna odnalezc dowcipna, ale zarazem trafna metafore autorstwa Fryderyka Engelsa, ktory jezyk definiuje w sposob nastepujacy (pewien, kazdy) jezyk to dialekt wojska i marynarki [ang. a language (...) as a dialect of an army and a navy] (por. Fairclough, 1989: 23)."
(p. 40)

Czerwiński, Maciej, “Jezik – izvor nacionalne i državne homogenizacije: Izabrani prilozi,” in: Lada Badurina, Ivo Pranjković, Josip Silić, eds., Jezični varijeteti i nacionalni identiteti (Zagreb: Disput, 2009), 22.

"Iako Friedrich Engels nije na dobru glasu u postkomunistickim drzavama (a jest u zapadnoeuropskoj humanistici koja je nadahnuta ljevicarskom ideologijom), cini se zanimljivim podsjetiti na njegov stav koji jezik situira u druétveni razvoj, dakle: a language (...) is a dialect of an army and a navy (usp. Fairclough, 1989: 23)."
(p. 22)

Fairclough, Norman. Language and Power. Longman, London, 1989: 21.

"A language has been jokingly defined as 'a dialect with an army and a navy', but this is a joke with a serious undercurrent. Modern armies and navies are a feature of the 'nation state', and so too is the linguistic unification or 'standardization' of large politically defined territories which makes talk of 'English' or 'German' meaningful. When people talk about 'English' in Britain for instance, they generally have in mind British standard English, i.e. the standardized variety of British English. The spread of this variety into all the important public domains and its high status among most of the population are achievements of standardization (see Ch. 3) as a part of the economic, political and cultural unification of modem Britain. From this perspective, 'English' and other languages' appear to be the products of social conditions specific to a particular historical epoch."
(p. 21)

Gundersen, Dag, Snorre Evensberget, eds., Bevingede ord (Oslo: Den norske bokklubben, 1995): 840.

"Sprak. Et sprak er en dialekt med haer og flate bak seg, ofte sitert sentens i sprakmiljoer. Siterti Vart Lands sprakspalte 30.1.1993 i formen «Et rikssprak er en d. med egen haer og flate» Oftes tillagt den amer. lingvist Max Reinhardt i formen «A language is a dialect with an army and a navy». Ifolge én forklaring er sentensen laget i to deler, forst av den fr. lingvist A. Meillet i formen «Une langue est un dialect avec une armée», og sa er flaten tilfoyd i Storbritannia eller USA."
(p. 840)