A language is a dialect with an army and navy


"A language is a dialect with an army and navy" is a quip about the arbitrariness of the distinction between a dialect and a language. It points out the influence that social and political conditions can have over a community's perception of the status of a language or dialect. The facetious adage was popularized by sociolinguist and Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich, who heard it from a member of the audience at one of his lectures.

Weinreich

This statement is usually attributed to Max Weinreich, a specialist in Yiddish linguistics, who expressed it in Yiddish:
The earliest known published source is Weinreich's article Der YIVO un di problemen fun undzer tsayt, originally presented as a speech on 5 January 1945 at the annual YIVO conference. Weinreich did not give an English version.
In the article, Weinreich presents this statement as a remark of an auditor at a lecture series given between 13 December 1943 and 12 June 1944:
Weinreich observed that the phrase is a "wonderful expression of the social plight of Yiddish". In his lecture, he discusses not just linguistic, but also broader notions of "yidishkeyt".
The sociolinguist and Yiddish scholar Joshua Fishman suggested that he might have been the auditor at the Weinreich lecture. However, Fishman was assuming that the exchange took place at a conference in 1967, more than twenty years later than the YIVO lecture and in any case does not fit Weinreich's description above.

Other mentions

Some scholars believe that Antoine Meillet had earlier said that a language is a dialect with an army, but there is no contemporary documentation of this.
Jean Laponce noted in 2004 that the phrase had been attributed in "la pétite histoire" to Hubert Lyautey at a meeting of the Académie Française; Laponce referred to the adage as "la loi de Lyautey" 'Lyautey's law'.
Randolph Quirk adapted the definition to "A language is a dialect with an army and a flag".