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My Chinese coworker says that this image is a reasonable representation of the controversy over whether Mandarin and Cantonese are dialects or languages. What is your opinion on the topic?
In practice, "a language is a dialect with an army" seems to be the correct rule. There are instances of nations sharing a common language (the Anglosphere and friends), but also plenty of adjacent countries that can understand each other but declare them separate languages (I hear Swedish and Norwegian are almost identical) and countries that can't understand speech, but consider it a single language (China).
I think the language/dialect distinction is a bit like the religion/cult distinction: at the big picture most generally agree on the idea, but any concrete example can be argued over indefinitely.
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