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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?
I'd argue that Korean and Chinese are more separate languages than Italian and French.
Chinese is a tonal language and Korean is not, and they have different writing systems.
Italian and French have nothing that divides them to this extent, either in spoken or written language.
As for Chinese and Cantonese I have no idea, I'm not terribly familiar with them even if I've studied some Mandarin. My general rule though is that languages are separate if they aren't mutually intelligible.
I genuinely don't understand why your coworker put spoken Korean and spoken Chinese in the same bubble, they're mutually unintelligible and come from different language families, even if they used the same writing system for a long period. This on its own makes the rest of your coworkers claims suspect to me.
Take the Nordic languages: Swedish and Norwegian are clearly the same language as they are easily mutually intelligble both in written and spoken form. With Danish it's a bit murkier but seeing as the written form is clearly mutually intelligble with both Norwegian and Swedish, as well as large amounts of the local dialects, even if it can be a bit difficult, I would still put it as being the same language but at the outer edge.
Icelandic on the other hand is its own language seeing as both written but especially spoken Icelandic is not really mutually intelligble with the other Nordic languages.
Broadening things to the Germanic languages it's easy to see that German is separate from the Nordic languages. It uses mostly different words and even has different grammatical structure, it's clearly a separate language even if there are overlaps and a common history.
His position is that a particular speech can be part of multiple languages depending on how it is written. The exact same hanzi/hanja passage of writing can be understood by speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean, so they are dialects of the same language, regardless of mutual intelligibility between the three speeches—but Korean speech also forms part of the Korean language when used with hangul.
That is more of an artifact of how logographs work than evidence of that the languages are the same or even meaningfully related.
The characters are pronounced differently in the different languages and and used very differently grammatically.
You could write English nouns with Chinese characters, that doesn't make English Chinese.
Is your coworker perhaps a Han supremacist?
He has claimed previously that grammar isn't really a thing in Chinese.
I think he would disagree, if I'm understanding his position corrrectly.
I have no idea.
Do not trust this man.
He sounds like certain Chinese people I knew who would claim that Japanese is also a dialect of Chinese, sign up for some Japanese class (in the $abroad country they were staying in) fully expecting to BTFO the stupid weeaboos, instead getting BTFOed themselves (as it turns out Japanese grammar is actually in some ways more accessible to speakers of reasonably-inflected European languages than to Chinese speakers), and angrily concluding that the racist teacher is discriminating against them.
It was impossible to get them to see reason on that topic; patriotic memes are entrenched very deeply.
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