Who Decides When a Dialect Becomes a Language?

Daniel wondered whether there's a continuum from a few borrowed words all the way to a brand-new language — and whether the world's language count is really shrinking. We trace the whole spectrum: code-switching (it's rule-governed, not confusion), pidgins, creolization, and the slow drift that turned Vulgar Latin into the Romance languages. Then we get to the uncomfortable part: the dialect-versus-language line isn't linguistic at all. It's political. Mandarin and Cantonese aren't mutually intelligible yet count as one language; Danish and Swedish are mutually intelligible and count as two. We dig into Ethnologue's contested 7,000+ figure, Arabic's thirty-odd varieties, and why Moldovan got its own ISO code. Along the way: Michif, a language that merged instead of forking, and the honest answer to who makes the call — mostly not linguists. Episode #603130 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/603130