Page "Dialect" Paragraph 7

There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing a language from a dialect.

A number of rough measures exist, sometimes leading to contradictory results.

Some linguists do not differentiate between languages and dialects, i. e. languages are dialects and vice versa.

The distinction is therefore subjective and depends on the user's frame of reference.

Note also that the terms are not always treated as mutually exclusive ; there is not necessarily anything contradictory in the statement that " the language of the Pennsylvania Dutch is a dialect of German ".

However, the term dialect always implies a relation between languages: if language X is called a dialect, this implies that the speaker considers X a dialect of some other language Y, which then usually is some standard language.