"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 adage was popularized by the sociolinguist and Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich, who heard it from a member of the audience at one of his lectures. == Weinreich == This statement is commonly attributed to one of the leading figures in modern Yiddish linguistics, Max Weinreich, who expressed it in Yiddish: The earliest...