According to the Yiddish expert and sociolinguist Max Weinrich "a language is dialect with an army and a navy" () .This expression draws attention to the problematic distinction between a language and a dialect. A language can be defined as a "system of communication used by a partic-ular country or society" (Oxford Dictionaries).Whereas a dialect is usually defined as "a regionally or socially distinct variety of language, identified by a particular set of words and grammatical structures. Spoken dialects are usually also associated with a distinctive pronunciation, or accent" (Chrystal 2008). Consequently, a dialect can be considered as part of a language. But how can we exactly differ a dialect from a language? This paper examines in how far a language can be distin-guished from a dialect and if the primary criteria of mutual intelligibility is sufficed.
There are several criteria of language definition, which try to distinguish a language from a dialect. Nevertheless there are some problems involved. Anyhow, it is certainly true that language and dia-lect merge into each other
A primary attempt to differ a language from a dialect is through the criteria of mutual intel-ligibility. If two speakers are able to understand each other, they speak two dialects of a language. A representative example is British and American English. Americans do understand British English and the other way round. If they are not be able to understand each other, they would speak two
languages.