In 2022, after the start of the war in Ukraine, the number of people studying Ukrainian on Duolingo, a language learning website and mobile app, increased by more than 500%.

Most of those who have taken up Ukrainian are probably unaware that there is a long-running controversy about this particular form of speech. One side views Russians and Ukrainians as “one people,” and the opposing side does not.

The former claim that Ukrainian is just a dialect of Russian, while the latter argue that it is a separate language. Who’s correct?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear answer. The difference between a language and a dialect depends upon whom you ask.

Many linguists base their determination of language-or-dialect on whether forms of speech are mutually understandable. In simple terms, if two people are speaking different dialects of the same language, they can probably understand each other. However, if two people are speaking separate languages, they probably won’t be able to understand each other.

By this definition, Czech and Slovak could be viewed as dialects of the same language. The same goes for Indonesian and Malay.

Some spoken forms look quite different when pen is put to paper. For instance, Serbian is written with a variation of the Cyrillic alphabet, like Russian, while Croatian uses a form of the Latin alphabet, like English. Nonetheless, many linguists would consider Serbian and Croatian to be dialects of the same language, because it’s the understandability of spoken forms that generally counts.

Humans have been talking for a very long time, but we’ve only been writing things down for a few millennia. Plus, of the roughly 7,000 known living languages only about 4,000 have a writing system.

For political scientists, the difference between a language and a dialect is not based on mutual understandability, but rather politics. For example, Hindi and Urdu are separate languages because the governments of India and Pakistan say they are, even though the colloquially spoken forms of the two varieties are strikingly similar.

Max Weinreich, a Yiddish scholar, popularized the idea that “a language is a dialect with an army and navy.” In other words, a government can promote the view that a dialect is a separate language even if it isn’t in linguistic terms.

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