Chinese is kind of weird. There is a common written form (with no phonetic content) that everybody learns in school. But only Mandarin-speakers talk the way they write - in terms of sentence structure - and even then, maybe only with 70 or so per cent fidelity between the oral and written structures. In the spoken form, China's so-called dialects are mutually incomprehensible - the word sounds are completely different. The word "wok" is Cantonese - the Mandarin equivalent sounds something like "goo-or". That is to say, you could listen to someone talk in a different dialect* and not understand a single world of what he said. You could listen for a week to him talking non-stop for 24 hours a day and still not understand what he's saying. Does this mean they are dialects or distinct languages? The Chinese government maintains that they're dialects. I think they're dialects in the sense that Indo Europeans languages are dialects of each other - in Western terminology, though, they would be distinct languages.
* Now, there are dialects of Mandarin where Mandarin-speakers could eventually figure out what his opposite number is saying. Ditto with Cantonese. But a Mandarin-speaker with no training in Cantonese would not be able to understand a Cantonese radio broadcast, anymore than a Cantonese-speaker with no training in Mandarin would be able to understand a Mandarin radio broadcast. It would be like asking an American to figure out a Greek language broadcast. Common roots, but the word sounds are completely different.
thank you so much for your informative posting.
It does seem to be a grey area, how very odd.
I would say that if one can’t undertand the other,
it’s a language.