Ket isn't a dialect, it's a language (fwd link)

[Natasha L Warner]

Hi,

I think you might be being too generous to the copy editor or whoever
wrote the title by putting it down to avoiding repeating the word
"language."  (The title does sound bad with "language" twice though, I
admit).  Can you imagine someone saying that, say, Hindi is related to
English, an ancient Germanic dialect?  I think their calling Ket a
dialect bothers us because the mainstream press only uses "dialect" to
describe things they don't think of as full languages, or at least
languages they think of as obscure.

Thanks for posting the example.  I think I just read another one of
"dialect" for "language" earlier today.

Thanks,

Natasha

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Natasha Warner
Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics
University of Arizona
PO Box 210028
Tucson, AZ 85721-0028
U.S.A.

Until August 2008:
Visiting Researcher
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
PO Box 310
6500 AH Nijmegen
the Netherlands