vallinder comments on Worth remembering (when comparing ‘the US’ to ‘Europe’) - Less Wrong
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The map of languages of Europe (as most such maps I've seen) has some very weird things. Why the hell would “Toscan” [sic] be considered a separate language from Italian and Neapolitan wouldn't? Describing most of Ireland as a “bilinguism [sic] situation” sounds like wishful thinking -- Irish might be official but very few people speak it regularly (not counting school classes and the like) except on the west coast.
Being from southern Sweden myself, I was also quite amused to see that Scanian – which is really just an accent – is marked as a separate language.
The difference between languages and accents is largely a manner of degree. The boundary lines are completely arbitrary. You can pair mutually intelligible modes of speech together in a chain and have non-mutually-intelligible ends of the chain.
Indeed, my point was rather that if Scanian is included, so should ten or so other accents as well.