Really, the difference between "dialect" and "language" is imprecise, the definition consists of lines and boundaries drawn on a smooth continuum of different and where the line gets drawn is often utterly political--often because national languages get constructed by states, rather than being the basis on which a state is formed.
True.
If Moravia or Silesia were separate countries, or even if they were cores around which nation-state were constructed (I'm right in assuming Bohemia and Prague are the "core" of the Czech Republic the same way Paris is to France, aren't I? Is standard Czech based on a Prague dialect? Or is it more like a German situation where the standard isn't really the dialect of anyone?),
The German case seem to be closer to the real situation in the Czech Rep. Bohemia and Moravia(+Silesia, the tiny part of it that is part of the Czech Rep.) have almost the same population. From my experience, there are fewer distinct dialects in Bohemia than in Moravia. People from Prague and the central Bohemia can be easily distinguished because of their soft accent and there are certain language traits present in Bohemia which are not used in Moravia.
Moravia is more complicated and the dialects there are stronger and more diverse. As in Bohemia, there are some language traits typical for Moravia, by which the Bohemians can distinguish people who came from there.
The thing is that because of the rougly same population, it's hard to tell what's the "real Czech". The literary form of the language isn't spoken by anybody and that what you call "standard" Czech (spoken by politicans, journalists, TV and radio reporters, professors etc.) isn't spoken by common people in either part of the country. Of course both claim that their dialect is closer to the "real Czech"
I bet there'd be more people calling Moravian or Silesian a different language, kinda like with Bulgarian and Macedonian or, I assume, Mirc's example of Moldavian and Romanian.
Well, we consider Slovak as a different language, despite the fact most Czechs understand 98% of it without any problem at all. It's because the grammar is different from the Czech one. Most Czech dialects only use some flavor words and phrases, but the grammer is essentially the same.
If the Romanian and Moldovan grammar is the same as well as most of the vocabulary, then it's the same language.
The most extreme examples of politics dictating language definition are, on the excessive separation side, Serbian vs Croatian and Hindi vs Urdu. On the excessive unification side, the designation of Cantonese and Mandarin as dialects of "Chinese" when they're more different than Portuguese and Castillian Spanish, is pretty farcical from a linguistic perspective. There's also the case where two languages are probably just one language with multiple standard forms, like Macedonian and Bulgarian probably are.
Agreed.
Linguistically speaking, mutual intelligibility is the key to the dialect vs language definition,
I'd stick with the grammar definition. Because otherwise Czech and Slovak would have to be considered as one language.
but even then that's hazy. Villagers in border towns in Portugal can understand their neighbours on the Spanish side of the border, and they can understand their neighbours, and so forth, all the way across Spain and France and into Italy. But the standard forms in each capital aren't mutually intelligible and a villager in Portugal couldn't, say, understand a villager in Aragón.
People from Prague and Kosice understand each other pretty well, despite they speak different languages.
Am I right in thinking there's actually a similar fuzzy continuum between standard Czech and standard Polish running between Silesia and Moravia? If you were to travel across Moravia and Silesia into Poland proper, at what point would the locals' language become unintelligible to you?
Somewhere at the border
There is really no slow transition. I mean, yes - people in Northern Moravia, the Czech Silesia or whatever you want to call it, speak a different dialect (they have a very distinct accent and use different words, some of them taken from Polish), but you can understand them pretty well. Then you cross the border and the people speak Polish. You don't understand them naturally, you have to really try and put your brain into work until you realize what they're saying. The grammar is different, they use archaic (from Czech point of view) sentence composition, the written form is entirely different etc. The transition is pretty sharp even at the Czech-Slovak border, the difference there is that we understand Slovaks much better.
There is a great deal of similarity between the Slavic languages though, I've been able to communicate with Poles, Croats, Serbs and Russians, at a basic level.
As well as the small little holes on the border with Hungary. I doubt the hole goes that far south, but I doubt that Romanian is as spread in Serbia as it's shown, too (I mean mainly the northern red point in Serbia, which is just a few towns and villages as far as I know).
