Very true. An even clearer example is Catalan and Occitan, which are just the two most famous/prestigious/standardized poles in a still clearly-existing dialect continuum.
Or Scots and English: polls suggest that people's answers to the questions "is Scots a separate language, or a dialect of English?" and "should Scotland be an independent country?" are strongly correlated. On the surface, it seems that the former is a scientific question and the latter is a political one, so they shouldn't be correlated at all, but in reality they are both political questions.
Other examples include the various Chinese varieties (Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hokkien, etc. etc.), which are often considered one language for political reasons, Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian, which are nearly identical but often considered different languages for political reasons (imagine if we considered US American to be a different language from Canadian), Romanian and Moldovan to which the same description applies, and so on. There are examples practically everywhere you look.
Very true. An even clearer example is Catalan and Occitan, which are just the two most famous/prestigious/standardized poles in a still clearly-existing dialect continuum.
Or Scots and English: polls suggest that people's answers to the questions "is Scots a separate language, or a dialect of English?" and "should Scotland be an independent country?" are strongly correlated. On the surface, it seems that the former is a scientific question and the latter is a political one, so they shouldn't be correlated at all, but in reality they are both political questions.
Other examples include the various Chinese varieties (Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hokkien, etc. etc.), which are often considered one language for political reasons, Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian, which are nearly identical but often considered different languages for political reasons (imagine if we considered US American to be a different language from Canadian), Romanian and Moldovan to which the same description applies, and so on. There are examples practically everywhere you look.