knivescut mentioned you in a post
@sagunita based on my filipino classes in hs and college, a lot of people do tend to consider it a language on its own because of the amount of people that speak it (7M+) same with bisaya/cebuano (20M+), but since most of the people that do speak it belong to a certain part of the country it’s considered more of a dialect. dialects technically /are/ languages though it’s just that they’re more people-specific than all around like english or filipino
AHH i get how the technicalities could be confusing. i think for the most part, people just try to avoid the political connotations that come with calling filipino languages (that's not tagalog/filipino) as dialects.
but while there are several accounts differentiating languages and dialects from a geographic/demographic standpoint, there are also accounts from linguists stating that dialects are subsets/variations of a single, recognizably different language that are interchangeable between each other and would still allow intercommunication (i.e. bisaya has kana, urban cebuano, boholano, leyteno, and davaoeno dialects and korean has gyeonggi, jeju, jeolla etc.)
a lot of this is arbitrary, though, just like the technicalities of language and grammar. so i just stick with calling ilokano a language (because someone who only knows tagalog wouldn’t be able to understand it) and north ilokano/south ilokano as its dialects (because speakers of these dialect would be able to understand each other).
