Dialect
From Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium
A dialect is commonly considered to be a variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic region or social group; for example, British English is a dialect of English. However, it is not always easy to determine whether a given way of speaking, writing or signing is a language in its own right, or one of many closely related systems. Furthermore, since dialects tend to blend into each other over distance, and the differences between dialects can be more than that between two separate languages, whether the term is valid at all is open to question. Linguists would argue that what counts as a dialect and what counts as a language is a largely social or cultural issue, as linguistic criteria to label any variety as a 'language' or a 'dialect' are disputable.
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