There is a joke among linguists that a language is a dialect with an army. This still raises chuckles when people hear it for the first time but it has a more serious point, highlighting the fuzzy lines between the two concepts and the inescapable truth that hierarchies, based on prestige or political backing, exist in the linguistic world.

In layman understanding, certainly here in Singapore, dialects are usually seen as spoken forms of communication, subordinate to languages which have an official status.