In linguistics, a principled definition of what constitutes a ‘language’ in opposition to a ‘dialect’ has been notoriously elusive. The intelligibility criterion, possibly the only criterion that could form the basis of such definition, has often been considered inadequate, leading to the widespread conclusion that languages may not be linguistically definable objects at all (e.g. Chambers and Trudgill, 1998). This paper reconsiders some of the objections typically raised against the intelligibility criterion and argues that one of these objections — namely that intelligibility is a scale to which no meaningfully discernible segmentation may be applied— can be formulated as a testable empirical claim. Three experiments are then presented with the explicit aim to test this claim. Results indicate that, contrary to what has been frequently claimed, the intelligibility scale does allow for potentially meaningful segmentation, providing empirical evidence in favour of adopting intelligibility as an empirically sound criterion of demarcation for the identification of languages and dialects.

在语言学中，与“方言”相对的“语言”构成的原则性定义众所周知是难以捉摸的。可理解性标准，可能是构成这种定义基础的唯一标准，常常被认为是不充分的，从而导致广泛的结论，即语言可能根本不是语言上可定义的对象（例如Chambers和Trudgill，1998年）。本文重新考虑了通常针对可懂度标准提出的一些反对意见，并认为这些反对意见之一（即，可懂度是一种规模，不能应用任何有意义的可辨别性分割）可被表述为可检验的经验性主张。然后提出了三个实验，其明确目的是测试该要求。结果表明，与经常声称的相反，