How languages can live together without killing each other

Naw...

"If you want to be consistent, however, and you count Galician as a distinct language from either Portuguese or Castilian, then you would need to recognise Geordie or Scouse (say) as a separate language from English, which few people are willing to do."

Actually, you've picked a very good comparator here.

Geordie is more similar to Scots than English, and it's alignment as a dialect of English is more geopolitical than linguistic.

This is the situation with Gallician. Gallician is part of the same language group as Portuguese, but is aligned to Castillian for political and geographical reasons.

But Gallician is very definitely a different language from Castillian, and "if you want to be consistent", then if Gallician is a dialect of Spanish then so are Portuguese and Italian, and English is a dialect of Afrikaans, and eventually we ratchet back until all our languages are rebranded as dialects of "Earthish".

Intelligibility

"Galician is helped to survive* because there are essentially no Castilian speakers who would fail to understand a monoglot Galician-speaker"

That's not true IME. If you speak in Galician to Andalusians, for example, they typically won't understand you (or claim not to, at least).

"And because there's popular support for separate development, evidenced by the folks who go around spraying out the 'L' and the tilde in roadsigns for 'La Coruña'."

Yep - where my family lives, the different variations of La Coruña (Castilian), A Coruña (Galician - official spelling) and A Corunha (Galician - Portuguese spelling) are constantly being sprayed on and painted over. Some signs are virtually unreadable as a result.

Strine

"a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" - I guess that makes Strine a language, then.

Now, I read the sentence ...

... "Traditional analysis of "competing" languages points to the eventual extinction of one, as was pretty much the case with ... Welsh and English," to suggest that Welsh had made English extinct. I admit that, come closing time, it seems that it might be the case what with all the spitting and slavering and hacking and slurring, but English is still most definitely the spoken language here.

Regarding Welsh as an extinct language - my wife and I have different opinions. She comes from a country which is very proud of the fact that they use a language that was basically invented by nationalists in the late 19th Century (i.e. Czech)*, and thinks that anyone should be able to speak any language they like, and have it recognised. On the other hand, I don't see the point of having made-up languages whether or not they have some basis in a language that people once spoke, particularly since they all seem to involve a lot of spitting and tongue-cramping noises.

* Czech, like Welsh, was a series of dialects spoken in different areas, and rarely written down. In order to make a language that could function as a badge of membership of a particular group, a written, standardised form was deliberately created (rather than evolved, like English, Spanish, and German, but not French which has conscious interference from language police), and is seriously compromised. Czech deliberately has strange letters (such as "ř", which represents "rzh", where the "zh" is like the "s" in "pleasure", even though they have two letters - "r" and "ž" - which would make the same sound. Even using the diacritic over certain letters was basically so people could look at it and differentiate it from other similar languages, which make the same sounds with different spellings (such as Polish). If you ever want to start a vigorous argument amongst Czechs simply suggest that they might have been better keeping German as their language after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, since they would then be less isolated from the rest of Europe. It is amazing how many will agree!

@Never trust a linguist....

Well, I suspect they know that. So they might be referring there to the languages that are spoken, read and written by more than a handful of people, maybe?

Caló? In Spain?

Caló is also a 20th century Mexican criminal class argot. I was unaware of the Spanish/Roma version.

Wow!

I salute you for knowing something quite so spectacularly obscure.

Meanwhile I wonder if there is anyone capable of directly translating Basque to Icelandic, a language so unfathomably strange that it's just as well they're all stuck on an island halfway across the Atlantic.

Quechua - an undead language

In support of that, I once had missionary neighbors that learned Quechua in order to translate the Bible into that tounge.

They also learned to enjoy roast guinea pig.

Ahh but...

Quechua is quite unique in its orthogonality for a real language and has been demonstrated to be a reasonable choice as an intermediate step when translating between two other unrelated languages. (Or was it Aymaric?)