Editing Indo-Aryan languages (section)

=== Language and dialect ===
In the context of South Asia, the choice between the appellations [[Language or dialect|"language" and "dialect"]] is a difficult one, and any distinction made using these terms is obscured by their ambiguity. In one general colloquial sense, a language is a "developed" dialect: one that is standardised, has a written tradition and enjoys [[Prestige (sociolinguistics)|social prestige]]. As there are degrees of development, the boundary between a language and a dialect thus defined is not clear-cut, and there is a large middle ground where assignment is contestable.
There is a second meaning of these terms, in which the distinction is drawn on the basis of linguistic similarity. Though seemingly a "proper" linguistics sense of the terms, it is still problematic: methods that have been proposed for quantifying difference (for example, based on [[mutual intelligibility]]) have not been seriously applied in practice; and any relationship established in this framework is relative.{{sfn|Masica|1991|pp=23–27}}