Is There a Difference Between a Dialect and a Language?

There is a difference between a dialect, which is deemed a kind of bastardization of pure language, and a language itself. Think about cantonese which is sometimes referred to as a variety or dialect of chinese even though it's largely unintelligible to a mandarin speaker. Norwegian and swedish have national political borders around them, elevating their status in a sense. And those two languages are largely mutually intelligible. So there is something called the principle of linguistic subordination, which is what african american english is struggling against.