Should German count as only one language?

[LBJer]

As has already been noted on this thread, the question of what's a "language" as opposed to a "dialect" of a language doesn't have a clear, objective answer.  Many people make the distinction based on mutual intelligibility--if people speaking and/or writing can understand each other, then there's one language, if they can't, there isn't.  But even mutual intelligibility has problems.  What if speakers of one thing and speakers of another can understand 50% of each other's speech?  Do they speak the same language or not?  Obviously the speech of the two groups isn't "mutually intelligible" in the sense that, say, Standard American and Standard British English are.  But neither are they mutually unintelligible in the sense that English and Japanese are.  So the definition of mutual intelligibility itself is arbitrary--how much comprehension in necessary for two forms of speech to qualify as a language? 

I think that politics and objective linguistic differences both play a role in whether something is considered a language or a dialect, although the former is usually more important.

I voted yes to German being one language for two reasons.  One is that it's not clear what is meant by "German."  Some people use the word to refer only to Standard German, and that's a reasonable definition.  Secondly, it's true that the regional varieties of German (for example, Swabian) usually aren't mutually intelligible with each other, as far as I know.  But at the same time, most of them form part of a "dialect continuum" where speakers of neighboring dialects can understand each other well, but speakers of far apart dialects cannot.  It would therefore be unclear where to draw the line between many of these dialects in order to divide them into separate languages.  And this continuum doesn't extend, except for certain border areas, into non-Germanic neighbors like France or Italy.  The dialects can therefore be considered one big continuum of "German" even if many of the individual speakers wouldn't be able to understand each other--and of course, virtually everyone in Germany speaks Standard German today anyway, so this is not the case.