The standard (language)-dialect hierarchy

“A dialect is a subordinate variety of a language, so that we can say that Texas English and Swiss German are, respectively, dialects of English and German. The language name (i.e. English or German) is the superordinate term. We can also say of some languages that they contain more than one dialect; for example, English, French, and Italian are spoken in various dialects. If a language is spoken by so few people, or so uniformly, that it has only one variety, we might be tempted to say that language and dialect become synonymous in such a case. However, another view is that it is inappropriate to use dialect in such situation because the requirement of subordination is not met. Consequently, calling something a dialect of a particular language implies that that language has at least two dialects, but calling something a language does not necessarily entail that it has subordinate dialects.” (Wardhaugh & Fuller, 2015, pg. 38).