There are linguistic standards that are detached from such socio cultural historico political motivation Disagreement with motivation does not make the scientific fact of the thing any less verifiable The phonetics phonology and morphology of Alsatian are a combination of elements from other languages as are its lexicon and syntax It is a regional dialect This is not a value judgment Just as the many forms of British American Canadian and Australian are kinds of English rather than separate languages Alsatian too is a dialect