The problem is that if we start to divide based on standards, we will make almost everything that is currently represented as a dialect a separate language.
- Dialects are for flavour, and for that, we need unique to the dialect names.
- Unique to the dialect names come from unique to dialect sources.
- Those sources probably will also include texts, not just names
- From those texts, we can deduce that dialects are separate languages as it was clearly a separate thing.
Sweedish was a thing in 1225
Middle Low German has been documented in writing since about 1225/34
And Novgorodian is found in birch bark writings, dating from the 11th to 15th centuries
Venetian was first attested in writing in the 13th century.
For all those cases there are quite a lot of sources as I understand
And all of that is not translated. You can also make claims like: How much influence did the German language have on Scandinavian, will that be enough to make it separate from Norwegian?
That's why I think first we need to know the methodology upon which they separate the languages. From my experience, the difference between modern German dialects from the North and the South is much more severe than between modern East Slavic languages. But it also can boil down to when I learned them.
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