The saying "a language is a dialect with an army" is a bit worn out in linguistic circles. A change in how it is uttered might save it, though. How about "gengo ndi yyu shē guntai muchuru hōgen yaibin" (言語んでぃっゆしぇー軍隊むちゅる方言やいびん)? This is how you would say it in uchināguchi, a language mainly spoken on Okinawa Island. To get this transliteration, I made a telephone call that went on for 45 minutes because words such as "language," "army" and "dialect" cannot be easily translated into uchināguchi and the uchināguchi speaker I was consulting, Byron Fija, did not want me to write something weird. He agreed only to this exact version.

Fija and many other speakers of uchināguchi insist that, despite big lexical gaps, it is a language in its own right. If a lack of mutual intelligibility was to serve as an indicator for determining languages, one would have to agree; speakers of Japanese do not understand uchināguchi.

Nor do they understand "mǖnudzu tiia guntai u muchǖdzu sumafutsu tidu adzu" (むぬぅずてぃーや軍隊うむちゅずすまふつてぃどぅあず), which is a translation of the same saying into myakǖfutsu, a language spoken on Miyako Island, also in Okinawa Prefecture. Staff at Miyako City Hall who gave me this translation, insisted that I should not treat it as the sole possible translation, or, worse, the sole legitimate version of myakǖfutsu. There exists no standard myakǖfutsu.