That also makes me think about how interesting political differences make things. Czech and Slovak are politically distinct, so we present them as two languages. But there are so many distinct dialects of Chinese that none of us would ever stand a chance in the game were they all recognized. Yet the politics dictate that there's only Mandarin and Cantonese - even native Chinese don't consider their mother tongues to be "real languages" because of the way they've been raised.
eta: I had a conversation with one of my students on a bus in Taiwan. He was telling me how jealous he was that I could speak multiple languages. I told him "Well, you can already speak two, and you're learning English."
"What do you mean? I only speak Chinese."
"What does your family speak at home? Taiyu? Or maybe Hakka?"
"Oh, Hakka, but that's not a language."
Hakka is unintelligible to speakers of Taiyu, Mandarin and Cantonese.