Win writes:
I believe that, at some speed, CW becomes a language. Most high speed
operators are not reading the each character. They hear the word.
They only resort to character copy on unfamilure words and names. Even
the low speed op will hear many short common words.

When most adults read printed text, they don't look at each letter and
sound out the word, at least for common words. Instead they see the
shapes of whole words and recognize them as a unit.

This does not mean that "written English" is a distinct language from
"spoken English".

CW is a modulation type. It is interesting in that it is the only form
of digital modulation which can be encoded and decoded by an
unassisted human in real-time. It is also interesting for a variety of
other reasons, such as historical importance, widespread adoption,
simplicity of equipment and readability in high-noise, weak-signal
environments.

That sounds like a language to me.

When abbreviations, prosigns and Q-codes are heavily used, one could
perhaps make an argument for calling the entire system a dialect or
pidgin. It is not a language in and of itself. There are very few
thoughts you can express in CW alone, without using a real language
(English or Esperanto or whatever) on top of it.

Win, W0LZ
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KE5IXY AR