I learnt that it means dialect. During a presentation at university, someone
asked a question about whether my topic was possibly influenced by a
misunderstanding of the word "hougen" i.e. that it could also mean regional
variation, or something else. He even said that Korean had been called a
hougen.

How accurate is this?
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meaning
What is the denotation of 方言？
While you're right that 方言 means dialect, such as 東京方言, it's used slightly
differently in connotation in Japanese. You do get expressions referring to it
by dialect (ie regional grammar, vocabulary, or pronunciation to a language),
as pointed out, it can also be used to refer to languages that have split from
a common ancestor.

Kotobank, as cited by Earthling above, states:

>
> 中国の非常に違ったことばが中国語としてまとめられ、ラテン語から分かれたスペイン語・ポルトガル語などが別の言語とされるのは、むしろ言語以外の、政治や文化が基準になっている。この意味で、日本語に関して微妙な位置にあるのが琉球{りゅうきゅう}地方の方言である。かつて奄美{あまみ}・沖縄諸島に琉球王国が成立し、その首都首里のことばが文字に記され、全土に通じた時代には、「琉球語」としての地位をもっていたとみなしうる。

To summarize, it leaves the determination of a "dialect" as very much
political, as in the example of Chinese, which is internally viewed as having
many dialects, some of which aren't even mutually intelligible, but all share
a writing system and political nation. Equally Okinawan holds similar status
in Japan; it's not mutually intelligible, but often seen as a dialect of
Japanese because they have common ancestry, and are still politically united.
The same loose definitions exist in English, too (and _for_ it, but that's a
different topic).

In the case of Korean, some people argue that they share a common ancestral
language (see
[here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Japonic_languages#Korean_hypothesis)
for more) . Maybe calling it 方言 is a stretch, but not _entirely_ alien to some
definitions of 方言, which are already quite loose, and very political.
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@Sqrtbottle, @snailboat Victor Mair has pointed out on numerous occasions how
critically he views the current usage of the term 方言 in current Chinese and
Japanese contexts, see for example
<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=6654>,
<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10303>,
<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15006>.

The point is that 方言 used to mean what he translates as 'topolect', a.k.a.
'regiolect', IOW "a language spoken in some place (other than here)". As such,
the more classical use of 方言 is simply "a form of expression we need an
explanation or even a translator for"; it is a very non-committal term.

In fact, what we call languages now have been historically sometimes been
referred to as 方言, and this term also appears in the name of the office of
translations of former Chinese dynasties.

By contrast, the modern idea of both the term 'dialect' and 方言 carry strong
overtones of "a mere variant of the real thing", and this is (rightfully) what
people from Hong Kong and Shanghai get P-offed by when the central government
tries and suppresses the use of local idioms. It does so with the argument
that these forms of expressions are not 'languages', they are merely 'variants
of the one language', the implication being that they're faulty variants and
therefore to be avoided and corrected.

To an extent, this may also be true for the situation in Japan. I cringe a bit
when I read "Okinawan holds similar status in Japan; it's not mutually
intelligible, but often seen as a dialect of Japanese because they have common
ancestry, and are still politically united". First of all, which 'still' is
this, the assertive one ('i still did it'—though it was frowned upon) or the
temporal one ('i still did it'—when they saw me)? In case it's the latter:
Okinawa is a very recent addition to the Japanese Empire (dating from the late
19th c,; [read more on Tofugu](http://www.tofugu.com/2013/09/26/the-forgotten-
dynasty-of-the-ryukyu-islands/)).

Asserting that two forms of speech are "not mutually intelligible" _and_ "are
viewed as dialects" at the same time flies flat in the face of everything that
'dialect' wants to be as a term. The whole idea of 'dialect' in modern
understanding is that "well they may sound peculiar but i can still talk to
them". If it were to mean "i can't talk to them but we're of same origin so
theirs is just a variant of my speech and X thousand years ago we would've
sounded the same", well then, ultimately, all the languages of Europe,
_including_ Basque, are mere 'dialects' of each other, for it is thought that
_all_ languages derive from a single ancestor.

The whole idea of two languages having a common ancestor is also often
somewhat overrated, as is the so-called 'genetic' ancestry of language.
Languages mix and mingle quite freely, and Mandarin Chinese in particular is a
language well known for having resulted from a melting pot of different
peoples with different tongues.

What looks like a monolithic Japanese language is, likewise, the result of the
coming together of a number of influences from different directions, not least
because Japanese has taken over so many Chinese forms of expression and
incorporated them so inextricably deep in the language proper. Sure you say
"those are but loanwords!" but the fact is you don't say "ume (the plum) is
not Japanese!" or "fude (the brush) is not Japanese" but you (like the
Japanese themselves) only don't do that because you're not _aware_ they're
probably very old loans from Chinese. In other words, to some degree it so
happens that something that we _can_ trace the origin of we call a foreign
influence, and something that we can not link to something somewhere else we
call native. Tells you a lot about what we know, and sometimes little about
the language at hand.
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