There are various terms that linguists may use to avoid taking a position on whether the speech of a community is an independent language in its own right or a dialect of another language. Perhaps the most common is "variety"; "lect" is another. A more general term is "languoid", which does not distinguish between dialects, languages, and groups of languages, whether genealogically related or not.
Try to answer this question if possible (otherwise reply "unanswerable"): Which term distinguishes between dialects and languages but not position?
unanswerable