As a native Portuguese speaker, it's fun to look at the dialectic continuum you can construct as you go across the Iberian peninsula.
It's imperfect, but you can travel with a very soft "language gradient": Extremaduran -> Portuguese -> Galician -> Asturian -> Castillian (Spanish) -> Valencian -> Catalan -> Aragones -> Occitan -> French ...
Each individual step is pretty easy, but it adds up to a huge difference.
Unfortunately, there isn't a great analogue for English. You can kinda construct a small jump by looking at Scots, but it ends quickly and is (at least to my ears) a jump on par with Portuguese to Galician.
English is member of a language continuum, albeit a disjointed one by virtue of the English Channel and the Norman conquest. The Ingvaeonic languages is a "gradient" including Scots, English, Frisian, and Low German/Plattdüütsch. Frisian is certainly legible to an Anglophone with a wide exposure to English dialects and historical periods.
Don't forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Norse and its influence on English. (I say) some of the contemporary Norwegian is very close to some contemporary Scots.
After years in Portugal I still can't differentiate where anyone is from within the country, but put me a Brazilian event and I can tell you where each person is from in Brazil (where I also lived) by accent and word-choice alone. I'm impressed by my lack of ability when it comes to Portugal. Perhaps it's more nuanced.
However, the language gradient you speak of is one of the reasons I love Iberia. If only modern English, as you note, would be so interesting.
By the way, the region the author speaks of is beautiful, in case anyone plans to take a lazy drive through it. If yes, don't forget Andorra.
Loons I am not so sure about (http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/loun has some interesting info on the name though, see e.g. item 5)
but quines sound somewhat similar to the word for woman in today's Scandinavian languages: Danish: kvinde, Norwegian: kvinne and Swedish: kvinna.
You can also find it again in the word Queen (originally woman) that seems to share similar words and meanings in different European languages: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/queen
My family is from a North East fishing village and apparently I've got one Finnish ancestor about ~300 years ago - I've wondered if that's where I got my distinct epicanthic folds from!
Valencian/Catalan is actually one single language, although you can use either term to refer to it.
There are two main dialects of the language (eastern and western) but their division is by geographic borders, rather than by administrative divisions.
There is a nationalistic political movement called "Blaverism" that states that people in Catalonia and in the Valencian Community speak different languages, but their reasons are political, not linguistic.
This variation was quite common in France until the commencement of an active program of linguistic assimilation (beginning with Luis XIII but really accelerating in the 1930s). Outside the Romance Domain, Britain held out well into the 50s (I still remember being shocked by the Yorkshire "thou" as a kid) but TV wiped it out -- the accents remain but the grammar and, mostly, the vocabulary, have all converged.
Ironically I hear much more variation in Germany where there is an "offical" German that everybody learns at school but almost nobody speaks at home.
America and Australia are, to my ear, in the same boat as the UK: accents abound but if you were to transcribe people's speech they would all appear to be Californian. That's definitely due to TV and the fact that US/UK TV doesn't need translation. After decades in the US I go back to Australia and people tell me, "wow, you've really kept your accent." Actually, it's just that they're very much used to hearing US speech on TV.
> America and Australia are, to my ear, in the same boat as the UK: accents abound but if you were to transcribe people's speech they would all appear to be Californian.
While regional variations in mainstream, WASPy, middle-class-and-above speech may be more accents (in the vocal sense rather than the linguistic sense) than dialects, American English has a number of clearly distinct dialects (notably Chicano English and African American Vernacular English) and accents (in the linguistic sense that includes patterns that would be distinct in transcription; including a couple different American Jewish English accents, among others).
America and Australia are, to my ear, in the same boat as the UK: accents abound but if you were to transcribe people's speech they would all appear to be Californian
There are regional distinctions in word choice in the US:
> Ironically I hear much more variation in Germany where there is an "offical" German that everybody learns at school but almost nobody speaks at home.
Certainly there are grammatical differences between Hochdeutsch, Plattdeutsch, Allemanisch, (much less the varieties spoken in Switzerland!) in addition to accent and (minor) vocabulary differences so I presume you aren't disagreeing with that. I have been to plays in Munich that were explicitly in Bayerisch and were deliberately incomprehensible (have had the same "problem" in Edinburgh). So I doubt you disagree with that.
Do you disagree that people use Hochdeutsch at home? All I can say is that my kid grew up speaking Hochdeutsch at home because his mother (from south of Hannover, near Goslar) speaks it in the house, as do the rest of her family, neighbors, etc so it's what he learnt when learning to speak. In Berlin and in the overseas German School the kids all commented that he was the one who didn't have to learn the accent (in the overseas school it was very clear that all the kids had different accents).
I was assuming dom0 meant that Hochdeutsch is quite widely spoken at home, rather than that it's never spoken at home.
I only know German as a second language (so have only studied Hochdeutsch) but I have the impression that it's rather common as a home language today. One reason may be that there are more couples than ever before who've come from different regions of the German-speaking world, and hence have Hochdeutsch as their main common language.
AFAICT generally people speak the same thing at home they speak in public:
* people who speak Hochdeutsch generally also speak Hochdeutsch in private
* people who speak Swabian or Bavarian generally speak it both at home and in public
* most other regional dialects have moved closer to Hochdeutsch, usually retaining only a few "loanwords" and the accent
A great example of the last one is the Cologne dialect: because of its association with Karneval it is frequently emulated in TV to the point that what most people think of as dialect is just a Rhineland accent with a handful of dialect words thrown in for flavour. The result is comprehensible for speakers of Hochdeutsch but about as authentic as mock "ebonics" sound to an actual speaker of AAVE.
The Cologne dialect of course still exists and there are some people who still speak it but retain a heavy accent when switching to Hochdeutsch. But it's become exceedingly rare even among natives.
Similarly what passes for Hochdeutsch in Swabia is often still heavily accented and full of Swabian phrases to the point that the state of Baden-Württemberg ran a campaign with the slogan "We can do everything but speak Hochdeutsch". "Foreigners" are often confused by the Swabian phrases that are mixed into what Swabian speakers would otherwise consider their best attempt at Hochdeutsch.
Compare this to Saxony "Hochdeutsch" which is often very difficult to understand due to the thick accent but tends to contain far fewer dialect vocabulary.
In other words: when talking to Swabians in "Hochdeutsch" you might generally understand the gist of what they're saying but will have to ask for clarifications on certain words they're using; when talking to Saxons you'll probably just have to ask them to speak more slowly and enunciate words more clearly ("What does a Saxon say when he wants to buy a Christmas tree in New York? 'Attention Please!'").
These are all generalisations but I'm a Cologne native who spends a lot of time in Westphalia and have been to various parts of Germany, so I think my observations might be somewhat representative.
The general historic trend seems to be that dialects have shifted towards Hochdeutsch vocabulary (with a few notable exceptions like Swabian and Bavarian) and in most places even the remaining accent has faded almost entirely.
When I went to live in Germany as an exchange student for 2 years, I found my self in Swabia. I had been learning Hochdeutsch for 3 years, and I had no idea there even was a dialect in that region, so I found myself struggling to figure out what people were saying. I hadn't had that problem when I was traveling in other regions. Some of the people there who spoke a very strong dialect were completely incomprehensible to me.
After 2 years and doing an internship in a workplace where most of the people were Swabian, I could understand it quite well and could even speak a little. It was quite amazing how continual exposure to the dialect made it go from nonsense to normal.
I was amused when I spoke with Germans who seemed apparently unable to speak standard German despite hearing it everyday from TV, radio, and non-Swabian speakers: they could only seem to speak in their Swabian dialect. What was even more amusing is when they spoke English and their Swabian accent came through into English as well.
"Attention please" sounds like "A Tännchen please" spoken with a Saxon accent (e.g. the "ch" is pronounced as "sh").
"Tännchen" is the diminutive of "Tanne", meaning "fir".
So a Saxon who doesn't know what a fir is called in English might ask for "A Tännchen please" -- which would sound almost exactly like "Attention please".
Hochdeutsch is, in my experience, relative. Swiss people call the language of Germany Hochdeutsch, regardless of region. The southern Germans I've met seem to collectively agree that they do not speak Hochdeutsch and that Hochdeutsch is what is spoken in Hannover. I don't know many people from northern Germany, but I recall an instance of someone mentioning Hamburg as being the Hochdeutsch standard in their ears.
I've recently been to Hamburg and even that they sounded just a little bit different than the German I hear on television, it was for the better. As someone who learnt supposedly Hochdeutsch from a Swabian teacher and lived for more than half a decade near Stuttgart, I could understand people in Hamburg much easier.
From my dad, linguist:
"This is the classic example of an L-complex. A chain of mutual intelligibility can be established from Normandy to Sicily and over to Portugal, and in fact across all of Latin America, though Brazil is linked through Portugal and the rest of Latin America through Spain. An L-simplex is a grouping of dialects that are all mutually intelligible. In an L-complex there may be dialects that are not mutually intelligible. But on occasion you find a maximal L-complex that is also an L-simplex. Israel is one. The Basque country is another. But it's rare."
Interesting terms. I've never came across them in my linguistic study, but I see they were heavily employed by C.F. Hockett, so that might be less exposure to American Structuralism.
I want to make a small correction here. Israel is a special case not because all regional dialects are mutually intelligible, but because it has no regional dialects at all (unless you're talking about Arabic, but then it's a far cry from an L-Simplex).
This is due to the history of Modern Hebrew in Israel being relatively recent. It only reached a stable grammar with a sizable generation of native speakers in the 1920s and 30s, and until the 60s at least non-native speakers probably outnumbered the native speakers. By then Television was unleashed, and killed whatever budding dialects that existed.
Practically speaking, there used to few minor dialectal variations in Jerusalem. It pretty much amounted to about 20-30 words, a default feminine form for the noun 'cat' and a different pronunciation for the number 200. But even these features are barely left in Jerusalem, which had seen large population exchanges.
The traditional languages of France are basically an infinite fractal to the extent that many of the forms are basically unheard of outside of the areas in which they're spoken.
I lived in a (largely rural) department of France called Mayenne for a year. Old people there universally believe that they grew up speaking something called "patois mayennais" (let's translate this as "Mayennese dialect") before they had to learn French to get jobs in the city.
However, I can find very little reliable information about this Mayennese dialect on the internet, in French or English. There are a few "local color" type newspaper articles that reference it, but that's about it. French dialect maps I've seen don't mention Mayennese dialect at all, and claim that Mayenne spoke either Gallo or Angevin.
including some purported vocabulary, plus a few books that discuss it! Some of them discuss it as "bas-mainiot" or "patois du Bas-Maine", of which Wikipedia says "Il [Département de la Mayenne] correspond essentiellement au Bas-Maine, qui formait la moitié occidentale de la province du Maine"... I guess you're probably very familiar with these geographical designations, but I'm definitely not!
Google has a scan of a 1975 reprint of an 1899 book about "les parlers du Bas-Maine" which includes tons of references to speakers and lexical items observed in Mayenne.
(It's sad that some pages are missing from the preview... maybe Google algorithmically concluded that the book might still be in copyright because it was "published" in 1975.)
But it's true that a Wikipedia article isn't the same thing as finding a thriving language community online.
Growing up in the French side of the Pyrenees, I concur with the article. Traveling on the other side of the border was barely special. The road signs would have a dialect very similar to our own Gascon, and there was no need to switch to Spanish.
One thing not mentioned in this article is how much these dialects have been losing ground over the past 50 years. My grand-mother spoke almost exclusively in her local dialect (Bearnais), my mom spoke it with my dad when they didn't want me to understand, and I barely know a few words. There are schools and local initiatives to revive the old languages. The reality is that less and less people speak the dialects. Most people stick to Spanish, French, and are now expected to know English well.
If you'd like to see a few of the lesser-known Romance languages in action (especially from Italy, because that's apparently a strength of this company -- I think they're based there, judging by their motto Non solo parole 'not just words'), take a look around Logos Quotes, where they used to translate a different quotation every day into as many languages as they could manage. There are a LOT of Romance languages out there!
Italian itself has an interesting spectrum of shades seeing as how it was "standardized" a relatively short time ago (mid 19th century), at the same time there was massive emigration from the country, with the result that the Italian spoken by the expats is quite different from the standard Italian.
And because of its geographical position and history, indigenous languages show influences coming from worlds as geographically distant as Arabia and China.
The term of art is "language shift", but it's nearly always a case of internal colonialism. Nearly any time you see a linguistic minority abandon its language for the majority language, you can bet that the government was taking kids away from their parents and beating and shaming them if they dared utter the language their parents spoke to them as babies.
This is true sometimes but not "nearly any time". For example rate of Spanish fluency in Arizona among second-generation residents is much lower than among their parents, without any kidnapping and beating going on.
The situation can be a bit different with 2nd generation immigrants, especially based on the parents' attitudes towards English. I do see occasional reports in the US of punishing and shaming students for speaking non-English languages, though, and many Americans are very hostile to any accommodation of languages other than English (Spanish signage, "press 1 for English"). And there is a clear, unstated language policy in the US of making immigrant children into English speakers (with no regard to preserving/increasing their mother-tongue proficiency), as well as a general policy of making everyone English-language monolinguals (if we wanted bilingual kids we would have bilingual elementary schools).
Minority-language communities really refers to communities where there is a long, stable history of intergenerational language transmission, and where functional bilingualism is possible or likely. Such as any Native American language, or something like Louisiana French.
A sane educational policy in this case would be something like "most instruction is conducted in the majority language, but kids aren't punished or shamed for speaking their mother tongue at recess, and there's maybe even an occasional minorty-language literature class".
Certainly plenty of shaming, though, if you've seen how many Arizonans feel about Hispanics, and heard the rhetoric about immigrants who "refuse to assimilate" (by failing to act, dress, and speak exactly like the locals).
Often times it's due to economic reasons. I believe there was a study (in this case, accents, but possibly works similarly with dialects) of some sort some decades ago which noted that people with Cape Cod accents found it easier to find jobs in a city not theirs (Boston), if they adopted some of the city language --and I may be mixing findings, it depended on the job sought. For some jobs accent didn't matter, for others it did matter.
I wonder how different / similar these romance languages are, compared to the reference frame I have: German dialects. German dialects can be mutually unintelligible, young germans typically know standard german and thus have a "common ground" for communication, also they usually speak a form of the dialect that is already considerably closer to the standard "high" language of newspapers and televisions, than what their grandparents or their great grandparents speak / spoke. Sometimes (typically in documentaries), they even subtitle dialect speakers.
So yeah, I wonder if depending on the context, the classification of languages and dialects differs.
Well there's a notorious adage, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy".
I think academics shy away from attempting to make the distinction except when extremely obvious, and instead talk directly about quantitative measurements and feature overlaps (isogloss is a search term that may be useful here). Dialect/language lines will often have completely different shapes when you look at different distinctions in lexicon, phonetics, syntax, etc. If I had to generalize though, in a particular language "chain", linguists seem to identify an order of magnitude more separable languages than non-academics do. (Consider the cases of huge macrolanguages like "Chinese" & "Arabic", or even "Italian", whose singular labels by laypeople are pretty universally rejected.)
It doesn't help that people are generally unaware of the incredible political pressure most nations put on presenting a singular linguistic front, when the truth is much much more muddled. As a result, the common parlance distinction between dialect & language often verges on meaningless.
My experience is that it's possible for people to understand each other. But the farther you go and the more difficult it gets. It's mostly the accent and the word endings that change.
My family is from Aveyron/Tarn (near Albi). We can understand texts from Frederic Mistral, written in Provençal (near Marseille) even though it sounds weird. My uncle says he had some success speaking Occitan in the Italian Piedmomd. However neither my parents nor my uncle understand any of the Catalan spoken in Barcelona. (I do, but I'm fluent in Spanish and not in Occitan...)
I think my parents (born in the 1950s) are the last generation fluent in Occitan. In France, even though it's now being taught as a second language, it's essentially gone. My mom told me she used to be punished for using Occitan at school whether in the classroom or during recess. I remember when I was a child, the farmers used to speak it among themselves (or more likely to their elders). The same people today only really speak French, even among themselves.
Italian dialects can be mutually unintelligible too. TV and internal migrations consolidated standard Italian to the point that local dialects are basically dead in some areas (for example Milan) but there are people in smaller cities that are actively bilingual, their dialect and Italian.
My father remembers that they could tell the town of origin of somebody by little variations of accent and vocabulary, over distances of less than 10 km in a well populated and well connected area centered around Milan.
> local dialects are basically dead in some areas (for example Milan)
Uela, you have to consider that Milanese dialects basically overlapped modern Italian already - as standardized on the works of Alessandro Manzoni, a writer from Milan. The accents still survive though, and even a few words.
It's incredibly funny to observe language in motion. At one point in the '90s, a few rappers living in the city I come from (Bologna) popularized a bunch of local slang in their songs. Nowadays, youngsters from Milan use that slang as native and strongly believe it originated there.
Do they use it correctly? Example: the roman "sti c...i" is very often used with the opposite meaning of the original here, that is: as a surprise, probably by guessing.
And by the way, "bagaglio" always surprises people here.
For the non Italians, among the other things the Milan accent basically swaps the open and closed e sounds. I have to change the way I say spaghetti when I'm outside region :-)
> My father remembers that they could tell the town of origin of somebody by little variations of accent and vocabulary.
I have seen this in Ireland where upon meeting someone new, one Irish person would guess the other person as coming from a small village (of a few hundred people).
This is somewhat true, but many of the accents are not as strong anymore.
The Irish language itself is interesting. Before standardisation, I'm told the Irish of the north of the island was more similar to Scots Gaelic than that of the south. Many of the regional dialects have disappeared now though.
Amazingly, up here north of Germany, in the tiny land of Denmark, Danish dialects manges to be mutually incomprehensible. Or at least they did, up until about a generation ago. Going to the northenmost or westernmost regions, I find no shortage of people I simply do not understand. On the other hand, a lot of Norwegian - officially a different language - appears to me like a distinct, but unproblematic dialect.
Interestingly, in this small, flat, homogenous country, linguistic faultlines can still be persistent and razor sharp, clearly reflecting population boundaries from way, way back - the viking age and earlier. Travel some thirty kilometers between some neighbouring major towns, and hear the tone of spoken language change abruptly about midway.
Norway was ruled from Denmark, so the danish ruling class in Norway probably spoke a similar dialect to yours. (See bokmål, basically danish style Norwegian.)
Norway has dialects VERY different from each other - these were used as stock for an attempt at standardization of non-danish-inspired language, which they call "nynorsk". Which is confusing, because it's basically a mix of OLDER norse dialects. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivar_Aasen
In Norway, the very distinct local dialects makes sense, because people were separated by high mountain ridges. (The same story goes for Greek dialects, but I digress.)
So it IS indeed interesting that Denmark, which is very flat, still has these sharp boundaries. :)
Everything you said. And yes, obviously I'm thinking primarily of Norwegian bokmål. Although I do comprehend at least som spoken fjeldnorsk. Having had a Faroese girlfriend, and some exposure to Icelandic does help :)
Rhythm and intonation of spoken Danish shifts markedly down towards the southern islands. No difficulty of compehension whatsoever, but it's clearly a dialectal belt with a history quite different from neighbouring parts of Sjælland (or "Zealand"). I'd love to see a genetic mapping of the local communities. I'm almost certain that lots of corresponding patterns would turn up.
It probably compares very similarly to the German dialect situation in that it is a dialect continuum. The dialects become less intelligible as geographic distance increases.
The article alludes to this at the end:
"Romance linguistics teaches that by walking across the former Roman Empire from Sicily to Normandy, every pair of neighboring villages can understand each other."
"Language" vs. "dialect" is also very tricky because politics often come into play to demarcate the two. The classic saying is that a language has an army and a navy whereas dialects do not (i.e.: languages are associated with nation states).
And the classic example is that of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish which due to high mutual intelligibility are often linguistically thought of as dialects of one language. However, each one belongs to a nation state whose inhabitants would likely often disagree that they speak "a mere dialect".
Edit: Stepped away from the computer for a long while before actually posting, hence the similarity to the answer below.
All of these various languages that sprang fort from Latin after the dissolution of the Roman Empire illustrate just how much the former Roman world shrank into small kingdoms.
It would be interesting to construct a many-dimensional language map of vectors. You could add two spherical (or three cartesian!) dimensions to your word vectors, and interpolate languages based on the known data.
Computational interpolation between english dialects, or chinese languages, or indian languages, sounds like a heck of a lot of fun.
And actually, with good enough data, you could probably shove in some text and figure out where it was written (or at least where the writer learned to write) within pretty good margins.
It's imperfect, but you can travel with a very soft "language gradient": Extremaduran -> Portuguese -> Galician -> Asturian -> Castillian (Spanish) -> Valencian -> Catalan -> Aragones -> Occitan -> French ...
Each individual step is pretty easy, but it adds up to a huge difference.
Unfortunately, there isn't a great analogue for English. You can kinda construct a small jump by looking at Scots, but it ends quickly and is (at least to my ears) a jump on par with Portuguese to Galician.