Dialect Continuum Puns

Learners often list a reason for learning a language as gaining access to other languages. I'm curious to know how often people take advantage of this in practice!

• If you have learned Spanish, do you often watch Portuguese shows?
• If you know Swedish, do you regularly seek out Norwegian films?
• If you are learning Czech, do you read Slovak novels?
• etc.

What are your experiences? Do you exploit your dialect continuum advantages?

I've been wanting to know that for a while since I wanna do that myself,so is there any method or thing that can help creating those? And more generally what is your method to create a full fledged dialect and not just an accent?

That is, what series of varieties can one connect such that each step in the chain is basically mutually intelligible with the next and the varieties at the farthest ends are most different?

There's "Scandinavian", Danish, Norwegian and Swedish which many see more as dialects of "Scandinavian" rather than languages, because of how extremely similar our languages are and how effortlessly we communicate with each other (except when listening to Danish. They fucked up their pronounciation big time). There are dialects in these countries that are more different to one another than the "main" languages themselves.

We share like 95% of the vocabulary, and the 5% difference is mainly Swedish where we see the 5% as outdated and switched them out, but where they still exist in our vocabulary. They are just old fashioned. Danish and Norwegian bokmål are more similar, because of history.

What other areas in the world have this?

I've seen people claim Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, but as far as I understand it, there are still a bit more differences between these, even if they are very similar, just not quiiiite as effortlessly similar.

How about Czech and Slovak? Serbian and Bosnian? Russian and Ukrainian?

This is not a shitpost and I'm using my real account for this. I recently saw a comment that I brushed away as typical nationalistic badling but I started to think about really whether the classification of Serbo-Croatian as a language is accepted in mainstream linguistics. If anybody has any sources I'd love to give them a read.

edit: fixed wording

I was wondering if anyone did to the Iberian Romance Languages what Haiman and Benincá did for the Romance languages of the alps in their The Rhaeto Romance Languages
I'm astonished by the quantity of variations and dialects that exist in the region!
Thank you all beforehand!

I have now more or less finished my first real conlang and I'm planning on creating a dialect continuum based on this language, comparable to the Frisian language/s, however I have absolutely no Idea how to start, what to change, how much to change and how to do it in a natural way. Has anyone any tipps/personal experience?

Also if anyone can recommend some articles or yt videos, that would be of great help too.

Hi y’all, the other day I made this post comparing Føfiskisk (my “flagship” project) and my latest creation Ostmål. The two languages form a dialect continuum collectively known as Norrmål, which represents the northernmost languages descended from Common Hominid, itself descended from a more ancient Common Humanoid (which is a “humanization” of the Divine language of the gods). Føfiskisk represents the dialects spoken on the mainland of the continent, while the dialect of Ostmål presented here is spoken as the prestige dialect on the largest and easternmost of the Great Islands, known to most humans as Ostey. On the other islands lies a range of dialects that, more or less, represent a gradient between more Ostmål-like dialects in the east and more Føfiskisk-like versions in the west.

Ostmål possesses all the characteristic phonetic features of Norrmål:

· the u-umlaut^(1), by which vowels are rounded by following /u w/ in the next syllable: compare Ost. hånn [ˈhonː], Fø. håndr [ˈhɔndr̩] with Manspell hand [ˈhænd] and Meerspell hann [ˈhɑnː]

· the reassignment of the [g ɣ] allophones of /g/ to [j] before close-front vowels and [g] elsewhere

· a “labialization” of hv /xʷ/ to [ɸʷ], then merging into [f]; some Føfiskisk dialects, such as the Southern "Rett Føfiskisk" dialect of the Føfiskisk ruling class, instead realize it as [ʍ]

· word-final lenition of stop-consonants /p b t d k g/ to [f v θ ð x ɣ]

· fricativization of the first element of geminated voiceless stops, e.g. /tt/ to [θt]

However, Ostmål displays several features that distinguish it from its mainland and western insular relatives:

· an early, complete merger of /ɹ/ and /r/ into [r]: compare Old Ost. rúnar [ˈrʊːnər] with Old Fø. rúnaʀ [ˈruːnɑɹ]; Fø. merges /ɹ/ with /r/ much later in its history, but the /ɹʲ/ and /rʲ/ allophones remain distinct

· heavy reduction of atonic vowels towards [ə ɵ̞], preserving roundness; /ɑ/ reduces to [ɐ] in most dialects, and /æ/ is generally something like [ɛ] or [ɜ]

· heavy word-internal lenition: compare Ost. ubban [ˈʊv͡bn̩] with Fø. uppan [ˈuɸ͡pɑn], Ost. brjaga [ˈbri͜ɑgɐ] with Fø. breka [ˈbðeka]

· vocalization of coda /r ɹ/ to /ə/: compare Ost. liena [ˈli͜ənɐ] with Fø. liʀna [ˈlirna]

· lenition of /θ/ and

I'm thinking of something like a creole continuum but in both directions.

The Romance languages, Germanic languages, and Indo-Aryan languages all form dialect continuums of their own, but aren't they all Indo-European? What prevents the existence of a Romance-Germanic dialect continuum across Western Europe and have creoles between these language families formed at any point?

I'm just wondering whether there are dialect continuums out there spanning multiple dozens of countries or even continents. It seems to me that it could happen within a sub-branch of Malayo-Polynesian languages where there isn't really a lot of divergence between the languages but they do cover a lot of geographical distance.

As a native Spanish speaker, I find it relatively easy to understand speakers from any Spanish-speaking country, from Mexico to Argentina, including Spain. But I've seen languages like German or Dutch, where dialects far away within the same country differ a lot greater than dialects in Spanish. Why could this be?

I've heard that the differences between some dialects of German are so great that they are not intelligible to people not versed in both. There are differences between Low German and High German (my aunt speaks Dutch and she can fully understand Low German but only understands fragments of standard German), and also within High German as well e.g. Berliner German, Swiss German, Bavarian, Yiddish, Luxembourgish (the two latter of which are sometimes referred to as separate languages) etc.

I've looked at the differences between dialects of hochdeutsch and platdeutsch and they seem similar to variations between Hindi and Punjabi, or between various Eskimo-Aleut languages. But I don't actually speak German so I don't know.

What do you think personally about the differences between the German dialects, are they many close languages under one big tent, or are the differences overstated? I know that there is no true linguistic line between dialect and separate language, and that it comes down to society and also "ships and navies", so I was wondering if some German speakers could lend their thoughts to this question?

For example, if the Germanic languages were to fade into Romance without any clear line of demarcation. It sounds highly unlikely, but seeing as how languages such as English and Albanian can stand with both feet in different linguistic branches, I wonder if such a spectrum of languages ever existed.

The closest possibility I can think of is with the Jbala dialects of northern Morocco, where the Berber continuum crosses with Arabic. However I don't know enough about it to make any bold claims.

Is the border between Denmark and Germany also a linguistic border between the two subgroups of the Germanic languages?

Dialects in Norway vary from region to region and, because of the existence of Nynorsk and Bokmål, they can vary greatly; the north end of the continuum has very little in common with the southern end. Can we therefore say they are living in a diglossic situation despite them being part of the same language?

I've heard that a lot of local dialects had existed prior to 19th century modern communication. Illiterate peasants who didn't travel more than 10 miles from their village, couldn't have spoken exactly the same as those who could read and traveled abroad, such as merchants and nobles. Basically, this is how new languages could develop based on other language groups - the more isolated people live, the more new dialects start to spring into being.

People just had their own way of talking to each other, and lack of peer pressure from the outside world would lead them to act nuanced. As villagers became more connected later on, language became more uniform, especially with the introduction of literacy and writing.

My guess is that the nobility in northern england simply stuck to their way of communicating, and it made its way into writing, such that more uniform standards sprung up.

However, this video somewhat asserts that dialectical conformity existed into the medieval era.

I'd like to see what this community's opinions on the dialect continuum are?

The case for the locales of england and how somewhere like france or china was quite different - that's interesting to me, and so any extra knowledge would be helpful. Thanks.

I will be DMing a very homebrew version of d&d (very simplified/our own rules) and I'm including languages in the campaign. I have two base languages that are meant to be counterparts. One is the mother of a whole language family, the other is a dialect continuum. Does anyone have tips on how best to go about making Descendants/Dialects?

Let's say 2 otherwise mutually unintelligible, but related languages developed a pidgin language. Would that count in a dialect continuum?

Has anyone else wondered why there are apparently no intermediate dialects between West Germanic and North Germanic? On the Jutland Peninsula today is spoken Danish and then in Schleswig-Holstein German. Schleswigsch and Holsteinisch were the Low Saxon dialects historically spoken in Schleswig and Holstein respectively, and then the historical dialect related to Danish, Jysk (Jutlandic), was spoken north of there in the Jutland Peninsula. Nether Schlewigsch nor Sønderjysk seem to be close enough to one another, from my reading, to form the intermediate links of a West/North continuum.

My present understanding is that the Danes arrived on the Jutland Peninsula after the Anglo-Saxons had already settled in Great Britain, coming from Zealand and Scania. According to Bede, the Jutes settled in Kent, the Isle of Wight, and Southhampton, so the Kentish dialect of Old English along with Old Norse may be candidates for closest links.

It is generally thought that there was a fair degree of mutual intelligibility among Old English, Old Frisian, Old Norse, Old Low Saxon, Old Low Franconian, and Old High German. I suppose then this would make Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Low Saxon the closest dialect neighbors to Old Norse.

Is there any one particular historical dialect in West Germanic that can be considered closest to North Germanic?

Have there ever been any studies about dialect continua where the researchers literally went to every town in a dialect continuum and tried to understand the dialect, and then compared the next town over?

So for example, is the Spanish in Northern Argentina closer to its neighboring region in Paraguay/Bolivia or closer to Southern Argentina? Is there a clear line of dialect differences on these national borders?

I've heard that the differences between some dialects of German are so great that they are not intelligible to people not versed in both. There are differences between Low German and High German (my aunt speaks Dutch and she can fully understand Low German but only understands fragments of standard German), and also within High German as well e.g. Berliner German, Swiss German, Bavarian, Yiddish, Luxembourgish (the two latter of which are sometimes referred to as separate languages) etc. I've looked at the differences between dialects of hochdeutsch and platdeutsch and they seem similar to variations between Hindi and Punjabi, or between various Eskimo-Aleut languages. But I don't actually speak German so I don't know.

What do you think personally about the differences between the German dialects, are they many close languages under one big tent, or are the differences overstated? I know that there is no true linguistic line between dialect and separate language, and that it comes down to society and also "ships and navies", so I was wondering if some German speakers could lend their thoughts to this question?