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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] fortes|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dangerbird2|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingvaeonic_languages
[+] [-] personlurking|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 6t6t6t6|9 years ago|reply
There are two main dialects of the language (eastern and western) but their division is by geographic borders, rather than by administrative divisions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaverism
[+] [-] gumby|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|9 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] js2|9 years ago|reply
There are regional distinctions in word choice in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_vocabularies_of_Ameri...
And apparently even within CA itself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hella
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dom0|9 years ago|reply
Nope.
[+] [-] samch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unscaled|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] umanwizard|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] schoen|9 years ago|reply
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayennais
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.
https://books.google.fr/books?id=mcykCmekgioC
(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.
[+] [-] gabaix|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] schoen|9 years ago|reply
http://www.logosquotes.org/
[+] [-] JoeDaDude|9 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-capicola-became-gab...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10523661
[+] [-] panglott|9 years ago|reply
Occitan in 1860 was spoken by 39% of the population of France, and now has about 100k speakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha
[+] [-] umanwizard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] data_hope|9 years ago|reply
So yeah, I wonder if depending on the context, the classification of languages and dialects differs.
[+] [-] XaspR8d|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jackjeff|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pmontra|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] interfixus|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] herewulf|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vondur|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microcolonel|9 years ago|reply
Computational interpolation between english dialects, or chinese languages, or indian languages, sounds like a heck of a lot of fun.
[+] [-] schoen|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brithenig
(although that was manual, not computational)