The chain-of-dialects.

Piotr writes:

The dialects of Spanish and Portugal form a continuous dialect network rather than a neat family tree, hence the problems we encounter trying to label them on a linguistic basis. They've never separated for good, so to speak. If we say that Galician is a separate language, it is out of respect to the Galicians' sense of linguistic identity, not because any linguistic criteria force us to do so. ALL the Romance languages go back to provincial dialects of Latin, so if you travelled back half a millennium you'd cover one-third of the distance to the common source. Quite certainly the mutual comprehensibility of the "languages" and "dialects" of the area was far greater then.

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'A continuous dialect network' is usually spoken of in the literature as a chain-of-dialects. The Romance chain-of-dialects is the classic one, but you find it also in Germanic and Slavic, as well as places such as Africa and India. The phenomenon is easy enough to explain. You follow the road from village-to-village, noting the linguistic change as you go. The villages close to each other usually speak what is essentially an identical dialect, but as you move forward, changes are noted, and the further you move, the greater the cumulative changes become, when compared to your starting point. At a certain point, the chain of dialects differentiate sufficiently for those at the extremes to be called separate languages.

If you move up the east coast of Spain from Gibralter, you encounter a number of Iberian dialects (as well as Standard Castilian). By the time you reach Barcelona, you encounter a different language (Catalan). When you cross the border into France and head towards Narbonne, besides encountering standard French (which is indeed a separate language) you also encounter Occitan -- which is not that different from Catalan. This chain-of-dialects continues right around the Mediterranean coast of France until Italy, where Occitan is gone but Italic Romance dialects are encountered.

Now. The Romance chain-of-dialects has been greatly weakened in modern times because of universal education in the standard language of the respective countries, and more recently, by greatly increased mobility and the ubiquity of television. Nonetheless, it is still there.

The progressively greater differences you encounter in a chain-of-dialects demonstrates how distinct languages emerge. Primarily, the process is one of gradual differentiation, usually propelled by changes in phonology. In other cases, and usually less strongly, the influence from another language is felt.

The rate of differentiation, the time-depth necessary for such changes to manifest themselves varies greatly. If a language is left alone by itself, and is restrained to a modest geographic range, it can maintain itself seemingly indefinitely with relatively minimal changes, as with Lithuanian. In other cases, immense changes can occur in a relatively short period: Late Old English is separated from early Modern English by only 350 years.

Mark Odegard.
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