Re: Effects of Catastrophes on Language

It could be this: While a population is ruled by an educated literate
upperclass who speak the same language, education would keep the
upperclass in contact with the classical version of the language (e.g.
Sanskrit in India, Classical Arabic in Arabic-speaking Islam), and
that would filter down through the population and hinder language
evolution. When that upperclass is overthrown, that drag-anchor is
removed, the restraints are cut, and the language evolves faster.
Examples are:-

Malta. The Arabs conquereed Malta and imposed their language, but did
not manage to convery everybody to Ialam before the christian Knights
of St.John drive Islamic rule out forever. That cut Maltese Arabic off
from Islamic education, and after that the Maltese dialect of Arabic
evolved fast into a separate Maltese language, which (I think) is the
only Semitic language which is officially written in the Roman
alphabet.

India. The long period of Islamic oppression and systematic
destruction of (what a Muslim would call) kufr and kafir culture there
obliterated much of the old Sanskrit-learning Hindu iltelligentsia,
and I suspect that, after that, the common spoken languages evolved
faster from Prakrit and similar towards the modern languages such as
Hindi and Bengali etc.