Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 August 26

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August 26

Evolution

Is the Spanish spoken in South America the same as the Spanish spoken in Spain, or has this evolved over the centuries? One would assume that it has in the aspect that if we look at English from let say 300 years ago, it is very different from spoken English today. One would assume that a language developing over time naturally would do so differently in different parts of the world. I would therefore assume that Mexican Spanish and Chilean Spanish differ too. The same applies for French in Franceand that in Canada. Also, if my assumption is correct that there are subtle or overt differences between these, then why is English so uniform between the USA, Australia, South Africa and England? "If not the Queens English, it's just broken English". I note that Afrikaans and Dutch are dissimilar to such as extent that they can't really be understood by each other without careful attention, hence the hypothesis. So to clarify, are these so different that they can't be easily understood? Thanks

"A Spanish speaker from Madrid may have initial difficulty understanding Cuban or Argentine Spanish, just as an American does Australian or Scottish English, but that’s as far as the problem goes. One’s ear adjusts pretty quickly". The mutual intelligibility of Spanish dialects. Alansplodge (talk) 15:54, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Note also that there is mutual intelligibility between many Romance languages. Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in Europe says that Spanish can be understood (or at least 57% of it) by French, Italian, Portuguese and even Romanian speakers (p.13). Alansplodge (talk) 16:04, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Yep. Anecdotal evidence: with strong French (thanks largely to Astérix), rusty Esperanto, even rustier Latin, and such bits of Italian and Castilian that I happened to acquire casually, I have read articles in Catalan and Portuguese with some confidence that I understood them. —Tamfang (talk) 22:08, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Other contributors will know much more than me about the variation between different Spanish dialects and varieties, but I will venture to say that my Chilean Spanish is perfectly easily understood in Spain. Apart from vocabulary, the major difference I noticed when I sat my GCSEs and was tested on European Spanish, is the use of the informal second person plural, which was entirely absent from the language I learnt from my grandmother.

Although I'm not sure I agree with you that the various Englishes you refer to are so uniform as you imply, I would suggest that one reason why they have diverged less than you might be expecting (and no doubt one could think of many others) is that the Anglophone world has remained in more or less continuous contact by sea, and more recently by air, for centuries. To quote our article, "Divergent evolution is typically exhibited when two populations become separated by a geographic barrier...". This refers of course to the evolution of animals, but I submit that a similar principle applies to language – there simply hasn't been the necessary separation which might lead to more marked divergence. How such an approach would apply to the case of Dutch/Afrikaans is beyond my knowledge.

Our article Language change may be of interest to you, if you haven't already explored it. Quīsquīlliān (talk) 16:19, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Personal anecdote here, so not the same as actual data, but my experience confirms the sources that Alansplodge provided. Many years ago, attending graduate school in Chicago, I had a roommate from Colombia, and he tried to explain to me about the different Spanish dialects. He said that most of the South American dialects were fairly close to his Colombian dialect, and the difference seemed about as different as one could expect various dialects of Southern American English; i.e. some differences between say Georgia and Texas and Alabama, but still obviously closely related. He had particular disdain for Caribbean dialects, finding them the most difficult to understand, especially Puerto Rican Spanish, and he said that Castilian Spanish sounded stuffy and overly proper. But the impression I got was that all of those varieties of Spanish were certainly not of a wider variation than various English dialects. Wikipedia has an article titled Spanish dialects and varieties which states "The different dialects and accents do not block cross-understanding among the educated. Meanwhile, the basilects have diverged more." A basilect is a low-status dialect. In other words, the "standard" or "high register" varieties are generally fully understandable between the countries, while dialects associated with lower-socioeconomic status show wider variation or pretty much what you see in English. --Jayron32 16:24, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I have friends in London who were unable to understand the dialogue in Rab C. Nesbitt, a sitcom set in Glasgow (I was able to translate because I had a Glaswegian grandmother). Alansplodge (talk) 19:28, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

I mentioned here years ago that when I bought the CD of The Social Network, I started watching it but after 5 minutes I had to stop it, turn on the subtitles, then start again. It wasn't so much the dialect per se, though, since I've been watching American movies and TV most of my life. It was the speed with which they all spoke. A speed that, for me, totally cancelled out all understanding. It may as well have been Urdu or Welsh. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:59, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

That's Aaron Sorkin more than American English. The director David Fincher shot it very much like a Thomas Schlamme-directed Aaron Sorkin work, with heavy use of walk and talk style and extremely fast, stylized dialogue. It's a trademark of the Sorkin style. --Jayron32 12:01, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

He's welcome to it. There's no way I'm the only person who had this problem. What we had here was a huge failure to communicate. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:40, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

I've heard mention of efforts to codify a Neutral Spanish dialect for use in international media, but have not found solid information about it. —Tamfang (talk) 22:13, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

One relevant article is pluricentric language... -- AnonMoos (talk) 00:45, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

We can take some liberty to consider languages as biological entities, in both fields, interaction is used as one of many parameters for defining the boundaries between distinct entities, in language mutual intelligibility is a common test for categorizing languages, so is reproduction with viable offspring in biology, it's worth noting that in both cases, the entities become more similar by sharing and adopting their differences. In biology, Allopatric speciation is a mode of speciation (branching from one into two species) that occurs when populations become geographically isolated from each other to an extent that prevents or interferes with gene flow, the allopatric event with spanish would be the Age of Discovery of the New World, in this sense this analysis pertains to English and Portuguese as well. Flow between populations wasn't prevented, just reduced, and it occurred without interruption over a large span of time, albeit with a clear direction which allows us to consider the European languages as closer to the common ancestor, precolumbine spanish, which we must of course consider to be extinct.

Our languages of course evolve over shorter timespans than do our bodies, so 400 years of total separation might have been enough for mutual intelligibility to be lost, therefore the reason spanish speakers are able to understand each other across continents, is because we have exercised that ability over the course of the years. This is different from considering whether the modern dialects understand pre-columbine spanish, as this would be a third extinct dialect, the answer to that different question is, again, yes most readers can understand pre-columbine texts, with some effort, on the third and fourth question of whether a modern Spain speaker or a modern Mexican speaker could understand a 15th century farmer, we can be certain that the speaker from Spain has better odds, but generally speaking a language is harder than reading it, due to the impossibility of empirically testing this, definite answers will be harder to come by.--TZubiri (talk) 04:45, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

The better educated a population is the slower the language will evolve. If children learn their own language in a formal way in school then that will inhibit the drift of the language away from the current state. A thousand years ago Old English changed to Middle English in just two centuries, due to large numbers of immigrants arriving from Scandinavia who spoke Old Norse, which is very similar to Old English, but still different enough to cause the newcomers not be able to master Old English, and when you mix slightly different rules, they end up canceling each other out. See here for some details. Count Iblis (talk) 06:42, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Count Iblis -- we have the Middle English Creole hypothesis article, which has some problems (see the talkpage of that article). Iceland has had high literacy for centuries, which has kept Icelandic morphology conservative (but has done little to prevent a number of changes in pronunciation)... AnonMoos (talk) 11:02, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

The important factor in the case of Iceland is that it is an island - i.e. isolated. That is why the language has changed little from Old Norse. For the same reason the language of Sardinia has changed little from Latin. Portugal is not an island but it has an extensive coastline and inland it is ringed by mountains. Hence the language is little changed from Latin. 2A00:23C0:7980:3F00:CDAD:6AF2:6034:DF10 (talk) 12:42, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

This is generally true. Language change tends to be correlated with contacts between population group; in broad strokes the more contact between more groups of speakers, the more a language community will change over time, and the more isolated a language community, the more conservative its language will be as it is passed down. There are several isolated communities on the east coast of the US who speak varieties of languages that are much closer to the varieties of Tudor and Stuart English that were spoken when those communities were settled than they are to any modern dialect on either side of the pond, groups like the Hoi Toiders in places like Ocracoke, North Carolina and Tangier, Virginia along isolated fishing communities in the Outer Banks and Chesapeake Bay. --Jayron32 14:54, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

common bilingualisms

We have List of languages by number of native speakers and List of languages by total number of speakers. But I wonder whether enough is known about bilingualism to rank pairs of languages by number of bilingual speakers. I imagine English/Spanish and Hindi/Telugu, for example, are high on the list. --Tamfang (talk) 22:25, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Part of the problem is defining what is a distinct language. While something like English/Spanish bilingualism is a rather clear dividing line, the distinctions between languages, dialects, and registers aren't always very clear and determining if a person is bilingual is determining to what extent the two types of speech they can switch between represent distinct languages or merely varieties of the same language. --Jayron32 13:05, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

s/are/is not/, perhaps? —Tamfang (talk) 02:58, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Oops. So corrected. Some people are bilingual. I'm not even semilingual. Good catch. --Jayron32 14:28, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

If I'm very lucky, none of those doubtful cases are populous enough to crack the top ten. ;) —Tamfang (talk) 22:37, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Mandarin/Wu is likely to beat Hindi/Telugu just extrapolating from total numbers of speakers of the smaller language (80 million native speakers vs 70 million).

However, I suspect English/Spanish is going to win. Taking a similarly back of envelope approach, the US has around 50 million native or second language speakers of Spanish. Let's assume they all speak English as well. Add to that around 16 million English speakers in Mexico (and again assuming they all speak Spanish). Apparently around 28% of Spaniards speak English, and assuming that all of them can also speak Castilian Spanish or something close enough, that's more than 10 million. You are already getting very close to Mandarin/Wu based on three countries, and in addition there are likely to be a significant number of English/Spanish speakers in every English- and Spanish-speaking country. --49.255.185.235 (talk) 02:39, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Having said that, there are 125 million English speakers in India, and it's likely that a large majority of them can also speak Hindi, so English/Hindi surely wins. --49.255.185.235 (talk) 02:45, 31 August 2020 (UTC)