From what ive observed (no real research just educated guessing) i understand that dialects change and evolve over time but when does a language become so different from its origin that 2 people whose languages derived from the same root cant communicate with each other?
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When communication stops being a factor, essentially.
The linguistic drift that would become several of the romance languages pre-dates the fall of fhe western Roman Empire, but it wasn’t until there wasn’t until the bureaucracy collapsed, trade and travel had to be dialed way the hell back because everyone needed to focus on their own survival that new slang stopped propagating as far and there wasn’t really any practical reason to keep up with people hundreds of kilometers away’s slang and culture, but there’s a bunch of communication with the villages a day’s travel by horse so you all develop the same kind of slang and in jokes.
Similarly, if we were somehow sent back to the iron age, in less than 100 years the people in los Angeles would be speaking an entirely different language than the people in New York would be speaking a different language from the people in England
It’s a good question.
The answer is that it’s not science. Languages are very fluid and are influenced by politics, societies, governments, and all these actors have their own arbitrary motivations when it comes to language and linguistics.
Take Serbo-Croatian for example. Mutually intelligeable, but war and ethnic conflicts have motivated the governments of these countries to declare that they are different languages.
On the other hand, in China, Mandarin Chinese has multiple dialects, some of which are not mutually intelligeable. Yet, for national unity the government has standardized the language and doesn’t recognize the dialects as separate.
As for the overall notion of languages. Look at continuum dialect. Like Romance languages, where you can walk from Portugal, to Northern France, than to Southern Italy and always have neighboring villages have a mutually intelligeable dialect, but no single language.
There’s also, Language groups, branches, and familles. Like the Indo-European languages that includes most European languages from greek, english, french, russian, as well as iranian and northern indian languages like hindi.
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