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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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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