I intuitively know this, kind of like I intuitively know what a species is. I also accept that language is imperfect and there’s gonna be messy bits where things don’t fit right (again, like a definition of a biological species).
But if linguists and other languagey folks were to put a group of English speakers on another planet and let them live there for x amount of time, going back to study their language from time to time, what markers would they look for to say “this is now not a group with new slang, this is a group with a new dialect”? And “this is not the same language as the English spoken on Earth”?
In: 41
In my lifetime I went from speaking two languages to speaking like 6 without doing anything. Sincerely, someone born in Yugoslavia.
Also fun fact, standard Croatian and standard serbian are almost identical while the dialects within each country sound like completely different languages compared to themselves.
Latest Answers