LANGUAGE VARIATIONS

Are today's languages once dialects of another language?

It could be argued that most languages spoken today were once simply dialects of another language.  When a single people migrates in separate directions and the resulting groups no longer maintain close communication with one another, then dialects emerge and in time can evolve into separate languages (cf. Indo-European).  

The Romance languages are an example for this development. Originally, French, Spanish, and Italian were very much alike. They were all variations of Latin, and a citizen of the late Roman period would have regarded them as dialects of the same Latin. Today, the Romance languages are much more distinct. We can still see that they are closely related to each other, but they are definitely not dialects. These are national variations of the Romance language family - completely separate languages that are genetically related (more on language families in an upcoming module.)

Map of the Romance Languages, including Italian, French, Spanish, and Latin (Italy)

The many peoples that inhabit Germany, for example, the Frisians, Saxons, Bavarians, and many more each constitute a distinct group of people. But unlike the different language groups of the Romance languages, the varieties of German spoken from the north to the south of Germany are only regional variations of the same language. The variations remain regional because the German peoples have maintained close ties with one another throughout history. 

Map of the Germanic Languages, including German

In many areas it is the geography that allows a speech community to either merge or diverge. The vast mountain ridge of the Pyrenees dividing France and Spain, for example, separated the speech communities so that their linguistic development diverged. As you can see, languages distinguish themselves from one another or they may merge. Presently, the dialects of the German tongue are merging, for example. Some of its rare dialects have even become extinct.

So when people are cut off from each other--either by geography, by ethnic separatism, or by political separation-- which group tends to change the least and retain the older forms of a language?  It turns out that the language spoken by the group that is most isolated from the mainstream tends to change the least (for example, Appalachian English is most like 17th century English.)  We'll look at the history of language in a coming module.