Dialect continuum
[3] Dialect continua typically occur in long-settled agrarian populations, as innovations spread from their various points of origin as waves.
[6] A common tool in these maps is an isogloss, a line separating areas where different variants of a particular feature predominate.
[7] In a dialect continuum, isoglosses for different features are typically spread out, reflecting the gradual transition between varieties.
[10] Standard varieties may be developed and codified at one or more locations in a continuum until they have independent cultural status (autonomy), a process the German linguist Heinz Kloss called ausbau.
During the time of the former Socialist Republic of Macedonia, a standard was developed from local varieties of Eastern South Slavic, within a continuum with Torlakian to the north and Bulgarian to the east.
The Romance area spanned much of the territory of the Roman Empire but was split into western and eastern portions by the Slav Migrations into the Balkans in the 7th and 8th centuries.
to consider them to be dialects of the same language, but the Insular ones (Faroese and Icelandic) are not immediately intelligible to the other North Germanic speakers.
Fragmentary areas of the Dutch-German border in which language change is more gradual than in other sections or a higher degree of mutual intelligibility is present still exist, such as the Aachen-Kerkrade area, but the historical chain in which dialects were only divided by minor isoglosses and negligible differences in vocabulary has seen a rapid and ever-increasing decline since the 1850s.
[29] Being based on widely separated dialects, the Dutch and German standards do not show a high degree of mutual intelligibility when spoken and only partially so when written.
[30][31] The Germanic dialects spoken on the island of Great Britain comprise areal varieties of English in England and of Scots in Scotland.
The western continuum of Romance languages comprises, from West to East: in Portugal, Portuguese; in Spain, Galician, Leonese or Asturian, Castilian or Spanish, Aragonese and Catalan or Valencian; in France, Occitan, Franco-Provençal, standard French and Corsican which is closely related to Italian; in Italy, Ligurian, Piedmontese, Lombard, Emilian, Romagnol, Italian Gallo-Picene, Venetian, Friulian, Ladin; and in Switzerland, Lombard and Romansh.
Focusing instead on the local Romance lects that pre-existed the establishment of national or regional standard languages, all evidence and principles point to Romania continua as having been, and to varying extents in some areas still being, what Charles Hockett called an L-complex, i.e. an unbroken chain of local differentiation such that, in principle and with appropriate caveats, intelligibility (due to sharing of features) attenuates with distance.
This is perhaps most evident today in Italy, where, especially in rural and small-town contexts, local Romance is still often employed at home and work, and geolinguistic distinctions are such that while native speakers from any two nearby towns can understand each other with ease, they can also spot from linguistic features that the other is from elsewhere.
In recent centuries, the intermediate dialects between the major Romance languages have been moving toward extinction, as their speakers have switched to varieties closer to the more prestigious national standards.
That has been most notable in France,[citation needed] owing to the French government's refusal to recognise minority languages,[32] but it has occurred to some extent in all Western Romance speaking countries.
From the perspective of linguistic features alone, only two Slavic (dialect) continua can be distinguished, namely North and South,[35][36][37] separated from each other by a band of non-Slavic languages: Romanian, Hungarian and German.
[38][39] It comprises, from West to East, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria.
An intermediate dialect linking western and eastern variations inevitably came into existence over time – Torlakian – spoken across a wide radius on which the tripoint of Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Serbia is relatively pivotal.
[50][51] Many intermediate dialects have become extinct or have died out leaving major gaps between languages such as in the islands of Rathlin, Arran or Kintyre[52] and also in the Irish counties of Antrim, Londonderry and Down.
The current Goidelic speaking areas of Ireland are also separated by extinct dialects but remain mutually intelligible.
Northeastern Neo-Aramaic, including distinct varieties spoken by both Jews and Christians, is a dialect continuum although greatly disrupted by population displacement during the twentieth century.
Western dialects of Persian show greater influence from Arabic and Oghuz Turkic languages,[citation needed] but Dari and Tajik tend to preserve many classical features in grammar and vocabulary.
[59] Geographically this continuum starts at the Balkans in the west with Balkan Turkish, includes Turkish in Turkey and Azerbaijani language in Azerbaijan, extends into Iran with Azeri and Khalaj, into Iraq with Turkmen, across Central Asia to include Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, to southern Regions of Tajikistan and into Afghanistan.
In the east it extends to the Republic of Tuva, the Xinjiang autonomous region in Western China with the Uyghur language and into Mongolia with Khoton.
[citation needed] Structurally, the Turkic languages are very close to one another, and they share basic features such as SOV word order, vowel harmony and agglutination.
[citation needed] The Indo-Aryan Prakrits also gave rise to languages like Gujarati, Assamese, Maithili, Bengali, Odia, Nepali, Marathi, Konkani and Punjabi.
[63] Unlike Europe, however, Chinese political unity was restored in the late 6th century and has persisted (with interludes of division) until the present day.
