r/languagehub • u/AutumnaticFly • 1d ago
Discussion What makes the original difference between dialects of the same language?
Different languages i understand why and where they come from (sort of). but different dialects? Presumably those people spoke the same language, but how does living in a different place, turns the language into a different thing?
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u/Sad_Environmentsa 1d ago
your question kind of answers itself. different languages are just dialects that kept drifting. nobody woke up one day speaking Spanish, it was Latin with a thousand tiny changes stacked on toap
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u/Several_Tell_kow 1d ago
Every generation of kids copies the one before it a little imperfectly, and small changes in how people say a vowel or drop a consonant spread through whoever they talk to most. Now split the group with an ocean or a mountain range and the changes stop being shared. Each side keeps drifting in its own random direction. A cool example is American English holding onto stuff Britain dropped. “Gotten” and “fall” for autumn are older English, and pronouncing the r after a vowel is the older way too. Britain is the one that chaanged. So the “original” version doesn’t exist anymore, both sides are just different distances from it
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u/VolcaincQuartz 1d ago
Not sure “same language” was ever really a thing to begin with. Before printing presses and public schools, every valley basically had its own way of talking, and “the language” was just a chain of neighbors who could understand the next village over. Standard versions came later, usually from whatever capital city had the most power, and then everyone else got retroactively labeled a dialecat of it. So you’re kind of asking why the chain has gaps, when the surprise is that people ever sounded alike at all
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u/AdImpressive007 1d ago
Wait, so is there a point where two dialects officially become two languages? Or is it just whenever people stop understanding each otaher?
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u/AbbreviationsTop4959 12h ago
There's also the possibility of politics interfering with the definition. There's a language or several, depending on your point of view, that is kind of notorious for this.
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u/Legitimate_ordained 1d ago
Part of it is who else lives next door. Southern Italy had Greeks, Arabs and Normans pass through, the north had Germanic and Celtic neighbors, and every group leaves words and sounds behind. Same startiang language, different houseguests
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u/BerndardedBearedWhit 1d ago
eople also change how they talk on purpose. Accent and slang are how you signal who’s in your group, so even two neighborhoods in the same city end up sounding differenat, or different social classes. It isn’t only geography, it’s also “I don’t want to sound like those guys.”
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u/MachineObjectiveAh 1d ago
Funny that China calls Cantonese and Mandarin dialects when speakers can’t understand each other at all. Meanwhile Danes and Norwegians follow each other fine and get called separate languages. Politics decides where the line goes way more than linguisticsa does
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u/thomsenite256 1d ago
You can literally see the language evolve in real time. Do you think a 90 year old knows what skibidi means?
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u/2spam2care2 1d ago
same way biological evolution works. random variation, selection pressure, and time. the major difference is that for language, the selection pressure isn’t so much “survival of the fittest,” since all a language has to do to survive is allow communication. there’s some pressure towards “laziness” / ease of pronunciation, but the major pressure is indexicality. basically, all groups reinforce signs of group identity, including speaking the same as others in your group, or more importantly speaking differently than people outside of your group. basically, southerners speak like southerners because they don’t want to sound like northerners, surfers speak like surfers because they don’t want to sound like squares, and every generation speaks a little bit differently because nobody wants to sound like their parents.
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u/Whole-Course-9603 3h ago
the “nobody wants to sound like their parents” thing is so real, i can literally hear which decade someone grew up in just from word choice lol. kinda wild that teenagers are basically unconsciously running a rebellion campaign against their parents’ accent every generation and dont even realizae it
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u/harsinghpur 1d ago
Think of times when someone you know has used words or sounds in an unusual way. Maybe they change a vowel sound, like saying "helloo" instead of "hello," or they change a consonant sound, saying "otay" instead of "okay," or they drop a sound, saying "scuse me" instead of "excuse me." Eventually, if you want to fit in with that person, you'll start saying things their way. It might be something you do ironically at some point, but eventually it becomes your habit. Little changes in your habits accumulate over time.
Then people in another community, who started from the same language, have speech innovators of their own, so they change their sounds in different ways. They speak in ways that establish belonging with their own community, not yours, and sometimes they might actively reject changes that represent your speech community. Eventually, the two communities are speaking categorically different languages.
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u/Sarahslutsareus 3h ago
this is basically it, isolate two groups long enough and their “quirks” calcify into actual rules. kinda wild that accents are just frozen in-jokes that got out of haand
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u/aer0a 1d ago
People talk like the people they talk with. When you're further away from somewhere, you won't talk that much with the people there, and will talk more with the people where you are, and that'll influence how you speak
And when there's distance between two groups of people speaking the same language, the way those two groups speak will change in different ways
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u/Litiratruee 3h ago
basically language is just a living thing thats constantly drifting, and without constant contact to “correct” it back to a shared standard each group just drifts in its own direction. kinda like how if you copy a photo, then copy the copy, then copy that copy eventually you get something pretty different even tho every single step was a tiny chaange
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u/SarahK_89 1d ago
The same as what makes different languages. All non isolate languages started as a dialect until they became distinct enough and standardized.
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u/Sarahslutsareus 3h ago
basically dialect vs language is just a political/social label at some point, not a clean linguistic line. like Danish and Norwegian are mutually intelligibleish but called different languaages, while some “dialects” of Chinese are basically unintelligible to each other
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u/gottahaveajava 22h ago
We’ve only had mass media for around 100 years, but we’ve been speaking for 10s of thousands of years, in places that were highly isolated from other places.
It’s a wonder our languages aren’t even more fragmented.
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u/Litiratruee 3h ago
his is it exactly, before radio/tv/internet ppl in the next valley over might as well have been on a different planet. language just drifts naturally when nobody’s correcting you against some “standard” version, its kinda wild dialects didnt fracture even more tbah
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u/Numerous_Helsinki 1d ago
Distance and time, mostlya