SV: Standard Languages

[Lars Martin Fosse]

Joat Simeon wrote:

> All languages are dialect clusters; this is particularly obvious with the
> Romance languages, which (apart from Romanian) have plenty of "bridge"
> dialects.

> I suspect that towards the beginning of the 2nd millenium BCE, you could have
> made a similar journey from the Rhine delta to the Tarim basin, and found a
> series of overlapping IE dialects all the way.

This situation is certainly true about the Sami dialects of Arctic Norway. A
Sami speaker once explained to me that he could understand the dialects "to the
left and to the right" without problems, the dialects beyond them with more
difficulty and the dialects beyond those again hardly at all.  There are a
total of some 40,000 Sami speakers in North of the Arctic circle, and this
should give a perspective on such things as dialects and numbers of speakers.

South Sami, which is now practically extinct, is/was a different language
altogether.

Best regards,
Lars Martin Fosse

Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse
Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114,
0674 Oslo
Norway
Phone/Fax: +47 22 32 12 19
Email: lmfosse at online.no