Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"

[manaster at umich.edu]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
This is I certainly agree with.  At the of risk of offending
various people, it seems clear that the creation of literary
Macedonian, literary Belorussian, etc., were in part at
least responsible for the perception that they are independent
languages.  Scandinavian is probably also one language treated
as three because of this.  Hindi and Urdu, Serbian and Croatian
are other examples.  SO I think I (and perhaps Benji) were
reading too much into Roger's earlier remarks.  I am glad we
can come to agree or if we must disagree that we can do it
quite civilly.  But I would like to hear Roger's view of
exactly what he thinks happens with nonliterate languages.
 
AMR
 
On Wed, 13 May 1998, Roger Wright wrote:
>
> No, that isn't what I meant (and these differences are greater now than
> they were in the 12th century, of course); it's just that - under normal
> circumstances - a large amount of variation can be taken to be
> language-internal, within *a single* speech community, if there are
> communications between the speakers in different areas, and there's an
> unspoken consensus that such a community is indeed monolingual. English
> is now a good example; there are many differences between English in
> different places, granted, but I don't think there's a general movement
> to argue that the English of Jamaica, Pakistan, Somerset, New Zealand,
> etc., are actually different languages [yet]. Similarly Spanish, French,
> Chinese, in the modern world, are usually conceived of as being
> monolingual, despite wide internal variation (of a normal kind), and
> Romance seems to have been thought of as monolingual up to the late
> twelfth or early thirteenth century. But if, in -say- thirty years time
> English-speakers somewhere decided to reform their spelling, and it then
> seemed convenient to reform the spelling in different ways in different
> places, then we would have the conditions for splits in the language.
> (Essentially, that's what happened around the year 1200 in the Romance
> area). After that, of course, individual language changes can easily
> stay within the boundaries of the thus-demarcated split cognate
> languages, and the differences will accelerate, and isoglosses will
> bundle at political frontiers, as people in different places have
> different new politically-inspired stylistic standards to style-shift
> towards, which is why Romance differentiation could and did accelerate
> after that time.                      RW
>