Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"

[Roger Wright]

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Alexis says:
>I cannot believe that anyone would take such radical
>differences as exist between French and Portuguese say
>as being due to writing in different ways.
 
 
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