Talk:Dialect continuum

message: Would the languages of the former Yugoslavia (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin etc.) form a dialect continuum? I am aware that the other two Macedonian and Slovenian are slightly more divorced from the main four. Macedonian being closer to Bulgarian. - FrancisTyers 12:05, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: AFAIK, they might even be considered a single language. Allegedly, the differences between the languages are minimal, and they were classified as a single language before the war. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.232.72.148 (talk • contribs) 20:17, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Not true. Most definitely Slovene, BCSM, and Macedonian and Bulgarian are at least four very different languages. There are huge syntactical differences between Slovene, Croatian/Serbian and Macedonian, and Bulgarian. But they do form a language continuum, true. Dialects exist dialects on both sides of linguistic borders (Slovene-Croatian, and Serbian-Macedonian, see Kajkavian, Torlakian), that are closer than the respective standardized languages. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.77.150.213 (talk • contribs) 16:40, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Yes they most definately would. Not only just BCSM but dialectal continuum spreads from Slovenia down to Bulgaria. You have obvious transitional dialects from Slovenia through Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Macedonia and all the way to Bulgaria. BCSM only present even tighter dialectal continuum within that group as are Bulgarian-Macedonian.--Factanista 10:04, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

text: ... and, there isn't much of a break between eastern and western groups either. Zocky | picture popups 00:39, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

text: So, how about adding the new-found linguistic knowledge to the article? :) Zocky | picture popups 01:32, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Serbo-Croat' 

message: I am going to remove the following:
"A more or less similar interaction takes place between a creole language which lacks prestige, and its more prestigious relative. The relationship between Gullah and African American Vernacular English on the one hand, and standard American English on the other, is a good example of this. Some speakers can glide throughout the continuum depending on the subject and the context.
There are many other examples throughout the world."
This was added by anon. contributor from 80.224.97.8 (12:02, 29 January 2004) who apparently did not understand the notion of dialect continuum ("gliding throughout the continuum" ?! clearly the author intended to say something about switching between 2 languages and that has nothing to do with our topic).
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.199.22.70 (talk • contribs) 18:09, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Please get a consensus before deleting chunks of text.  Thank you. David Cannon 22:40, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You must be joking! This is pure editing, no consensus required if changes are explained. I have clearly stated my reasons and preserved the text on the talk page. You instead have reverted the text only because there was no discussion and no consensus... David, for your information, most edits in Wikipedia are done without lengthy discussions and voting. I am deleting the erroneous section again; I have stated my reasons; if you wish you can revert, but tell us why the text in question is right and I am wrong. 212.199.22.38 19:39, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wrong example 

message: I think someone made a mistake here. Istro-Romanian isn't the closest surviving language related to Dalmatian, that is Istriot. Istro-Romanian and Istriot are two different languages.--Factanista 10:04, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Istro-Romanian 

message: Cross-reference or merge with Sprachraum article.
-- Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.6.254.191 (talk  o  contribs) 12:32, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think that the term "Sprachraum" is very widely known among English-speaking linguists -- it's not in any of my linguistics dictionaries, while Sprachbund is.  In any case, it's certainly not synonymous with "Dialect continuum" -- article Sprachraum is all about standardized national languages, while Dialect continuum is not. AnonMoos (talk) 02:31, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Coordinate with Sprachraum Article 

message: if smoebody is cree talk back —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.128.81.68 (talk) 19:01, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  are you cree? 

message: I added this section based on the information in
Language Policy in the Soviet Union
By Lenore A. Grenoble
Language Policy in the Soviet Union
Series: Language Policy , Vol. 3
Grenoble, L.A.
2003, 248 p., Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-4020-1298-3 AverageTurkishJoe (talk) 00:43, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Turkic language dialect continuum 

message: Surely Afrikaans cannot be considered part of the Continental West Germanic language continuum for the simple reason that it is geographically isolated from the related languages of Europe? Due to geographical isolation there are no surviving intermediates between Afrikaans and Dutch and therefore a "continuum" cannot exist in any meaningful sense of the term, though of course the two languages are still closely related. Booshank (talk) 17:27, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I think Afrikaans can be considered part of the continuum, as for example Latin American Spanish is part of the Romance continuum, because it's mutually understandable with varieties of Spanish in the continuum in Europe. Anyway, it's true that the mention of Afrikaans can be a bit confusing, so removing it won't really make the page any bad. --Jotamar (talk) 02:55, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Removed Afrikaans and Yiddish: both are languages in their own right and not part of a geographical continuum. Also removed "Nevertheless, Frisian does form a part of the continental West Germanic continuum (via Town Frisian and Dutch)", as Town Frisian is essentially a creole of Dutch and Frisian, and creoles don't count for continuums. Jalwikip (talk) 14:35, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I count no fewer than three egregious linguistic misconceptions in the last comment. - David, Chicago  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.135.24.165 (talk) 18:31, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Continental West Germanic 

message: Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are closely related and there is mutual intelligibility. But it is important to know that the level of intelligibility varies.
Swedish and the Norwegian that is spoken in the eastern part of Norway (compare with Bokmål) is very similar. There is for instance no problem for a person from Stockholm to talk with a person from Oslo. On the other hand it is a little more complicated for a Swede to understand a person from the western part of Norway (e.g. from Bergen). At the same time Norwegians sometimes have difficulties understanding people from Skåne in the southern part of Sweden.
It is not so easy for Swedes to understand Danish, because the pronunciation is so different. It is somewhat easier for Danes to understand Swedish though. Swedes and Danes are however able to talk to each other. It is not common, but it sometimes happens though that Swedes and Danes speak English with each other.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.237.203.154 (talk) 13:52, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian 

message: This section needs some work, work that I'm not really qualified to do. Describing the written standard of Chinese prior to baihua as "Classical Chinese" is questionable, the descriptions of baihua, putonghua, and Mandarin are confusing (putonghua is based on baihua??), and it's only true to a limited degree that Chinese writing obscures the differences between different Chinese languages. Excalibre (talk) 20:33, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: the development of the divergent Chinese languages was made much easier because the characters used for writing Chinese are not tied closely to pronunciation as alphabetic or syllabic scripts are
needs a citation at least. Chinese characters do give phonetic hints, but what they hint at varies between Mandarin and Cantonese for example. To me it's not obvious that using characters rather than an alphabet has freed the languages to drift to some unusual degree. 71.4.124.241 (talk) 17:39, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

text: Does Chinese really form a true continuum throughout? Are there no language boundaries separating the larger dialect groups anywhere? Are there really transitional dialects to be found within any two adjacent dialect groups (even with Min)? I find that hard to believe. Mandarin is certainly a continuum, so are probably the other primary subgroups of Chinese, but I suspect that the Chinese/Sinitic-speaking territory is criss-crossed by boundaries, and has been for quite some time. Sometimes there may be transitional (and thus ambiguous for the classification endeavour) dialects, but in many other cases, or at least some cases, there may well be not. Contrast Sami, which is of a similar age: its western portion (from South to North Sami) used to be a true continuum (at least in the 19th and perhaps early 20th century) as far as I know, but between North Sami and Skolt/Inari/Kemi Sami, there was a clear break (perhaps a result of a spread of North Sami eastwards from northernmost Sweden/Norway into Finland, which eradicated transitional dialects between Western and Eastern Sami formerly spoken in Finnish Lapland, without new transitional dialects arising). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 14:59, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Chinese

message: This article had grouped East and West Slavic together into a single dialect continuum, as if simply because Poland borders Belarus, a dialect continuum must necessarily exist.  I thought that, without any evidence, this could not remain.  On the one hand, most linguists consider Proto-West Slavic to have diverged from the other dialects prior to Proto-South Slavic (meaning that South Slavic is actually genetically closer to Russian than is Polish, even given the geographic division.  Linguistically speaking, this is entirely possible.)  Belarussians, as I understand it, cannot understand Poles, and vice versa, with out training.  On the other hand, it is true that East and West Slavic have shared features/words as a result of areal contact.  This would be analogous to the the phenomenon of Danish showing shared features with Low German in Schleswig due to contact.  This is NOT, however, evidence of dialect continua - a genetic phenomenon - but of dialect convergence, a sociolinguistic phenomenon.  My question is: is it even accurate to say that Polish and Czech/Slovak exist in the same dialect continuum?  More specifically, are the isoglosses of West Slavic isomorphic, such as between Finnish and Estonian (in which case I would argue a dialect continuum either doesn't exist, or our definition of "dialect continuum" is only trivially distinct from language family), or not isomorphic, such as among the South Slavic dialects (a true dialect continuum)? 
David  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.135.24.165 (talk) 18:28, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: What does isomorphic mean here? —Tamfang (talk) 06:47, 12 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  East and West Slavic 

message: Why not somebody add a chapter on the continuum spanning form Sindhi and Kashmiri in the west all the way to Assamese and Oriya/Odia in the east. This may well be one of the largest areas of dialect continua within the Indo-European language family.
GB  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.12.59.102 (talk) 14:28, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Indo-Aryan ' 

message: This would be very important to language evolution.--Ollyoxenfree (talk) 14:29, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Indeed. The present article seems to be written mainly from a synchronic perspective; and some contributors seem to take a conceptual tree-like hierarchy of languages and dialects for granted, and thereby miss a major part of the point. JoergenB (talk) 22:26, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

text: There is a link to wave model, but maybe that ought to be developed more? —Tamfang (talk) 19:14, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: Should add something on evolutionary linguistics

message: Kashmiris generally speak Kashmiri at home. It's just that Muslims and some Hindus use the Perso-Arabic script while other Hindus use the devanagiri script. And all Sikhs are originally from Punjab, so they speak Punjabi at home. Those who have settled for many years in Kashmir also speak Kasmiri or Hindi/Urdu  (to communicate with others)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.124.247.56 (talk) 11:36, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: kashmir

message: The definition attributed to Bloomfield, viz.:
"A dialect continuum, or dialect area, was defined by Leonard Bloomfield as a range of dialects spoken across some geographical area that differ only slightly between neighboring areas, but as one travels in any direction, these differences accumulate such that speakers from opposite ends of the continuum are no longer mutually intelligible" has, I think, a problem.
There may be "a range of dialects spoken across some geographical area" that exhibit cumulative differences, without the extremes necessarily being mutually unintelligible.  For example, take the Western Desert Language (WDL) or "Wangka Yuti" ("clear speech") of the central and western Australian deserts.  According to the Wikipedia article: "For native speakers this language is mutually intelligible across its entire range".
Importantly, the notion of a dialect continuum presents the idea that language may change gradually and progressively over a wide geographic area.  This is the core of the phenomenon that Bloomfield pointed out.  Only in extreme cases are the geographically extreme variants no longer mutually intelligible.
It's generally more informative to measure the degree of mutual intelligibility, e.g. by comparing the lexicons of two variants.
yoyo (talk) 14:54, 29 January 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Although your reasoning sounds basicly correct, in practice I think that dialect continuum is typically used for an area where there is no intelligibility for some of the linguistic varieties. Most of the examples in the article are like that. Otherwise, you wouldn't typically speak about a dialect continuum, but about a language with dialects. Anyway, if you have a source where the expression is used for an area with intelligibility, just add a clarification in the heading. --Jotamar (talk) 17:27, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mutual intelligibility 

message: If you have enough borrowing of words between languages, it becomes fairly simple for a listener to understand across.  Nevertheless a speaker may have to choose the syntax of  one language or the other.  For example English is fundamentally Germanic, with a huge admixture of French vocabulary.  By choosing French vocabulary over German, I suppose I could make it much easier for a French speaker to follow what I'm saying, but I still have to choose between English and French pronouns, word order and conjugation schemes so to me it seems that a continuum doesn't quite exist.
Perhaps nobody is claiming a continuum between French and English, but in Wikipedia I am seeing claims of a continuum in Indic languages, yet from personal experience I know that Hindi and Nepali have different pronouns and different conjugation systems.  Although Nepali borrows a lot of words from Hindi, and Hindi words not found in a Nepali dictionary are nevertheless readily understood, ultimately a speaker has to choose a Hindi or Nepali framework for each sentence. To me, this also suggests a continuum doesn't quite exist. LADave (talk) 13:18, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: A dialect continuum is not about standard languages, but rather about rural vernaculars, often including varieties on the brink of disappearing. Jotamar (talk) 16:31, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unclear on concept. 

message: Why does Language cluster redirect here? If it is a related concept or a synonym, it should be mentioned in the article, right?--90.182.150.54 (talk) 16:46, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Language cluster 

message: There has been a recent cycle of reverts regarding Lombardi and other northern forms of speech. I suspect that that Jotamar is right, but the claims need sources cited. Pete unseth (talk) 13:37, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi. That sentence is a POV linked to political purposes. The attitude of the first Italian governament was similar to the French one in the way it helped the diffusion of the Italian language but on the contrary there has never been a plan of suppression of the regional languages of Italy. Moreover all the Italian states before the unification had already adopted Italian as official language. It is not my will to start an edit war but it would be better to tell the truth. If you need sources for what I wrote, I will be able to provide them.--93.32.182.72 (talk) 14:07, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Two sources have been provided for the language policy in Italy since 1861: 1.Italy/ 5.1 General legislation. Language laws (today)., 2.Languages of Italy: History. Treccani.it. Moreover, it's also a matter of fact that the regional languages of Italy have never been fought by the Italian government; today about half of the Italian population is able to speek also its regional language while in France less than one quarter is able to speak the local language. This difference is due to the fact that French government stopped with hard measures the regional languages; this didn't happen in Italy. Greetings.--93.32.182.72 (talk) 14:54, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I may be wrong, as English is not my mother tongue and I am not particularly good at reading Italian, but you claim that in the 19th century Italian language policy was more or less the same as in France (the above attitude of the French government was reflected in Rome by the Italian government). I do not find that the sources support the claim, i.e. that the sources show that there was a repressive language policy in Italy. Unoffensive text or character (talk) 17:15, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: You are right. the above attitude of the French government was reflected in Rome by the Italian government means that Italy helped the spread of the Italian language (national language) by using similar measures with one big difference that in Italy the regional languages were allowed to be spoken while in France there was also a repressive policy against its regional languages.--93.32.182.72 (talk) 18:30, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: So at the moment we have a sentence and two footnotes that seem to support it but really contradict it. We should delete the claim and replace it by something that makes sense and is well sourced. Unoffensive text or character (talk) 08:03, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

text: My reasons to revert the IP were just that the shortened text was kind of ambiguous and less understandable than the original one. Anyway, the question of language policy in Italy is only marginally relevant to the page. On the other hand, I'm not sure of the meaning of A less arguable example .... Does it refer to the La Spezia-Rimini isogloss, breaking the continuum? This should be clarified. --Jotamar (talk) 17:35, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Italian language varieties -- edit war 

message: The map shows Carpathian Ruthenia as excluded from North Slavic, and presumably Hungarian-speaking. In reality, Slavic languages predominate in the region: listed by population, the most spoken languages there are Ukrainian (including the Rusyn dialects), Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, German and Romani. At least since the late 19th century, and probably much longer, Ukrainian/Rusyn has been the most widespread language in Transcarpathia, while Hungarian-speakers have never formed more than a quarter of the population, and stand at 12% now. Rusyn, the native Slavic dialect group of Transcarpathia, is clearly part of the North Slavic dialect continuum, bridging East Slavic Ukrainian and West Slavic Slovak (in fact, the Zemplín dialects of Eastern Slovak are transitional to Rusyn). Does the source really exclude Transcarpathia from North Slavic? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 00:25, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, it does.  It doesn't identify it as anything – there's just an unmarked area between North and South Slavic.  Kanguole 01:51, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: That's completely weird, and in fact a grave blunder, in light of what I've said above. Transcarpathia is, in fact, a vital part of the North Slavic dialect continuum, as it forms part of the West–East Slavic transition, and as such a key example for what dialect continuum means. It's a monumental screwup roughly on the order of drawing a map of the languages of Europe and leaving Basque out. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 12:19, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: The original can be seen in the "Marketing sample" (under the Contents tab) on the publisher's page.  Kanguole 13:15, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you. Still very strange, and a clear (it's evident that Transcarpathia is intentionally left out, and there is no ambiguity about the way the map is drawn at this point) and serious mistake, next to Budjak not marked as (North-)Slavic-speaking. Interestingly, the way you've drawn the map implies that Budjak is neither Eastern-Romance- nor (North-)Slavic-speaking, but could be interpreted as implying that it is Bulgarian- or Turkic-speaking in the main, which is not the case (see Budjak#Ethnic groups and demographics). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:55, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Again, following the source, which clearly excludes this area from the North Slavic continuum.  Kanguole 10:05, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Map of Europe 

message: It is common for textbooks and linguistic encyclopedias to call the topic of this article a (geographical) dialect continuum or a dialect chain, but not a "dialect cluster". I have seen two definitions for the latter term:
* In the Handbook of African languages, it is used as a basic unit of classification at the level of a language but consisting of "a number of dialects no one of which appears to dominate", contrasted with a "language", in which there is a dominant dialect. This usage seems common in descriptions of African languages.
* In the SIL literature, it refers to a collection of dialects whose speakers can understand a selected reference dialect at a specified threshold level.
Neither of these is the topic of this article. Indeed the SIL definition is presented as a method for subdividing a dialect continuum. In any case, per MOS:BOLDSYN, only the most significant names for the topic should be included in the opening sentence, and in this case those are "dialect continuum" and "dialect chain".  Kanguole 09:25, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dialect cluster