Is it true that Occitan & Catalan together are more mutually intelligible with Italian than is Spanish despite the last sharing a degree of communicability with Italian?
Yes. Because of the way that the language continuum works, Catalan and Occitan are closer to Italian. Our grammar, vocabulary and some sounds are very similar to Italian, more than Spanish is.
However, Italians can have difficulty understanding the accent of Eastern Catalan and most of Occitan, because of the vowels like ə that Catalan and Occitan have but Italian and Spanish don't. For this reason, if they're not used to hearing our language/identifying our sounds, it can be easier for Italian speakers to understand Spanish. But written down, Italian is generally closer to Catalan and Occitan than to Spanish.
Still on vowels, on the other hand, Catalan and Occitan differentiate open and closed E and O (è, é, ò, ó) same way Italian does, but Spanish only has the closed ones. Other sounds like g (as in giraffe), z and sh (spelled ix in Catalan and sc in Italian) are also shared, while Spanish doesn't have any of the three (in their place, Spanish has the hard j and th that neither Catalan nor Italian have, and ch which all three have, respectively). So you see, it has differences but also many similarities.
Italians should have an easier time understanding Western Catalan accents. In fact, historically it has been considered that Valencian (one of the accents of Western Catalan) is the "central" or "bridge" Romance language that can be easier for the others to understand.
Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 73: The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.
[Music]
Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.
Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about mapping languages in space. But first, we’re heading into our anniversary month.
Lauren: November is Lingthusiasm’s anniversary month, and it’s been six years this year.
Gretchen: Wow! The podcast is so big! In celebration of our anniversary, we’d like to get you to share a link to your favourite episode or share your enthusiasm for linguistics and for Lingthusiasm. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, and a lot of them don’t yet realise they could be having a fun linguistics chat in their ears every month.
Lauren: Or eyes. All Lingthusiasm episodes have transcripts, too.
Gretchen: They do. We’re asking you to help connect us with people who’d be totally into a linguistics podcast if only they knew it existed.
Lauren: This is a bit of an anniversary tradition for us. We always see it in the stats that all of your recommendations really do help people find the show.
Gretchen: If you want to share Lingthusiasm on social media and tag us so we can see it and like it and so on. If you share in private, we won’t know about it, but you can feel a warm glow of satisfaction. Feel free to tell us about sharing it in private on social media if you want us to see it, and thank you, and interact.
Lauren: We are also doing a listener survey for the first time. It’s your chance to tell us what you’re enjoying about Lingthusiasm so far and what else we could be doing in the future.
Gretchen: This is your chance to suggest topics, as well as give us other kinds of comments and feedback.
Lauren: Also, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to add a few linguistics experiments in there as well, which we’ll be sharing the results of after the survey. We might even write up a paper about the survey one day. We’ve got ethics board approval from La Trobe University to do the survey.
Gretchen: Always fun to have your day job coming in with Lingthusiasm.
Lauren: Yeah, it’s been nice to bring the two together for this. To do the survey or to read more details about it, go to bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey22 or follow the link from our website and social media.
Gretchen: Also, our stylish, minimal, reimagined IPA chart is now available as a poster. Thank you to our patrons for funding our stretch goal to fit the design into poster-rectangle shape in addition to the square shape on the lens cloths. For IPA posters and other Lingthusiasm merch, which makes a great gift, head to lingthusiasm.com/merch.
Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was a chat with Liz McCullough, Lingthusiasm’s former production manager.
Gretchen: Liz and I chat about how doing science communication relates to linguistics from Liz’s other former job at a science museum as well as non-academic careers related to linguistics more generally.
Lauren: To listen to this episode and all of our other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.
[Music]
Gretchen: I have a brilliant travel idea that, as far as I know, people aren’t doing yet.
Lauren: Okay.
Gretchen: You know how you can go on architectural tours of places or historical tours? What if you could go on language tours?
Lauren: Ah, sign me up. That sounds great.
Gretchen: Right? You could just have a local guy tell you about all the different language things that are going on in a particular area.
Lauren: I would love to take a train from Southern Italy, move through Italy hearing the dialect change until you get up to the north. Then by the time you’re in Northern Italy, that’s got more happening that’s similar to French. Then you move through French, and then you move through the southern varieties of French like Occitan. That has more in common with languages like Catalan in Spain. Then as you move through Spain, you can move through Valencian, Manchegan. You could stop for the cheese as well as the dialect. Eventually, you’d move through Spain, and you’d get to Portugal. You’d just be slowing moving through slowly changing languages. It would be delightful. Sign me up for that one.
Gretchen: Well, as much as I love trains – and I think this sounds like a great idea – I just think you’re gonna miss so much that way. We need to do a walking tour, maybe like a bike or a horse, so you could really stop at all the little villages on the way and find out what was going on.
Lauren: Sounds even better.
Gretchen: There was actually this guy. Edmond Edmont, who was a Frenchman, who did a – you could say – biking tour of French dialects.
Lauren: Could he be our tour guide?
Gretchen: Sadly, he’s dead.
Lauren: Okay.
Gretchen: He was doing this like 100 years ago. At the very end of the 19th Century, he spent four years biking around France, talking to locals, cataloguing their unique words and phrases. He went to over 600 towns and gathered materials for what would become the Atlas linguistique de la France– the French linguistic atlas – which was one of the first things in this genre of what’s going on in different places. This is just France, right. If we wanna do this level of detail around the world, we’re gonna be doing this for 100 years.
Lauren: Look, I think it sounds like a worthwhile endeavour.
Gretchen: You know, just uproot your life. It’s fun.
Lauren: We would need a lot of local tour guides for sure.
Gretchen: We’d also need to understand a lot about things like local history and what has come into making the languages different. Because Edmond Edmont was just keeping track of unique words and phrases but not trying to figure out why these things were going on. Like, I’m curious about why. You know, was there an empire here? Was there a war? An invasion? Marriages? Nation state building? Migration? Centralised education? Telecommunication? There’s so much going on that influences what people are making in terms of linguistic decisions in a particular area.
Lauren: Especially in countries where some of those layers have been things like colonisation or dispossession of large groups of people. History can be pretty heavy, and don’t wanna underplay that at all, but it is important to understand how these things have influenced the shape of the languages in a given area.
Gretchen: And it’s something that goes on if you zoom in on any area where humans have been living. There’s always something linguistically interesting there. We picked this very Southern European/Mediterranean vacation, but you could do this anywhere and say, “What’s happened here? What are the histories and the linguistic things that have gone into making what people are doing today?”
Lauren: Where are we going next on this tour?
Gretchen: Well, somewhere else that’s really interesting when it comes to how languages exist along sort of a pathway or a continuum is up in the north in Greenland and the Arctic Circle, Northern Canada.
Lauren: I’ve never been there before. This is very exciting.
Gretchen: I technically haven’t been there either, but I learned a bit about it in Canadian history class. One of the things it’s linguistically famous for, the varieties of the Inuit language, which are spoken by the people up there, is that it’s a whole continuum where from one village to the next or from one area to the next, there’s all these small differences that add up into if you pick two places that are relatively far apart, people can’t necessarily understand each other, whereas any two places that are relatively close together, oh, yeah, that’s sort of close enough, and you can figure your way out through.
Lauren: I know there are four major dialect groups. So, at some point, people must find a way to group these into larger dialects, but on the ground, the situation isn’t actually as clear cut, it sounds.
Gretchen: You have four groupings. You can see how these are related to modern day geopolitical groups as well because you have the Alaskan Inupiaq, the Western Canadian Inuktun, Eastern Canadian Inuktun, and Greenlandic Kalaallisut. You can see how the Alaskan grouping versus the Greenlandic grouping are, to some degree, modern day political entities in addition to all of these groups being cousins of each other as you go along the coast of the Arctic Ocean.
Lauren: If we were to pack up the sled dogs, or maybe get some kayaks, and head into that Kalaallisut-speaking area, you can see how they are all similar, but there are differences as you move through the chain. As you move geographically from one side to the other, you have, in the west, the word for “eye” is “isi,” and as you move further east, it becomes “ili,” and then further along, right up in the north, you get “ihi.” You can hear that the consonant in the middle there is changing in its pronunciation as you move through. It’s not just for the word “eye.”
Gretchen: This is “eye” as in the body part, yeah?
Lauren: “Eye” as in the body part – E-Y-E. If you speak a variety that has that S there, that’s systematic in words that have that.
Gretchen: So, there’s gonna be a whole bunch of words that have the S where a little bit further east they might have the L, and further east from that, they might have the H.
Lauren: Yeah. It’s a systematic set of changes, which means if you are used to hearing people from a neighbouring variety, you might be used to understanding what the systematic changes are. But as you move further along, it might get harder for you to understand what’s happening in someone else’s variety.
Gretchen: This sometimes comes up when it comes to the name of a language. Sometimes, people in Canada talk about the “Inuit language” or the “Inuit languages,” depending on whether you’re more of a lumper or a splitter. Sometimes, people talk about “Inuktitut” versus “Inutitut” because there’s one variety in the northern part of Quebec where they don’t say the K before the T in that context. You can see it in the names of the language. There’s these subtle differences that go across the area. But it still sounds like it’s the same word, so there’s been some efforts in teacher training in Iqaluit, which is the capital of Nunavut, to figure out, okay, how can we train teachers from different communities. Then they can go back and teach their own community’s variety to people in that community, which is what they want, but also have the benefit of doing a certain amount of centralised training as well. It’s figuring out how much centrality are you gonna do; how much standardisation are you gonna do; what types of media and resources are people gonna encounter in a particular area.
Lauren: Across history, there have definitely been periods where people have found it to their advantage to see themselves as one group or one language with people who speak similar varieties. And there have been points in history where even small differences have been used to declare that these are very different languages spoken by very different groups of people. It’s always worth remembering that that is as much a political decision – often more of a political decision – than it is a linguistic decision. It seems like that Inuktitut education programme is trying to balance those two competing things.
Gretchen: Right. To go back to France for a sec, one of the reasons why it feels like – at least if you’re somebody who’s learning French as a foreign language – that there is this one French that people learn is because the Paris-based government went to a lot of effort to try to stamp out regional variation in French. But regional variation is the natural state for languages to exist. The idea that everybody in what’s defined as a “nation” should speak exactly the same way is something that people in governments decide, less so that people who are on the ground who just want to be able to talk to their neighbours are doing in any area.
Lauren: I guess one of the challenges for our tour is to not get distracted by the fact that geographic variation isn’t the only variation we have in any place you might expect variation between people of different ages. There might be gender-based differences, which I’m sure a good tour guide would point out to us without letting us get too distracted given that geographic variation is our focus on this tour, but it’s not the only type of variation we have, for sure.
Gretchen: Especially in larger population areas, you may have things that are based on social class or the districts that people live in but also which groups tend to interact with each other more.
Lauren: We could take tours on any scale. We’ve gone across the north of Canada and across Greenland, but if we’re ready to commit to some serious air miles, I would love to take you on a tour of the BANZSL language family.
Gretchen: Ooo, “BANZSL,” that sounds fun.
Lauren: It’s an acronym that stands for “British Australian New Zealand and South African Sign Languages.” It’s a sign language family that spans the countries that are named in it as well as a few others. They’re all related to each other.
Gretchen: This seems like it makes sense as part of the British Commonwealth. They’re probably influenced by schools for the d/Deaf with respect to each other, and then also maybe diverged locally in the particular local context that they were in. Interestingly, despite Canada being a Commonwealth nation, we used to have what was called “Maritime Sign Language,” which I don’t think is super prevalent anymore, but in the eastern part of Canada, for a while, there was a part of the BANZSL group that was Maritime Sign Language. These days in Canada, mostly you get ASL, which is technically American Sign Language, and some LSQ, which is Langue des signes québécoise. These are both related to French Sign Language because the first American school for the d/Deaf came into existence right after the American Revolution.
Lauren: I don’t imagine they wanted some British people turning up and introducing their sign language there somehow.
Gretchen: Not particularly, no. They had a few people come over from a school for the d/Deaf in France and exchange information about sign languages that way which is why ASL and FSL are more closely related than the BANZSL group.
Lauren: Again, the distribution of language is telling you a lot about European history, American history, Commonwealth history. Even with documented time depth of around 300 years for this language family, there is a lot of variation, especially in the lexical level – that word level – between these different varieties within the family.
Gretchen: That’s this very large-scale, geographic variation depending on ships and planes to get from one group to another. There’s also some really small-scale variation. For example, the Faroe Islands, which are these pretty tiny islands in the North Atlantic sort of equidistant between the top of Scotland, Iceland, and the edge of Norway.
Lauren: Right. Right in the middle of the Northern Ocean.
Gretchen: At least if you’re defining “middle” based on these three countries. These islands are pretty small. They speak Faroese there. It’s related to Icelandic. They’re both descended from Old Norse. There were Vikings and so on going around these areas. Even within Faroese, which is the language that’s spoken on a relatively small number of relatively small islands, there are differences in how people use Faroese depending on whether you’re in the more northern islands, whether you’re midway down, part-way down, or all the way to the more southern islands. There’s five different vowel changes that happen in a continuum along this band of islands from north to south.
Lauren: What you see as you move down this long string of islands is that people in the north will have more features in common with people who are further north. As you move further down, there are more features that change. By the time you get from the north to the south, there are five or six different sound changes that have taken place across the language. It’s gonna be more changes that you have to keep track of to try and understand what someone’s saying, whereas your neighbours on the island next to you in the north might just have a little bit of an accent difference.
Gretchen: Gretchen: Right. So far these differences have been coming from the fact that the varieties in these regions have a common ancestor, which linguists refer to as a dialect chain or dialect continuum. But there's also a thing where languages that come from different roots, but are all existing in an overlapping area, start picking up features from their neighbours and getting influenced by each other. So, some examples of this are in the Indian subcontinent, you have the Indic languages like Hindi and the Dravidian languages like Tamil influencing each other. Or in Southeast Asia, there are similar tone systems shared between four different language families, Sinitic, Hmong-Mien, Tai-Kadai languages, and Mon-Khmer like Vietnamese. The Balkans are also another famous example of this. And this kind of similarity is referred to as a linguistic area or, if we want the technical name, a "Sprachbund"
Lauren: A German word.
Gretchen: A nice German word. I’ve always thought of it as meaning – so I think the literal cognates in English would be “speech band,” and so sort of thinking of a band of different ways of speaking going from, say, red to blue with lots of shades of purple in between. But this also makes me think of a very obscure analogy which is – you know what else goes in regions along an area and is characteristic of a particular region?
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Gretchen: You know, it’s not only languages. Sometimes, it’s food.
Lauren: True. I mean, a food tour is a thing that people do already that they could just improve by adding language.
Gretchen: A language and food tour – amazing! But you could talk about, maybe there’s, like, a Mediterranean style of food where you have feta and olives and cucumber and things like this in a particular area, and it’s not necessarily only characteristic of one area.
Lauren: Like a culinary region.
Gretchen: Right. In that case, is the culinary equivalent of a Sprachbund maybe a “Schmeckbund”?
Lauren: Amazing.
Gretchen: [Laughs] I don’t think “Schmeckbund” is gonna catch on because it relies on people knowing this not incredibly prevalent linguistics concept, but I want it to catch on.
Lauren: Maybe we could make a Sprachbund cake to celebrate our holiday.
Gretchen: Ooo, a “Sprachbundt” cake.
Lauren: I believe it is etymologically related as well.
Gretchen: I guess they’re all related to “band” and “bind.” Where does this word come from? It sounds German to me.
Lauren: It does sound German, and it’s definitely German. As a non-German speaker, you tend to find anglicisations are something like /spɹækbʌnd/. But it was coined by Nikolai Trubetzkoy, who was a Russian. In fact, he originally came up with the term in Russian as “yazykovoy soyuz,” language union.” It’s the same “soyuz” that pops up in the Russian form of the phrase “Soviet Union.”
Gretchen: Oh, of course. Okay.
Lauren: He used that in a 1923 paper. I think the Soviet Union was formed in 1922, so unions were clearly on his mind. Then he presented his research in a paper in 1928 in German, and so he had to use the German form. It’s the German version that has stuck.
Gretchen: Okay, so this is German “Bund” meaning more like “federation.” Like, the “Bundestag,” which is something in German national politics.
Lauren: Yeah. He calqued it from Russian into German to give this German conference paper, and then the idea really took off in German, and it has stayed German even for English speakers.
Gretchen: Fascinating. I guess “language federation” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as “Sprachbund,” and “speech band” isn’t actually the same thing.
Lauren: It’s much catchier.
Gretchen: It’s nice – we often get our technical terminology from Latin or Greek – to have some terminology showing up in German via a Russian guy.
Lauren: It makes a nice change.
Gretchen: Sprachbunds are the natural state for languages to exist in unless you have an empire or a capital city or some sort of authority saying, “No, you must speak exactly this thing.”
Lauren: Cities really weird up language.
Gretchen: Cities, they’re weird. This is the village state of languages. But also, if you try to make a map of languages – and this is kind of difficult – you don’t just see, like, here’s a whole bunch of bands. You also see groups and clusters and some places where the number of languages are more dense than other places.
Lauren: Indeed, yeah. One thing that people often note is that some features of the environment seem to be more conducive to there being a lot of languages maybe spoken by smaller groups of people. We know that a language can happily be sustained with a speaker population of 4- or 500 people, maybe even fewer, if they are in a context where the language can keep being spoken. A lot of the places that tends to happen are in hilly or mountainous areas or places on islands. This is the highlands and islands theory of where you get intense linguistic diversity.
Gretchen: I guess this makes sense because the water between islands is a bit of a barrier to people getting by. I mean, you have boats, but it’s a little bit harder than just walking across a field. And also, mountains, they’re pretty hard to climb.
Lauren: You really have to wanna go see your neighbours, for sure.
Gretchen: Yeah. So, if those things make it a little bit harder to interact with your neighbours, then your language is more likely to be a bit more distinct from people that are far away from you by a geographic barrier not just distance.
Lauren: This is definitely the version I was taught when I was a student. A lot of the newer work has focused less on those geographic features and more on the feature of whether the climate can sustain a large number of small groups because if you’re not competing aggressively for resources, it allows you all to maintain your small speaker population. So, I think some of the more recent research has looked at that. But again, that’s a geographic feature that’s influencing just how many languages you might find in an area.
Gretchen: I know you find this with Indigenous languages of North America where there’s a lot more density of even unrelated languages on the west coast in both Canada and the US because the climate is very lush and flourishing, and you just need one valley for your group, and you’re fine. You don’t need to be going out and trading with as many people or interacting with people as much, whereas on the eastern side, you have larger areas of language groups or related languages.
Lauren: Similarly, in West Africa, when you move out of the Sahara area into that more verdant belt, you definitely get a much higher density of different languages there.
Gretchen: Nice.
Lauren: All lovely places that are worth adding to our tour.
Gretchen: This is a thing – the geography and the physical geography – can also sometimes get overridden by historical factors. If there was an empire, if there was a religion going through saying, “Here’s what people need to speak. We’re trying to impose or enforce a particular language,” that can be a thing that influences what language people are speaking as much as, “Okay, we’re able to sustain ourselves in this one valley.”
Lauren: I’ve definitely talked before about how we actually find it hard to pin down the number of languages that were spoken in Australia before colonisation because so many of those languages were erased by the process of white people coming in and changing the social landscape. There had been really long, long sustained multilingualism and people speaking their own languages in their own communities for so long that there were probably many more languages that weren’t even made record of.
Gretchen: The erasing part of history is one reason why counting can be really hard and also who’s doing the counting and what are they trying to figure out. Sometimes, this is a “Are you a lumper, or are you a splitter?”, but also, do you have a nation building agenda that says, “Oh, we wanna assume that everyone in this nation actually speaks the same language.” Maybe there are a bunch of different people who can’t actually understand each other when they talk, but we’re gonna say we all speak the same language, and just a bunch of them aren’t really doing it very well, and they need to speak like the capital. Or are we gonna say, you know, it’s true that we can understand this other nation state next door, but we’re still gonna say that it’s a different language from there is because ours is the one that we speak in our nation state, and theirs is the one they speak in their nation state. There’s lots of agendas that come with trying to say, “Is this a labelled language, or is this something that isn’t worth labelling?”
Lauren: Even with all these factors, people have been very interested in counting and coming up with a definitive number of languages even though that is a challenging and incredibly slippery number.
Gretchen: How many languages were you told there were when you were in school?
Lauren: I think we were talking about there being 6,000 languages. That was definitely a number that carried through the early ‘90s through the early 2000s.
Gretchen: I feel like I was maybe told 6,500.
Lauren: These days, a lot of people say 7,000 as their rounded off number.
Gretchen: These numbers are suspiciously round because – “Oh, 7,031.” I think the suspicious roundness is useful to keep in mind because any more precision than that is very artificial because we don’t quite know where the boundaries between two things are. Or sometimes those boundaries are constructed without reference to people on the ground.
Lauren: Also, thinking about who has done the most work in terms of quantifying the number of languages in the world, a lot of that work has come out of missionaries who are trying to figure out how many languages they should be translating the Bible into for their missionary work.
Gretchen: Right. Which is a whole agenda that might not actually be in consultation with the people who speak those languages in the first place – whether they were asked if they wanted a Bible. But where does this incentive come from – who’s funding all of these boats and horses and bicycles and things that are – if you want to have a single, unified count, you need a lot of transportation. Sometimes, that funding comes from people who wanna donate to evangelise their religion. But even if you have academics counting, which you might think is a little bit less interference, that’s still some funding agency, which is probably a national government somewhere, or maybe a non-profit, or a wealthy person who says, “Okay, I want you to go do some research.” It’s still somebody external coming in and trying to help create this external count because the idea of a local count doesn’t mesh with trying to count the whole world.
Lauren: It’s definitely more enticing to the academic linguist to say, “I am documenting this language” and not “I’m documenting a dialect of a language.” There’s certainly a prestige to the concept of “a language” that is at play there as well.
Gretchen: Also, for individuals who are speakers or signers of that language to be able to say, “Oh, ours has a different name from those people over there because we never got along with them, and we wanna call ourselves something different.” This can be a political decision at multiple levels.
Lauren: Even when you account for how much is known about the world’s linguistic diversity, there’s still so much that isn’t accounted for and so much that is being understood and documented and figured out all the time. That’s why the number of languages that are estimated to exist in the world is still going up even in the face of so many languages where speakers aren’t passing them on to their children. They’re no longer being spoken. Even as the world is losing its stock of languages, we haven’t even caught up to know how many languages there are in the first place.
Gretchen: To some degree, even though it’s interesting to try to have ever more precision with respect to a number, it’s also maybe something that even when things are known – “Okay, we know that people in these two villages are different on the following parameters,” that’s something you can say. You can say, “Okay, mostly people in Village A can understand people in Village B, and vice versa, but not entirely,” that’s something you can determine with investigation and by asking people and by making lists of words and things. But then the downstream question of, “Okay, does that mean Village A and Village B speak different languages, or does that mean they speak dialects of the same language?”, often “dialect” is used to shunt varieties into the we-don’t-care-about-this box. That’s a political decision, too.
Lauren: I always find it really interesting because “dialect” is a pretty neutral term most of the time in linguistics, but it has all these connotations more generally of being not the formal language, not the standard language, not the language you should use in schools. I think for that reason a lot of linguists now use the word “variety” as a less-loaded term when referring to different “varieties” rather than different “dialects.” We use “dialect” a lot because it is still relatively neutral as a technical term.
Gretchen: Sometimes, you also get people trying to reclaim it in the other direction by saying, “Everybody has a dialect.” The standard dialect or prestige dialect is also just one dialect among many that isn’t inherently better. It’s just based on the associations people have made. Sometimes, you can try to reclaim “dialect” in the other direction. But I mean, also, you get “variety” used a lot to try to say, “Look, there can be lots of varieties for lots of different reasons,” sometimes geographic and sometimes for other social reasons or other types of groups.
Lauren: On the other hand, you have situations like in China where all of these languages that aren’t able to be understood by speakers of the other languages are called “dialects” to bring them into a larger nation state project. Again, you see that nation state effect on how we’re counting languages.
Gretchen: Something that’s interesting about looking at languages through maps is that all these different local dialects are equally old. All of the varieties of Faroese are all descending from Old Norse. They all come back to a common ancestor. Sometimes, when you’re looking at a language through, okay, well, here’s the capital city, and everything else is just a version of that, there’s this weird version of population migration history that comes into your head where you think, okay, well, people must have spread out from the capital city and then gradually started talking differently, where really people lived somewhere for various reasons and came to an area for various reasons and started speaking particular ways for various reasons, and there wasn’t really ever one time when everyone spoke the same way in a group of people unless you go through a very tiny population bottleneck where it was a very small group of people, and they gradually spread out. But everything is equally old, and it all comes back to the same ancestors that they have.
Lauren: Once you begin to understand that complexity of history, the fuzzy boundaries that can exist with where you draw the lines on your Sprachbund, you begin to see why it’s very hard to map something like language compared to something like, “Is it a country? What kind of climate does it have?”
Gretchen: Right. Because for one thing, I mean, languages overlap a lot. There’s often people who speak multiple languages in a given place. And then how many languages are spoken in a given place is this complicated question. There are way more languages than we have colours. We often use colours to display different concepts on a map, and it’s really useful when it comes to nation states because you rarely have 20 nation states all bordering on each other, so you need to use like 20 colours. You can generally do this with I think it’s five colours or so. But this is really hard with languages because there are not 7,000-ish colours that the human eye can distinguish. Trying to map this gets really complicated.
Lauren: There are times when language mapping can be interesting. Often, on the show, we’ll give examples from the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures, which looks at grammatical features that exist in a sample of the world’s languages. Every language is reduced to one point on the map, which obviously from everything we’ve been talking about with our grad tour of continua of language, obviously a point doesn’t really cut it. Exactly what they’re counting as a language varies depending on what they’re documenting. But what’s really nice about these maps is that you get this big spread of dots. They’re in two or three different colours depending on how many features you’re comparing. So, for this show, I’ve linked to one of my favourite WALS maps which is whether a language has the same word for “hand” and “arm” or a different word for “hand” and “arm.”
Gretchen: Do you think it’s related to whether the climate wants you to wear long-sleeved clothing so that you see this distinction between your hand and your arm?
Lauren: I’ve never thought about that before. What is really nice at this zoomed out, big picture level is that you can see that there are groups of languages that tend to do the same thing. Across Australia, languages tend to have different words for “hand” and “arm,” whereas across the Pacific, languages tend to have the same word for “hand” and “arm.”
Gretchen: Right. Sometimes, these points can – if you’re trying to reduce 7,000 or even this map is like 500 languages, which is still a pretty good number, you’re trying to reduce 500 data points to something that’s visualisable. You can say, “Okay, well, we put each language as a dot, then we can see most of the languages in Western Europe distinguish between ‘hand’ and ‘arm.’ There’s a band of languages in Sub-Saharan Africa that don’t distinguish between them. Most of the languages in South America do distinguish between them.” You can come up with these very quick evaluations of what the whole area looks like at the expense of reducing a language to a dot point.
Lauren: Exactly. There’s a trade-off there, and I think the important thing to always remember is what is the trade-off you’re making with information because it can be really difficult to use the limited vocabulary that we have for maps in displaying the complexity of languages. There’s this really beautiful map called “native-land.ca” that focuses on the territories of Indigenous groups of people across the world. If you zoom in on North America, you can see this really beautiful texture of overlapping land and names and stories and territories.
Gretchen: The overlapping polygons idea, which is a really interesting way of representing the idea that multiple people can have been in an area at a given time, and it isn’t necessarily like, “Okay, this part’s red; this part’s blue; and there’s no purple in between.” You get these semi-translucent polygons that overlap each other and show that multiple groups of people were in a particular area. It’s also hard to read. And especially would be even harder to read if you tried to represent even more languages on it. This is a really interesting way of approaching this problem of just trying to shade in particular areas is necessarily incomplete by doing these overlapping translucent polygons. But I don’t know if any mapping solution can ever display all of this information.
Lauren: Having a sense when you’re looking at any other way of mapping things that there’s probably more happening with the story is just a really good first start.
Gretchen: I think if we can make one generalisation of this, it’s that for all the problems that maps have, flags are even worse.
Lauren: Hmm, yes. Just representing a language with a nation state flag is not a very effective way of doing things.
Gretchen: Because even with all the complexities that come with speech bands of continuums of particular languages, a flag is just gonna say, “Everybody in this nation speaks the same language,” which is so far from being the case in so many circumstances.
Lauren: So, if languages aren’t the map, and languages are certainly not flags, what are they?
Gretchen: Well, I have another analogy that I’d like to try on you. What if we thought of languages like stars?
Lauren: Right. I’m a bit worried because we already are stretching the Lingthusiasm travel budget with our global language survey but take us to the stars.
Gretchen: I was thinking about this because I was trying to think about, you know, 7,000, it’s kind of a big number, and yet it’s also a number that we should be able to get a handle on somehow because it’s within human experience. What are other things that there are 7,000-ish of? I looked up how many stars are visible with the naked eye from Earth.
Lauren: Okay. And how many is that?
Gretchen: Well, if there’s no light pollution, and you have 20/20 vision, you can see about 5,000 stars per side of the Earth, so 10,000 total.
Lauren: But like a similar order of magnitude that we’re talking about here.
Gretchen: Right. And when you lie on your back in a dark, grassy field, and you look up at the stars, and you think, “Wow! There are so many of these pinpricks of light,” and each of these is an entire world, and each of these comes with, probably, planets, probably other things going on there. They seem far away, but there’s so much going on with each of these. Each of these languages is an entire world of things going on that’s just as central to people who are speaking that language as the sun is to me speaking my languages.
Lauren: I guess that means that for people who might be in an area that’s full of light pollution who might only see the brightest couple of hundred stars in the sky, I guess that’s kind of the equivalent of the fact that, for most of our day-to-day life, we might only notice the 200 languages that are on an online translation tool or the 30 languages that a website is available in.
Gretchen: Maybe I can only see a couple dozen stars from a city that has lots of other lights competing with it, and these are the big, famous languages that are often found in drop-down menus. But then there’s lots of other languages when you have the chance to actually see the full set. The other cool thing about this analogy is, have you seen the new photos of the galaxies that have been coming out?
Lauren: Oh, yeah, from that deep space telescope.
Gretchen: Yeah. They point the telescope at a dark patch of the sky that we didn’t think we could see any stars in, and there were so many galaxies.
Lauren: I love the photos that compare the new images from, say, something taken with Hubble where a patch of sky in the old images had a few stars, and then the new images you have galaxies behind those. There’s even more out there than we possibly thought.
Gretchen: So, maybe a Sprachbund or a dialect continuum is more like an entire galaxy where all of these things are related to each other. Or like the clouds and the dust and the nebulae that give rise to new stars and that interact with each other and birth new stars are like how languages can come in contact with each other and birth new languages or varieties.
Lauren: The best thing is we don’t even have to wait billions of years for the galaxies to get to us. There are speakers of the world’s languages who can share with us their dialect diversity, that can share with us the experience of living in their own linguistic galaxy, and that means we get to learn from each other straight away.
Gretchen: You never know. Maybe in one of these galaxies, in one of these stars and one of these solar systems somewhere, there are other beings that have some way of communicating that we can eventually learn about. In the meantime, we have lots of science fiction writers to speculate about that.
[Music]
Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, including our survey, which you can do, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get snazzy, redesigned IPA posters and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.
Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month plus our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Have you gotten really into linguistics, and you wish you could talk to more people about it? Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans. Plus, all patrons help keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include a discussion of linguistics and science communication, a paper about a rabbit, and a chat about our new IPA design. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language, especially this month for our anniversary.
Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.
Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
= is transitive. ≈ is not. ≈ is also not well-defined for general usage, but notice that no matter what error ε>0 one chooses for which one designates two quantities to be approximately equal (≈…
Consider the typical definition of a species, that is, a set of individuals that can interbreed with each other. Interbreeding is something that can occur between organisms of slightly different genomes (thankfully, for the sake of life existing), but the genomes still need to be similar enough for two organisms to be able to produce fertile offspring. As such one could imagine that individual A can successfully breed with individual B, who can successfully breed with individual C, who can successfully breed with individual D, and so on, but, say, individuals A and H cannot successfully interbreed. This phenomenon can of course be generalized to not just individuals but groups of individuals, where no members of one group can successfully interbreed with members of another group. Thus, by the interbreeding definition of a species, these are clearly not in the same species. And yet, every step along the way we find individuals that can interbreed with each other, all the way from A to H, so each should be in the same species as the previous one. What gives?
It turns out this is not just a hypothetical. There are actual cases of this occurrence found on Earth, in what are known as ring species. It is an occurrence that fundamentally challenges the concept of a species itself, an instance where there is very clearly no acceptable line to draw to divide the individuals into members of different species. It appears necessary to accept that sometimes there is neither a line nor an equivalence, but rather a gradual continuum in species membership.
It also turns out this is not just a problem with species. Let’s turn to linguistics.
A new short podcast is available for your enjoyment — Psammeticus Institute—the Language Education branch of linguistics publishing powerhouse Psammeticus Press—allows you to harness the amazing transformative power of dialect continua in your own personal language learning. By attending a Dialect Continuum Language Studies course, you can slowly but surely transform the language you speak into the language you want to speak. — XML Feed
