• Question: why are there different dialects in the same language

    Asked by Robyn Capes-Baldrey to Sreejita, Daniel on 22 Jan 2020.
    • Photo: Sreejita Ghosh

      Sreejita Ghosh answered on 22 Jan 2020:

      Unfortunately I am not a linguist, so I don’t know the correct answer. But I did have the same question a few years ago. In fact when I return to India then if I speak the same way as I do normally in the Netherlands, nobody will understand, so I have to speak that weird accent and unlearn as soon as I am back in the NL. But that is the accent. Dialects go a bit deeper than that. It’s more localized. It’s like your classmates and you have gone on a day trip to say a museum. Now your best friend and you were hanging out together and a bit away from the rest of your class, and during this time you both observed some things and made jokes about it such that one of you just mention one word and the other immediately cracks up. Maybe you heard some word being said in a weird way by some other museum visitor and that made you both laugh and now you both decide to say that word like that visitor.
      These words will not evoke the same reaction from the rest of your mates, but for you and your best friend you both now have a separate list of words, some even new made up words, which mean things to you. I guess that locals from different places had that sort of experiences and thus different dialects were developed. But this is just my guess and I am not a linguist.

    • Photo: Daniel Bearup

      Daniel Bearup answered on 23 Jan 2020:

      I am also not a linguist. One theory that I’m aware of could be described as evolution of language.

      At various points in history, one group have conquered a large area (e.g. the Romans or the Greeks etc). When that happens their language is spread through that area and kept consistent by travel within the empire by soldiers/administrators. When the empire collapses (as historically they tend to do), travel within the area tends to drop reducing the pressure to keep the language consistent. Without that pressure, the languages in the isolated areas of the former empire start to change, maybe incorporating words from old languages, making new words for new things, or just due to local pronounciation preferences (accents). Over time what was one consistent language becomes a group of dialects, or, if you wait long enough, different (but related) languages.

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