1146: Dialect Continua Jan 28, 2018

Languages usually exist along a dialect continuum which eventually forms the language family. This is to say that moving town-to-town, each dialect will be mutually intelligible with the next, but two given dialects that are used far enough apart will no longer be mutually intelligible. Looking to standardised languages, this is not so easily see; Spanish is not apparently like French which is not apparently like Italian, but looking at regional dialects of these languages, there is not always as clear differentiation. If you are interested in exploring this further, look into Occitan for example, which is a minority language [dialect] spoken by few now, but it looks—to use non-linguistic terms—a bit like a Spanish-y French. This is also clear when looking at certain words from English, Dutch and German. Looking at 'that' and the German 'dass' for instance, there is some small similarity, but not much. However, factor in the Dutch 'dat' and the link becomes clearer. Furthermore Kölsch (the German dialect from Cologne), spoken very near the Netherlands can replace terminal [s] with [t] such as 'das' for 'dat' or 'wat' for 'was' which translates to, incidentally, 'what'. If you know other examples from other dialect continua, feel free to leave it in a comment.

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