(no subject)

So dinner and pie out with a friend turned into worldbuilding a new shared project, like you do. And now we need help.

Does anyone here understand linguistic drift? If you stuck a bunch of people who all spoke different languages on the same slow boat and expected them to establish a colony at the other end, what would happen? A bunch of language enclaves? A single lingua franca based on the most populous language, or some other criteria? A new hybrid? A multilingual population?

How much lack of communication is necessary for two populations that originally spoke the same language to plausibly drift apart?