(no subject)

[stakebait]

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? 

Comments

[lonebear.livejournal.com]

Hebrew + low german = yiddish.

[embryomystic.livejournal.com]

I think you're thinking of Old High German (or possibly Middle High German, I'm not sure). Yiddish is not that closely related to Low German.

[rosefox]

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?

Probably!

More seriously: how many people, how many languages to start (including the lingua franca that's needed for things like emergency instructions), and how slow a boat?

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Enough people to establish viable genetic variety and allow for some attrition by accident but not orders of magnitude more. A minimum of five initial languages and a maximum of dozens -- we can tweak this somewhat. Emergency instructions might well have been given in more than one language (I'm guessing English, Spanish and Chinese.) The boat was at least 1 year but less than 10 -- it takes months to do the trip "now", and tech has progressed.

All this happened at least a couple of hundred years ago, so whatever process began then has had plenty of time to progress further since; I just don't want to establish a situation that could not logically arise from what would have been the initial facts on the ground.

[rosefox]

Depending on when and where they set out from, English is probably going to be at least an unofficial lingua franca; much of the world speaks it as a second language out of necessity.

"Viable genetic variety" depends on a great many factors. Is there enforcement of interbreeding or is it a free-for-all with some attempt at cultural safeguards (e.g. no marrying your cousins)? Are they expecting more colonists to arrive from wherever they started out from, and if so, when? How advanced is the technology for correcting birth defects and otherwise ameliorating the effects of inbreeding?

Much more relevant to the original question is "at least one year but less than ten", which in linguistic terms is about thirty seconds. Language shift of any real magnitude requires a great deal of time. Ten years is barely long enough to come up with some hip cool radical nifty new slang.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

I haven't discussed this with my writing partner yet either, but my instinct is: Enforcement, no. Encouragement, yes. And they may well carry some extra frozen sperm and eggs; I would, if I were them. However they're mostly coming with expectations from their various cultural backgrounds and the colonial authorities are not interested in imposing top-down alterations of social structure.

The initial crop is not expecting more colonists. They have had some immigration since then, but not a lot -- the initial wave was heavily government subsidized; anybody moving there now has to pay their own way or choose to stay after a temporary employment posting.

Extending the question then, assuming they land basically speaking the same languages as when they left, what about 400 years later?

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

If it's been 400 years, that's not enough time for a new language to develop unless you have actual creolization going on, and in the conditions you're describing, you wouldn't. It seems more likely that you'd wind up with a diglossia situation, with one dominant language used in education and government and spoken to some degree by everyone, and several surviving minority languages whose speakers are almost all bilingual and who use their home languages within the community and the dominant language with outsiders.

The dominant language may have developed into a distinct dialect-- lots of borrowings, quite probably a novel accent, maybe a handful of grammatical quirks-- and of course its divergence from what people are speaking back on Earth will also depend on language change there, since speakers will continue to innovate back at home even after the colonists leave.

Actually, I know you said you didn't just want to have Americans In Space, but the language situation might end up looking an awful lot like the US.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

If it evolves independently in a way that ends up resembling how the U.S. evolved, I'm okay with that. I just don't want it to be that the U.S. is the only one to export its culture to space, or that everyone spontaneously turns into us when they get there for no reason.

Which do you think is likely to become the dominant language? Assume the overarching governmental sponsorship is the U.N. or its successor and is not putting conscious effort into producing a particular outcome, though individual governments may be pushing for their own language either formally or by indoctrinating their colonists.

From a plot perspective, it could be handy if our main characters (a brother sister pair) grew up speaking a language at home that is different from the main language around them; they could use it to communicate in front of hostile others if needed, or drop into the occasional word of it to remind each other of their bond.

WRT to divergence from Earth, they will still have audiovisual contact with the home world to some extent, just not real time. Sort of like Americans getting books from England in the 1800s, but with sound. How much should we expect that to keep things synched?

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

Dominant language: English is a likely bet, but depending on your initial mix of people, Spanish, French, and (Modern Standard) Arabic would also be strong contenders, particularly if you have a mix of monoglot and polyglot colonists. You want a language that's widely-spoken as a second language, but is also the home language of some monolinguals; what languages fit that description will depend on your intial mix of colonists.

The degree of divergence is going to depend a lot on whether the colonists are trying to preserve cultural ties with the people back home, or whether they're invested in forging a new identity. (This means that in any language, you may end up with a couple of very different dialects, if different ethnic or settlement groups have differing senses of connection with Earth.)

Colonial speech tends to be conservative, in general-- the usual model is innovation in the core, preservation on the fringes. But the language contact situation among language groups on the colony will also have an effect-- languages tend to be most conservative when most speakers will never encounter someone who doesn't know their languages, and most innovative in high-contact situations where people hear a lot of accents and new languages and often have to communicate with non-native speakers. A diglossia situation, like your colony is likely to have, is going to be a conservative force on the dominant language-- less so on the home languages, which may be more responsive to cultural/political affiliation. If the dominant language does rapidly differentiate itself from the version spoken at home, it's likely to be less through straight-up innovation and more through widespread borrowing from the colony's minority languages.

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

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?

All of these things are possibilities. How long is the voyage? How large are the various language groups? How many are there, what are their proportions in the population? Are some of the languages related? Are children being educated together, and if so, what are the languages of instruction? How many of the initial population are bilingual, and in which languages? How many of them are monolingual, and are they in a strong enough social position that they don't have to learn anyone else's language? Do speakers of any one language hold a disproportionate amount of power or social standing? What languages are the populations religious texts, if any, in? What languages are the ships instruction manuals in? How much contact do they have with the homeworld, and what is the speed of communication? What were the dominant languages on the homeworld when they left?

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

Again, there's no one easy answer. How literate is the population? How invested are they in being able to read their old literature? How invested are they in maintaining a cultural identity with the people left behind? How invested are they in breaking away-- do they want to sever all ties? How much linguistic variety do they have, among themselves? And how much communication do they have with any third parties-- with anyone outside the parent population?

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

The voyage is about 1-10 years long. That can be adjusted upward a bit, but I don't want to get into generation ships. The various language groups range from a few hundred to a few thousand each of primary speakers. Quite a few of them will be bilingual to various degrees, but not all to the same second language. Some of the languages are related.

Basically we're pulling from our Earth, about 80-120 years in the future. Distribution will either be random selection from a global pool of volunteers, or each country filling its population-determined allocation in the way that seems best to it. There may be some skew toward equatorial countries and seacoasts -- i haven't discussed that with my writing partner yet, but larger allocations as reparations for those disproportionately impacted by global warming seems appropriate to me.

I'm open to hearing arguments to the contrary, but for the moment I'm assuming that English, Spanish and Chinese will be the most commonly spoken languages.

In the long run children will be educated together, however in the short run I don't imagine they'll have a lot of children -- they'll be landing under fairly primitive conditions and having to do a fairly strenuous amount of building before they have much in the way of someplace you'd want to take the kids.

I am trying to reduce the disproportionate amount of power or social standing held by English speakers. It's probably not plausible that they have none, but I do not want this to be another instance of USians In Spaaaaaace.

Popular religious texts are all the ones we have now, possibly plus one or two. Ship instructional manuals can be in whatever we want them to be in -- again I was defaulting to English, Spanish and Chinese.

Normal communication with the home world is slow-ish -- not as slow as travel, which took years originally but now takes months, but much too slow for real time back and forth. When the story is set, several hundred years after the colony ship arrives, there is technology for real-time communication, but it is brand new, hugely expensive, and tightly controlled.

The population is almost entirely literate, I would think -- i can't imagine it being terribly practical to send people that far away who can't read instructions. Though I suppose if we're progressed to all videos all the time...

When they first arrive, at least, their investment in maintaining a cultural identity and in breaking away is not uniform. There are people who feel passionately in each direction; there are people who feel mildly in each direction. There are people who embarked expecting to feel one way and find, when they actually arrive, that they feel the opposite.

By the time the actual story is set, the distinction of colonist versus homeworlder has become more important than the distinctions they arrived with for most.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

I think Hindi-related languages are likely to be more prevalent than Spanish.

How much linguistic unity you get will depend in part on how much fragmentation of populations the economy encourages.

In any case, languages that are reasonably common will generate communities of people who speak other languages as little as possible.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

In the beginning they're all stuck together because of limited terraforming.

As time goes on it will be more possible to spread out, but one of the things I don't know is if, by then, people would still be spreading out in ethnic/linguistic clumps or if they would have sufficiently come up with a cross-pollinated culture that other factors would come more into play.

[kate_nepveu]

You should read _The Power of Babel_! http://www.steelypips.org/weblog/2008/06/mcwhorter_babel.php

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

THanks, I will!

[thunderpigeon.livejournal.com]

I was trying to remember the name of that book. Good thing someone else got to it first, because I wouldn't have gotten there.

I'd say if it's only 1-10 years, then there probably wouldn't be a new language. You'd need at least a generation.

Some interesting possibilities--if it's multiple generations but not enough that the elders die off, then there could be a creole language spoken by people who were born en route but not by those who left the old country.

Another thing to consider is how much segregation is there? Not just among the different nationalities of origin, but among people of different social classes, or those who do different jobs? Another possibility is that if the ship is large enough and groups don't intermingle much, then there might be one language in steerage and another in first class. Or you might get something like (please forgive any stereotyping here; I'm trying to do this in broad strokes) pilots speaking a Spanish-English creole, while engineers speak English-Chinese, and the manual laborers speak Spanish-Chinese, with some overlap for the tasks that need frequent communication across groups.

[thunderpigeon.livejournal.com]

Another question: is one of the cultures politically dominant? When my parents were in the Peace Corps, the schools were conducted in English, but in the market everybody spoke Igbo.

Also to be considered is the presence of audiovisual recordings. I don't know if anyone knows yet how these will affect linguistic drift, but I'd imagine that the formal version of a language would change much more slowly, while the common version might still change.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

I heartily second the recommendation.

[crewgrrl.livejournal.com]

A creole is likely to arise, based on the most populous language. At least, that's how I understand things based on how trading pidgins turn into creoles.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

In ten years, I'd expect a pidgin, but I wouldn't expect a creole.

[crewgrrl.livejournal.com]

Point. I only took a small amount of linguistics as part of Sociology 101, so I forget how long it takes for a pidgin to grow up into a creole.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

About a generation.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Creoles are pidgins that become native/primary languages.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Based on what I remember from the John McWhorter Learning Company CDs I've listened to:

When two cultures bang into each other and have to interact, you form pidgins. You tend to form new languages once people start intermarrying and raising kids together. One-to-ten years isn't long enough to create a new language; a hundred years is.

New languages often form when entire groups of people are raised bilingual from birth, and/or when a group of people grow up using a pidgin as their native language -- the pidgin will evolve into an actual creole.

In the situation you've listed, questions include "how large are the groups", "is one group clearly dominant", "how much do the groups interact (which is related to the previous two questions)", "do the groups come from a place where a certain amount of knowledge of one of the languages tends to be common, even if it's not the native language (on Earth, a LOT of people speak at least a LITTLE English)", and "how long is the trip"?

When groups interact, the first thing that you get is a pidgin -- a rough-and-ready good-enough-to-get-basic-concepts-across hacked-together glom of basic words from both languages, jammed together in some sort of really basic order, with really basic rules. Verb tenses are basic, if they're there at all. One case is used for everything -- subject AND object. If the languages have gendered pronouns, typically only the male pronoun form is used. Things tend to go with strict subject-object-verb or subject-verb-object order.

"Me store go. Me milk get. Sally me meet. Me him talk. Him bread want."

It works well enough for basic stuff, but, over time, people want more complexity, and start coming up with ways of marking tense, and the like. Perhaps you might mark past tense by saying "did" after the word, such as "walk did", "build did", "carry did."

In another generation or two, standard extra words like that tend to shorten, and become prefixes and suffixes instead of separate words -- instead of "walk did", you get "walk'd", or "walked".

"The snake, his scales" --> "the snake's scales"

[cluegirl.livejournal.com]

In that context, i think that whatever linguistic group commanded the most tangible resources would probably tend to force the others to deal with them in their preferred tongue, but there would definitely develop a patois of all the languages on the boat. There would be linguistic cliques, because people will tend to gravitate toward others who share their tongue, whether they like those people or not, and if this is a multi generation voyage, you'd definitely have folks invested in making sure their languages didn't disappear in the incoming generation, but overall I think you'd wind up with a Lingua Franca of whichever group was richest and/or most powerful. That said, the trade tongue would definitely pick up words, phrases, and grammar from the other languages represented.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

I should find you a copy of Cat Faber's song Say Again, Tower?

[batyatoon]

I was just listening to that today. :D

"Say, B-17, how's the verne escadrine?" --
For pete's sake, we've only been gone twenty years!

[embryomystic.livejournal.com]

For it to be interesting, it would have to be on the level of a couple of decades. In that case, I suspect you'd end up with something rather like Singlish, ultimately. A huge range of varieties of English, from pidgin through creole all the way to decreolised varieties that could be considered dialects of English. Other languages, particularly demographically strong ones, would continue to exist, and there would probably be a lot of bilingualism in Spanish and Mandarin, probably Arabic as well, with codeswitching functioning as a way of emphasising something or adding a shade of meaning (see: Montréal). The place where this would be most interesting is in the schoolyard, so to speak, where kids from diverse backgrounds, being educated in the same language(s), would sort out a consistent manner of communicating.

In terms of written languages, I suspect that English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, whatever, would remain entirely distinct, and signs would be multilingual, manuals and things would be available in multiple languages. But one wonders what personal correspondence would look like.