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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?
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?
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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.
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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.
no subject
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.