(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

[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.