(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

[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.