(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

[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.