(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]

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.