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The Quran and its language ("Modern Standard Arabic") may be what binds the "dialects" together under one umbrella label "Arabic". Chinese is in a similar situa

The Quran and its language ("Modern Standard Arabic") may be what binds the "dialects" together under one umbrella label "Arabic". Chinese is in a similar situation, whose writing system unifies the mutually un-intelligible "dialects" like Mandarin, Hokkien, and Cantonese as one "language" called "Chinese". Such is an advantage of separating written and spoken forms of a language: as the spoken form inevitably mutates over time and fractures over space, having a stable written form means people who would otherwise consider each other foreigners may (1) share a common understandable set of historical and cultural documents, (2) communicate with each other at least in letters, (3) identify each other's language as but a "variation" of the standard written form. English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese remain largely uniform across the Oceans because they are spread across the Oceans only recently, that is, not long before centralised nation states, compulsory education, sound recording, radio broadcasting, and YouTube.

usrusr 8y ago
The parallel to post-Roman Europe is interesting, where Latin lived on for quite a while as the language of writing. It gradually gave way to written forms of the various spoken languages, derivatives of Latin or others. During this time of parallel usage Latin, just by being there as an alternative for the elites to show off pedantry, may have helped establishing a tradition of keeping the new written languages continuously aligned with their permanently changing spoken counterparts. Keeping Latin while it was helpful as a shared language when the scholar density was low and then moving on once local intellectual networks became stronger and mass education required efficiency may have been one of those "guns germs and steel" factors where Europe just happened to be lucky.

usrusr 8y ago

The parallel to post-Roman Europe is interesting, where Latin lived on for quite a while as the language of writing. It gradually gave way to written forms of the various spoken languages, derivatives of Latin or others. During this time of parallel usage Latin, just by being there as an alternative for the elites to show off pedantry, may have helped establishing a tradition of keeping the new written languages continuously aligned with their permanently changing spoken counterparts. Keeping Latin while it was helpful as a shared language when the scholar density was low and then moving on once local intellectual networks became stronger and mass education required efficiency may have been one of those "guns germs and steel" factors where Europe just happened to be lucky.