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Homo sapiens seems like a language creating factory. Two nearby valleys and they already mutually not intelligible. But is this a lost art? Is there any recent

Homo sapiens seems like a language creating factory. Two nearby valleys and they already mutually not intelligible. But is this a lost art? Is there any recent new language or have we moved to an era of language oligarchy?

dmulligan 4y ago
I grew up in Greater Manchester, a heavily-industrialised part of the UK, where locally the main industries were at one time coal mining and cotton milling. Members of my family worked in cotton mills, and the machines were so deafening that normal communication was impossible. Consequently, mill workers invented their own forms of communication, which mixed hand signals, exaggerated lip movement, and shouting, which was locally called "meemawing". This communication form was specific to each mill, and workers moving between mills would have to relearn the mill-specific dialect to be able to meemaw with their colleagues.
- college_physics 4y ago
  This is fascinating (and depressing of course from a quality of worker life perspective). I can imagine that if it would be somehow integrated in a theatrical play it would make for a very moving / haunting experience.
kibwen 4y ago
In the past, languages arose because of a lack of communication between different populations. These days every large population can easily communicate with itself, which destroys this avenue for new language creation. However, new dialects of existing languages still arise, and will continue to arise, usually driven by young people seeking to create a distinct culture from their uncool elders. For example, see any Twitch-aware teen and try to decipher half of what they're saying; is "monkaS" in your vocabulary?
culebron21 4y ago
The example you give is so-called primary dialects -- those that stay in place for 1000 years or more, and become very different. These are dialects in Europe, except for areas like Poland, where many people were displaced in WW2. There are also so-called secondary dialects. They appear where area is colonized, people from different dialects mix together, and differences disappear. But then they start developing. This is what happens in Latin America. In Russia, primary dialects are in the Western part, but east of Nizhni Novgorod they end, because Russia got those territories only after year 1500. In LA, people mostly settled 2-3 centuries ago, and differences are already big. Brasilians already can tell origins of each other by accent and vocabulary (they were puzzled by my accent and asked which state I'm from). USSR moved a lot of people across the country quite recently, and yet differences between regions appear and are developing. To test if there's oligarchy, we should probably measure whether European Portuguese is converging with Brasilian because of media and the amount of cultural content Brasilians produce. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet they don't. I saw a public person speculate that small national languages will disappear soon. But that's just not true. First phase of language dissapearance is when natives switch to another one in some areas -- like court, school or science -- and feel normal discussing school or law matters in the "colonial" language. Then it may lose more areas of use, shrink to home usage, and then be lost, because kids want to use the more socially prestigious language, rather their mother tongue. But this only happens to languages of minorities smaller than 1M speakers in bigger countries.

dmulligan 4y ago

I grew up in Greater Manchester, a heavily-industrialised part of the UK, where locally the main industries were at one time coal mining and cotton milling. Members of my family worked in cotton mills, and the machines were so deafening that normal communication was impossible. Consequently, mill workers invented their own forms of communication, which mixed hand signals, exaggerated lip movement, and shouting, which was locally called "meemawing". This communication form was specific to each mill, and workers moving between mills would have to relearn the mill-specific dialect to be able to meemaw with their colleagues.

college_physics 4y ago
This is fascinating (and depressing of course from a quality of worker life perspective). I can imagine that if it would be somehow integrated in a theatrical play it would make for a very moving / haunting experience.

kibwen 4y ago

In the past, languages arose because of a lack of communication between different populations. These days every large population can easily communicate with itself, which destroys this avenue for new language creation. However, new dialects of existing languages still arise, and will continue to arise, usually driven by young people seeking to create a distinct culture from their uncool elders. For example, see any Twitch-aware teen and try to decipher half of what they're saying; is "monkaS" in your vocabulary?

culebron21 4y ago

The example you give is so-called primary dialects -- those that stay in place for 1000 years or more, and become very different. These are dialects in Europe, except for areas like Poland, where many people were displaced in WW2. There are also so-called secondary dialects. They appear where area is colonized, people from different dialects mix together, and differences disappear. But then they start developing. This is what happens in Latin America. In Russia, primary dialects are in the Western part, but east of Nizhni Novgorod they end, because Russia got those territories only after year 1500. In LA, people mostly settled 2-3 centuries ago, and differences are already big. Brasilians already can tell origins of each other by accent and vocabulary (they were puzzled by my accent and asked which state I'm from). USSR moved a lot of people across the country quite recently, and yet differences between regions appear and are developing. To test if there's oligarchy, we should probably measure whether European Portuguese is converging with Brasilian because of media and the amount of cultural content Brasilians produce. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet they don't. I saw a public person speculate that small national languages will disappear soon. But that's just not true. First phase of language dissapearance is when natives switch to another one in some areas -- like court, school or science -- and feel normal discussing school or law matters in the "colonial" language. Then it may lose more areas of use, shrink to home usage, and then be lost, because kids want to use the more socially prestigious language, rather their mother tongue. But this only happens to languages of minorities smaller than 1M speakers in bigger countries.