>> When you have no >>alternative to contact neighbors except using intermediaries >>(specialized communicators) or war, you make substantial more >> efforts before saying "I don't understand your dialect".
My experiences in Bavaria show me that fairly often a rival dialect will be willfully not understood. Personally, I had less problems than some of the youths living there but never having learned the dialect actively, but then I'm in the lucky position that modern German was introduced to my part of Germany only four generations before as official language, so all my region has to offer is either a broad accent, or a different Germanic language, and previous exposure due to relatives there and in Austria.
The situation gets different when Bavarian Svabs and Bavarians proper get into contact. It takes a lot of sympathy between the participants to let go of their dialects, and sympathies between these different groups of population aren't that great. (They might form a common linguistic front against northerners, though...)
You may well get the situation where the chieftains talk extremely heavy dialect, their speakers translate it into just accented common (urban) Sartarite, and then the speakers of the other party translating it into another extremely heavy dialect.
Sources for these differences could be cultic (Torkani using Darktongue loan words, Elmali and Yelmalians Fire-tongue or Pelorian), ethnic (Far Point folk and Dinacoli speak a Tarshite - i.e. Pelorian Heortling - dialect, the rest of the Sartarites speak rural dialects of Heortlander, and may have kept some differences from their different regions of origin in Heortland, or (in case of e.g. the Colymar) Esrolia.
Shared cities are both a leveling factor in dialects, and the source for new ones through contact with outsiders. Urban Sartarite is likely to take in Pelorian phrases due to trade and occupation, whether as fashionable or as derogatives.
Donald Oddy:
> Neigbours rarely have widely varying dialects, it's travellers such
> as merchants who find the language changes as they move round the
> countryside.
That is true for lands that have been settled for more than 300 years. Immigrant groups keep their native dialects, to the extent that the Siebenbuergen Germans of Romania spoke a Svabian dialect among themselves. Areas with mixed immigration groups will form some leveling over time, but peculiarities will remain within each clan.
Another factor are the clan ancestors, who may demand certain archaic forms of address specific to their dialect. Lose the dialect, and you are about to lose clan identity. (Something found in modern regions, too.)
However, with the wives (keepers of linguistic education, and application) coming from external clans, isolated dialects require more than one clan to maintain it, and regular intermarriage rules.
> When you have never travelled more than a day's walk
> from your birthplace the language you use is the correct one.
Unless your neighbors speak some uncouth dialect of different origin.
> That
> a neigbour calls uses shippon for cowshed is something you get used
> to. Even when you don't know the word you can often get the meaning
> from the context.
That's how everyone tries to cope with dialects. Some a lot less successfully than others.
> I'm not suggesting dialects often form a barrier to communication,
> just an obstacle. Part of the job of Issaries is to learn the local
> variations sufficently well to avoid mistakes and confusion. At
> the worst extreme of accent and dialect both parties have to
> concentrate to express themselves clearly and get the other's meaning.
That's in direct conversation. The situation gets a lot harder sitting in the long hall, with a buzz of voices around you babbling all those meaningless things. Overhearing a conversation in an unfamiliar dialect (or language) can be extremely taxing, or even impossible. (Speech getting slurred with the consumption of ale doesn't help, either, although one's own consumption appears to lower the barriers a bit at first.)
Powered by hypermail