Less languages in Europe

Replicator

Banned
Around 5000 BC the Indoeuropeans all spoke one single language.

By 1000 AD there were dozens of languages in Europe and who knows how many dilects.

What if there would have been only like 6 languages in Europe?

One Germanic spoken in central Europe, Scandinavia and Britain.
One Romanic spoken in Spain, France, Portugal and Italy.
One Slavic spoken from Kiev to Bohemia
A Finno-Baltic one and Hngarian and Greek.

Would Europe have been more united- at least the regions with the same language??
 
Well shared language does create a sense of community and culture and allows the spread of ideals more easily which in turn would make it more possible for nationalistic ideals and a sense of nationhood to spread early amongst early Middle age peoples. Over time this might result in larger more expansive cultural blocks of countries.

Though I'm unsure how you'll kill so many languages.
 
I'd say that's a fair guess. I think countries with the same language develop a similar culture (not identical, but far more related than others) simply because it is easier for the commonfolk to associate with eachother. I'm not sure it would create supernations just because, but it would make such a unification easier.
 

Replicator

Banned
Though I'm unsure how you'll kill so many languages.

Kill of a few tribes with different language or make one tribe dominant?

This should go well witch the Slavic language which was the same untill rougly 600 AD.

To make one Germanic language would be harder though.

To mkae one single romanic language should be easy again if one looks at the similarities between French-Spanish-Portugese-Italian.
 
You can't stop linguistic change though. Political unity =/= linguistic unity. Just look at China or the Late Roman Empire.
 
But without a common culture embodied in schools, newspapers, popular novels, and a state-sized discourse - without most people even being able to read - how exactly does one stop the natural tendency of a language to split?

Think of Australia. Settled only since all that stuff started happening, and yet the population movement created a bunch of entirely new and unique accents and dialects there. Historically that was happening all the time, without any of the influences I mention to reverse it.
 
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I think it's backwards to most of the discussion here; languages are always evolving and diverging and what makes for a big common lingua franca is extensive contact between the different groups; this basically means political unity in some form.

So it's not that common languages make for big states, but big states foster common languages.

Therefore to slow down the splitting-up of proto-IE, one needs stages where there are long-lasting megastates retaining the allegiance of the various permitted linguistic subgroups--a "Slavic" empire, a "Germanic" one, a "Celtic" and a "Romance" one.

These conceivably might not be nation-states (almost certainly won't be, since that's a fairly recent invention) nor traditional empires, but they'd have to be pretty strong and foster a lot of long-range communication, whatever they are.

Frankly I think it can't be done before Early Modern times, and then only because those early nation states are headed for much more rapid and sweeping communications--of signals via telegraphs and telephones, of people via steamships and railroads.

I believe what you'll find if you look at societies before these factors (and their predecessors like more efficient sailing and canals and so forth) were so advanced, was that the language that eventually becomes the recognized "national" tongue taught in schools and used in mass media is in its early stages mainly just a dialect that happens to be favored by the court of the king or whatever more centralized approach to government exists, and the people who speak it would mainly be higher nobles, their hangers-on, ambitious people all across the realm, and maybe it comes close to the local commoner dialect in the capital city district. Later during the transition to a nation-state proper, made possible by more advanced communication, you'd find a lot more people aspiring to the status of the national version of the language, both for reasons of prestige and also for pragmatic reasons of having to do business across an expanding network of partners. They'd teach the national tongue in the schools, and the better students would get pretty good at it, but most people still grow up with a "mother tongue" that is some local dialect where they come from, a dialect that persists, and often survives to this day.

I just don't think any governing or economic system could accomplish this sweeping or deep an integration, to the point where the average member of a society is functionally competent in the national dialect, prior to modern forms of rapid communications. You might well have a strongly mutually intelligable set of closely related dialects that amounts to the national court tongue with lots of aspiring middle-class types and up are pretty good at, and recorded literature and history would tend to be in these dialects, providing an illusion of an ancient national language which appears to be universal if you just read the texts.

Considering that the splitting up of the various language families was already well advanced when the first significant city-states, let alone sweeping regional empires and kingdoms, started to form, I think there's not a prayer of these broad languages surviving as completely mutually intelligible forms throughout their sweep. What may eventually happen is some mix of natural and forced re-convergence of these now-widely divided dialects back to some standard favored by political and economic (in some cases mainly decided by purely cultural, as with Florentine becoming the canonical Italian dialect) factors and the dying down of the others, but this can only really happen in a very modern context.
 
Well, we know that it is possible to take a linguistically diverse area and homogenize it. China did it. At the time of the Qin Dynasty, there were at least 20 non mutually intelligible languages in China proper (not including Tibet or Xinjiang). Nowadays there's only 6 or 7 big ones, and they're mostly mutually intelligible if you speak slowly and use easy words. The problem is that it might not be possible in Europe, for the same reasons that Europe was never politically united like China was.
 
To eliminate all other languages completely would be pretty tough. I mean, your list doesn't include Basque, and I'd say the fact that there are still Basque speakers today despite thousands of years of invasions and conquests by other language groups should be enough to tell us that Basque is going to be pretty tough to eliminate. Even the Roman Empire, for all the good it did to spread and establish Latin as the lingua franca, had certain regions where they just couldn't make much ground, like Greece, Britain, and the aforementioned Basque Country.

Large countries like the Roman Empire and Russia are very useful for this notion, obviously, as it's only when they fractured that we got dialects that evolved into separate languages like Spanish or Ukrainian. I will say that the notion of any common language between the British Isles and continental Europe is pretty unrealistic. It's more likely to have a Brythonic Celtic language become the dominant language in Britain and then make grounds in Ireland (as English did) than to have a common Germanic language across all of northern Europe including Britain. You might be able to squeeze out just two Germanic languages between Scandinavia and mainland "Deutschland" (including the areas where Dutch is predominant in OTL) but to have one language between the both of them is really stretching it, too.
 
Well, we know that it is possible to take a linguistically diverse area and homogenize it. China did it. At the time of the Qin Dynasty, there were at least 20 non mutually intelligible languages in China proper (not including Tibet or Xinjiang). Nowadays there's only 6 or 7 big ones, and they're mostly mutually intelligible if you speak slowly and use easy words. The problem is that it might not be possible in Europe, for the same reasons that Europe was never politically united like China was.
No, they are not mutually intelligible any more than French and Spanish are mutually intelligible. Most of what seems like mutual intelligibility is due to a large number of shared borrowings, especially of technical terms, from Middle Chinese but when you start comparing actual conversations as opposed to individual words, the intelligibility drops a lot. I am a native Hokkien speaker, but I can't understand more than 50-60 percent of Teochow, even though both are dialects of Minnan and despite the person speaking slowly to me. Individual words are often similar, but the sentence construction and tones are different enough to make it difficult to understand.

It would be very difficult to make a few languages spoken over large distances, since geographic barriers are always going to isolate some groups of people. Even without geographic features separating populations, sheer distance is going to affect language development, especially when you factor in influences from neighboring countries.
 
It may be nonstandard but "less" is a commonly used comparative for countables (especially as both countables and noncountables use "more")

Common does not mean correct.

Simple. If it is countable, it's "fewer" (fewer cups and fewer enemies vs. less water and less angry). Common mistake. Even in supermarkets aisles where they say "10 items or less" is actually incorrect.
 
The problem with all this is that we are talking about an era when most would rarely leave their communities, when traders and travellers were very rare unless you lived in certain places, and when the theories of ethnic homogeneity were worthless. Two neighbouring settlements were more likely to consider each other rivals and enemies than equals in a continent-spanning proto-kingdom. What would these communities care of being able to speak the same language as another community 100 miles away, of whom not only would they have never had any contact with for centuries...they wouldn't even know of their existence. Communities only really needed language to converse with other members of their collective and occasionally their neighbours. What use is keeping language continentally standard? In fact I'd go further. How would they even know that their language was different, assuming a constant trickle of minor changes to language and vocabulary to be a universal standard. If one community picked up all their vocabulary changes from a neighbouring group then they could actually believe that they were keeping up with continental standards when thry were actually deviating...
 
Common does not mean correct.

Simple. If it is countable, it's "fewer" (fewer cups and fewer enemies vs. less water and less angry). Common mistake. Even in supermarkets aisles where they say "10 items or less" is actually incorrect.

Since there is no "correct" English - the common or colloquial usage (eventually) informs the media usage!
 
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