Spanish Diglossia

Goldstein

Banned
Reflecting about the Arab people and the way they relate with Arabic language, I came up with this question: Is there any possible set of circumstances that could have led to a similar diglossia within the Spanish speaking world? By that I strictly mean a situation in which, for exaple, an Argentinean and a Spaniard (or whatever the counterparts), use mutually unintelligible dialects of Spanish in their everyday lives, languages in their own right, while for public matters they use a prestige Modern Standard Castillian. Your thoughts?
 

Goldstein

Banned
Hmmm... more than 50 checks but no response. Too uninteresting? Too hard? Too ASBish? Whatever it is, I'm truly interested.
 
The problem here is that languages take a long, long while to diverge enough to become unintelligable. I'd estimate at least 300 years. I mean, look at America and Britain. We've been seperated for over 200 years and we still manage to understand each other. (For the most part.)
 
Reflecting about the Arab people and the way they relate with Arabic language, I came up with this question: Is there any possible set of circumstances that could have led to a similar diglossia within the Spanish speaking world? By that I strictly mean a situation in which, for exaple, an Argentinean and a Spaniard (or whatever the counterparts), use mutually unintelligible dialects of Spanish in their everyday lives, languages in their own right, while for public matters they use a prestige Modern Standard Castillian. Your thoughts?

Hard one, Goldstein, hard.

I'm not in the habit of making wild guesses, as I prefer to either joke about things I find funny or speak when I'm sure, but I'm going to say something which I am probably wrong, to try and use them as conversation pieces.

My somewhat not so educated guess: if the spread of *Spanish had occurred before mass literacy, education and widespread travel, maybe. But, and this is where it is very half-baked I'd say that the few consonantic and vocalic sounds make interdialect intellgibility easier than in many other Romance languages.

As an example, about the only somewhat "Spanish" dialect I can more decode than understand is Papiamento, and that is mainly because: it really isn't a Spanish dialect and because of the Dutch words.

And maybe there is where a possible answer lies: earlier spread of the language over a very foreign adstrate, that changes the phonology of the dialect enough that not only it has a different vocabulary, but different enough pronunciations to provide a further barrier to understanding. ¿An earlier Age of Discovery, centered around Africa, maybe?

Hope it helps.

Edit: And another thing. When that happens, *Spanish has to be already a prestige language. Otherwise the language of trade would end up being Latin instead.
 
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Lusitania

Donor
The largest distinguishing aspect of the language spoken in Argentina and Spain is the large number of Italian and German settlers in Argentina that have influenced themlanguage and pronounciation. (i think I got that right)

Similarly with the Portuguese spoken and Brasil and Portugal. In Brasil the large influence of the local indiginous have left their differences in the language.

If the United States had not experienced the rapid development in transportation and literacy then it too would be different. Look at the Italian Peninsula. Italian spoken in the north is not understandable to people from the south. I live in a city of large Italian community as do alot of people in North America. The sicilian italian is completely different than the Italian sopken in the center or north.

That happened because the language developed over hundreds of years in independent countries.

So Spanish, French, English and Portuguese which have spread througout the world have been able to keep a more unified common lingua franca.

Case in point in Malacca there is a small local community of Portuguese descents. They speak a language more resemblant to 15th century Portuguese. Also here in Canada the French Quebecoi people have developed a very distinct French language. Having been seperated from France for over 200 years their French has evolved on a different patern than parisian French, which coincidently only became the official French in the late 19th century. Quebecoi have a difficult time being understood by French when visiting France. Maybe it is jsut because the the French are too stuck up?
 
I think one reason it happened with Arabic is that Arabic has no vowels and some other issues. So when speaking it, peoples of the past might have adopted their own vowel structures and whatever else they grafted on.

ED: It has vowel sounds obviously. But it has morpheme roots that you slot other morphemes into to make words. KTB for example. Kitaab - book, kutubii - book seller, kaatib - writer, kataba - he wrote, kaataba - he corresponded with. Muslim, Islam and salam are all based of the SLM root that means peace/submission. What I mean is people could put other roots in the KTB root to make words as they wished.
 
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I think one reason it happened with Arabic is that Arabic has no vowels and some other issues. So when speaking it, peoples of the past might have adopted their own vowel structures and whatever else they grafted on.

That's another factor. Actually, it was the Castillan (I referring to dialects north of Madrid not the Andalusian ones) version of Spanish language who diverge from the original Spanish. Latin American Spanish was more archaic than the European ones.

The reason why the two major varieties of Spanish never diverge enough it's because Spanish language is a phonemic one unlike Portuguese and French, no wonder why there is so many localized or creole version of Portuguese and French in the respective area colonized by the Portuguese and the French. Also, trade between Spain and its colonies was almost continuous similar with the Britain and the 13 colonies compared to Portugal and Brazil and France and Quebec.
 

Goldstein

Banned
Many good and valid points here, thanks :). A few comments:

-Regarding English, it's interesting how ZombieSlayer54 mentions that they understand "for the most part". In my own experience, English varieties are far more divergent between themselves than Spanish varieties. Maybe Spanish not being so regulated, with official academies closely cooperating, would help.

-Regarding Argentina, I think Lusitania and hsthompson are right in the sense that a greater foreigner substract helps. Anyway, I totally skipped the part of Arabic not having vowels and such. Argentinean is, by far, the most divergent variety (at least for me, raised in a transitional variant of the Castillian dialect, quite divergent itself as Joseph Solis states), and yet the mutual intelligibility is very close to 100%. Hard indeed.

-Drago: Yes, an earlier independence may help, but that's not enough alone, I think. I don't mind the means, even reaching that situation in the future with an old POD... I only ask there are no nukes involved. ;)
 
Maybe a combination of more and diverse immigration to Latin America and the survival of the native Amerindian languages which in turn can affect the local dialects.
 
Reflecting about the Arab people and the way they relate with Arabic language, I came up with this question: Is there any possible set of circumstances that could have led to a similar diglossia within the Spanish speaking world? By that I strictly mean a situation in which, for exaple, an Argentinean and a Spaniard (or whatever the counterparts), use mutually unintelligible dialects of Spanish in their everyday lives, languages in their own right, while for public matters they use a prestige Modern Standard Castillian. Your thoughts?

That's actually easier than it sounds, to be honest. If Old Spanish was largely crystallized as Spanish par excellence over the Castilian, Andalusian, Galician-Portuguese, Aragonese, etc. "dialects", that would be a start. I would assume that to modern-day Spaniards today, Old/Medieval Spanish would might as well be a different language as its sound system contains sounds which do not exist in Modern Spanish, not to mention the grammar being different in several aspects.
 

Goldstein

Banned
That's actually easier than it sounds, to be honest. If Old Spanish was largely crystallized as Spanish par excellence over the Castilian, Andalusian, Galician-Portuguese, Aragonese, etc. "dialects", that would be a start. I would assume that to modern-day Spaniards today, Old/Medieval Spanish would might as well be a different language as its sound system contains sounds which do not exist in Modern Spanish, not to mention the grammar being different in several aspects.

Indeed. As with Middle English, Ancient Castillian is a different language on its own. Even putting wildly different phonetics aside, you cannot tell the meaning of a word out of four. It's a fine idea, but I can't figure out how that situation could be given.

If the United States had not experienced the rapid development in transportation and literacy then it too would be different. Look at the Italian Peninsula. Italian spoken in the north is not understandable to people from the south. I live in a city of large Italian community as do alot of people in North America. The sicilian italian is completely different than the Italian sopken in the center or north.

I skipped this detail. The problem with that reasonment is that Sicilian, as Neapolitan, is not an Italian dialect, even if it's called like that: It's a full language, and internationally recognized as that. I can understand Italian much better than Sicilian as well.
 
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Indeed. As with Middle English, Ancient Castillian is a different language on its own. Even putting widly different phonetics aside, you cannot tell the meaning of a word out of four. It's a fine idea, but I can't figure out how that situation could be given.

Well, number one, no expulsion of the Jews and the Moriscos - the Jews especially, as they were instrumental in making Spanish (in general) a prestige language by translating Classical works into Spanish from the Arabic originals (the latter often being translations of the Latin and Greek originals), amongst others. That alone would have knock-on effects beyond Spain.

Number two, let's say that Alfonso X "el Sabio" decides to take a keen enough interest in languages (a logical followup to his poetry in Galician-Portuguese and him being the first to extensively use Castilian in place of Latin) that he decides that there should one language throughout his Kingdom. From there comes a standardized form of [Old] Spanish (obviously with some Galician-Portuguese influences, as that was, alongside Provençal, a language of the troubadours) arises as Spanish par excellence. As this would be developed in the 1200's, that gives us some time to widen the differences between the written language (which is almost always conservative) and the spoken language (which would diverge widely, as usually happens, to the point of diglossia). This *Spanish could be widely used as an inter-language throughout the Iberian Peninsula, but as we are in a diglossia situation in TTL no one would want to change the written language (after all, it was approved by the King, and who would want to challenge him - particularly a "Wise" King?) so we'd end up with a situation where whilst anyone could recognize the written language, a Portuguese speaker would have a hard time conversing with, say, an Asturian or a Mercian without using *Spanish.
 
Languages can diverge rapidly - look at Dutch and Afrikaans. Although mainly mutually intelligible, the two are now considered separate languages.

The initial settlement time of the Cape was, in fact, later than Spanish America. The difference is the Dutch lost the Cape to the British, and the Afrikaner population was essentially isolated from its motherland for generations.

Thus, I think to have a Spanish-derived language which wasn't actually Spanish, you'd need to have Spain lose control of part of New Spain to another European power. Then wait 100-200 years or so, and you might have something interesting, particularly in more isolated, rural areas.
 
The largest distinguishing aspect of the language spoken in Argentina and Spain is the large number of Italian and German settlers in Argentina that have influenced themlanguage and pronounciation. (i think I got that right)

That's right. And even lunfardo, our local slung, is based on these influence (with some loans from Portuguese).

But before the massive arrival of these European immigrants, Argentina had its own popular variant of Spanish, different from standart Spanish. This variety had developped without foreign influences, and was probably a product of the isalotion experienced by Spaniards in the territory of present day rural argentina.

This form of Spanish was spoken by gauchos in the fields (gauchos that represented up to 70 % of the population), and was dominant among this population at least tilll the 1870ies. Immigration and standart public education eventually changed this, and this native "dialect" gradually faded off.

I don't know if you could call it a dialect or not, but it was slighltly different from Standart Spanish.

Maybe if Argentina had kept been ruled by Conservative tyrans asRosas throughout the XIX century, hadn't recieved many immigrants, and hadn't developped a good education system, these "speech" would have been more widespread. Eventually, some hyper-national populist leader might decide its a different language and make it the "language" taught in schools

Here's an example of this speech, in Martín Fierro (of course, it doesn't look that different fron Spanish when written, you've got to hear it spoken)

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]Soy gaucho, y entiendaló[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]Como mi lengua lo esplica:[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]Para mí la tierra es chica[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]Y pudiera ser mayor;[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]Ni la víbora me pica[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]Ni quema mi frente el sol.[/FONT]

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]Nací como nace el peje[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]En el fondo de la mar;[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]Naides me puede quitar[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]Aquello que Dios me dio[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]Lo que al mundo truje yo[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]Del mundo lo he de llevar[/FONT]
 
I always understood Arabic diglossia to be closer to the relationship of Spanish/Portuguese/French/Italian/Romanian and Latin. So we could just counter the popularization of books written in local languages and dialects, keeping all Spanish literature in Latin. But somehow I think that's not what you were going for.
 
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