A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be.
Dialect continua typically occur in long-settled agrarian populations, as innovations spread from their various points of origin as wave model. In this situation, hierarchical classifications of varieties are impractical. Instead, Dialectology map variation of various language features across a dialect continuum, drawing lines called between areas that differ with respect to some feature.
A variety within a dialect continuum may be developed and codified as a standard language, and then serve as an authority for part of the continuum, e.g. within a particular political unit or geographical area.
Since the early 20th century, the increasing dominance of nation-states and their standard languages has been steadily eliminating the nonstandard dialects that comprise dialect continua, making the boundaries ever more abrupt and well-defined.
Dialect geography
Dialectologists record variation across a dialect continuum using maps of various features collected in a
linguistic atlas, beginning with an atlas of
German dialects by
Georg Wenker (from 1888), based on a postal survey of schoolmasters. The influential
Atlas linguistique de la France (1902–10) pioneered the use of a trained fieldworker. These atlases typically consist of
display maps, each showing local forms of a particular item at the survey locations.
Secondary studies may include interpretive maps, showing the areal distribution of various variants. A common tool in these maps is an isogloss, a line separating areas where different variants of a particular feature predominate.
In a dialect continuum, isoglosses for different features are typically spread out, reflecting the gradual transition between varieties. A bundle of coinciding isoglosses indicates a stronger dialect boundary, as might occur at geographical obstacles or long-standing political boundaries. In other cases, intersecting isoglosses and more complex patterns are found.
Relationship with standard varieties
Standard varieties may be developed and codified at one or more locations in a continuum until they have independent cultural status (autonomy), a process the
Germany linguist
Heinz Kloss called
ausbau. Speakers of local varieties typically read and write a related standard variety, use it for official purposes, hear it on radio and television, and consider it the standard form of their speech, so that any standardizing changes in their speech are towards that variety. In such cases the local variety is said to be dependent on, or heteronomous with respect to, the standard variety.
A standard variety together with its dependent varieties is commonly considered a "language", with the dependent varieties called "dialects" of the language, even if the standard is mutually intelligible with another standard from the same continuum.
The choice of standard is often determined by a political boundary, which may cut across a dialect continuum.
As a result, speakers on either side of the boundary may use almost identical varieties, but treat them as dependent on different standards, and thus part of different "languages".
The various local dialects then tend to be leveled towards their respective standard varieties, disrupting the previous dialect continuum.[ p. 501.]
Examples include the boundaries between Dutch language and German language, between Czech language, Slovak language and Polish language, and between Belarusian and Ukrainian.[Woolhiser (2011), pp. 507, 516–517.][ p. 152.]
The choice may be a matter of national, regional or religious identity, and may be controversial.
Examples of controversies are regions such as the disputed territory of Kashmir, in which local usually regard their language as Urdu, the national standard of Pakistan, while Hinduism regard the same speech as Hindi, an official standard of India. Even so, the Eighth Schedule to the Indian Constitution contains a list of 22 scheduled languages and Urdu is among them.
During the time of the former Socialist Republic of Macedonia, a standard was developed from local varieties of Eastern South Slavic, within a continuum with Torlakian to the north and Bulgarian to the east. The standard was based on varieties that were most different from standard Bulgarian. Now known as Macedonian, it is the national standard of North Macedonia, but viewed by Bulgarians as a dialect of Bulgarian.[ pp. 173–174.]
Europe
Europe provides several examples of dialect continua, the largest of which involve the Germanic, Romance and
Slavic languages branches of the Indo-European language family, the continent's largest language branches.
The Romance area spanned much of the territory of the Roman Empire but was split into western and eastern portions by the Slav Migrations into the Balkans in the 7th and 8th centuries.
The Slavic area was in turn split by the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin in the 9th and 10th centuries.
Germanic languages
[[File:West Germanic dialect continuum (according to Wiesinger, Heeringa & König).png|350px|thumb|The varieties of the continental West Germanic dialect continuum after 1945:
[W. Heeringa: Measuring Dialect Pronunciation Differences using Levenshtein Distance. University of Groningen, 2009, pp. 232–234.][Peter Wiesinger: Die Einteilung der deutschen Dialekte. In: Werner Besch, Ulrich Knoop, Wolfgang Putschke, Herbert Ernst Wiegand (Hrsg.): Dialektologie. Ein Handbuch zur deutschen und allgemeinen Dialektforschung, 2. Halbband. de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1983, ISBN 3-11-009571-8, pp. 807–900.][Werner König: dtv-Atlas Deutsche Sprache. 19. Auflage. dtv, München 2019, , pp. 230.][C. Giesbers: Dialecten op de grens van twee talen. Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, 2008, pp. 233.]
]]
North Germanic continuum
The Norwegian,
Danish dialects and
Swedish dialects comprise a classic example of a dialect continuum, encompassing Norway, Denmark, Sweden and coastal parts of Finland. The Continental North Germanic standard languages (Norwegian,
Danish language and
Swedish language) are close enough and intelligible enough for some to consider them to be dialects of the same language, but the Insular ones (
Faroese language and Icelandic) are not immediately intelligible to the other North Germanic speakers.
Continental West Germanic continuum
Historically, the
Dutch dialects, Frisian,
Low German and
German dialects formed a canonical dialect continuum, which has been gradually falling apart since the Late Middle Ages due to the pressures of modern education, standard languages, migration and weakening knowledge of the dialects.
[ p. 54.]
The transition from German dialects to Dutch variants followed two basic routes:
-
From Central German to Southeastern Dutch (Limburgish) in the so-called Rhenish fan, an area corresponding largely to the modern Niederrhein in which gradual but geographically compact changes took place.
-
From Low Saxon to Northwestern Dutch (Hollandic): This sub-continuum also included West Frisian dialects up until the 17th century, but faced external pressure from Standard Dutch and, after the collapse of the Hanseatic League, from Standard German which greatly influenced the vocabularies of these border dialects.
Although the internal dialect continua of both Dutch and German remain largely intact, the broader continuum that once connected Dutch, Frisian, and German has largely disintegrated. Fragmentary areas of the Dutch-German border in which language change is more gradual than in other sections or a higher degree of mutual intelligibility is present still exist, such as the Aachen-Kerkrade area, but the historical chain in which dialects were only divided by minor isoglosses and negligible differences in vocabulary has seen a rapid and ever-increasing decline since the 1850s.
Standard Dutch was based on the dialects of the principal Brabantic and Hollandic cities. The written form of Standard German originated in the East Central German used at the chancery of the kingdom of Saxony, while the spoken form emerged later, based on North German pronunciations of the written standard.[ p. 11.] Being based on widely separated dialects, the Dutch and German standards do not show a high degree of mutual intelligibility when spoken and only partially so when written. One study concluded that, when concerning written language, Dutch speakers could translate 50.2% of the provided German words correctly, while the German subjects were able to translate 41.9% of the Dutch equivalents correctly. In terms of orthography, 22% of the vocabulary of Dutch and German is identical or near-identical.[Gooskens & Heeringa (2004)]
Anglic continuum
The
Anglic languages comprise areal varieties of English in England and of
Scots language in Scotland. Those of large areas north and south of the border are often mutually intelligible. In contrast, the
Orcadian dialect of Scots is very different from the dialects of English in southern England—but they are linked by a chain of intermediate varieties.
Romance languages
Western Romance continuum
The western continuum of Romance languages comprises, from West to East: in Portugal, Portuguese; in Spain, Galician,
Leonese language or Asturian, Castilian or
Spanish language, Aragonese and
Catalan Language or Valencian; in France,
Occitan Language, Franco-Provençal, standard
French language and Corsican which is closely related to Italian; in Italy, Ligurian, Piedmontese,
Lombard language,
Emilian dialects, Romagnol,
Italian language Gallo-Picene, Venetian, Friulian,
Ladin language; and in Switzerland,
Lombard language and
Romansh language. This continuum is sometimes presented as another example, but the major languages in the group (i.e. Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian) have had separate standards for longer than the languages in the Continental West Germanic group, and so are not commonly classified as
of a common language.
Focusing instead on the local Romance lects that pre-existed the establishment of national or regional standard languages, all evidence and principles point to Romania continua as having been, and to varying extents in some areas still being, what Charles Hockett called an L-complex, i.e. an unbroken chain of local differentiation such that, in principle and with appropriate caveats, intelligibility (due to sharing of features) attenuates with distance. This is perhaps most evident today in Italy, where, especially in rural and small-town contexts, local Romance is still often employed at home and work, and geolinguistic distinctions are such that while native speakers from any two nearby towns can understand each other with ease, they can also spot from linguistic features that the other is from elsewhere.
In recent centuries, the intermediate dialects between the major Romance languages have been moving toward language death, as their speakers have switched to varieties closer to the more prestigious national standards. That has been most notable in France, owing to the French government's refusal to recognise minority languages,
The Romance languages of Italy are a less arguable example of a dialect continuum. For many decades since Italy's unification, the attitude of the French government towards the ethnolinguistic minorities was copied by the Italian government.
Eastern Romance continuum
The eastern Romance continuum is dominated by Romanian. Outside Romania and Moldova, across the other south-east European countries, various Romanian language groups are to be found: pockets of various Romanian and Aromanian subgroups survive throughout
Bulgaria,
Serbia,
North Macedonia,
Greece,
Albania and
Croatia (mostly in
Istria).
Slavic languages
Conventionally, on the basis of extralinguistic features (such as writing systems or the former western frontier of the Soviet Union), the North Slavic continuum is split into East and West Slavic continua. From the perspective of linguistic features alone, only two Slavic (dialect) continua can be distinguished, namely North and South,
[Peter Trudgill. 2003. A Glossary of Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 36, 95-96, 124-125.][[1]Tomasz Kamusella. 2017. Map A4, Dialect Continua in Central Europe, 1910 (p 94) and Map A5, Dialect Continua in Central Europe, 2009 (p 95). In: Tomasz Kamusella, Motoki Nomachi, and Catherine Gibson, eds. 2017. Central Europe Through the Lens of Language and Politics: On the Sample Maps from the Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe (Ser: Slavic Eurasia Papers, Vol 10). Sapporo, Japan: Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University.] separated from each other by a band of non-Slavic languages: Romanian, Hungarian and German.
North Slavic continuum
The North Slavic continuum covers the East Slavic and West Slavic languages. East Slavic includes
Russian language, Belarusian,
Rusyn language and Ukrainian; West Slavic languages of
Czech language,
Polish language,
Slovak language, Silesian, Kashubian, and Upper and Lower Sorbian. Eastern Slovak and
Pannonian Rusyn stand out as sharing features with Slovak, Polish and Rusyn, thus serving as a transition between West and East Slavic languages.
South Slavic continuum
All South Slavic languages form a dialect continuum.
It comprises, from West to East,
Slovenia,
Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Montenegro,
Serbia,
North Macedonia, and
Bulgaria.
Standard
Slovene language, Macedonian, and Bulgarian are each based on a distinct dialect, but the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian standard varieties of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language are all based on the same dialect, Shtokavian.
Therefore,
Croats,
Serbs,
Bosniaks and
Montenegrins communicate fluently with each other in their respective standardized varieties.
In
Croatia, native speakers of Shtokavian may struggle to understand distinct
Kajkavian or
Chakavian dialects, as might the speakers of the two with each other.
Likewise in
Serbia, the
Torlakian dialect differs significantly from Standard Serbian. Serbian is a Western South Slavic standard, but Torlakian is largely transitional with the Eastern South Slavic languages (Bulgarian and Macedonian). Collectively, the Torlakian dialects with Macedonian and Bulgarian share many grammatical features that set them apart from all other Slavic languages, such as the complete loss of its
grammatical case systems and adoption of features more commonly found among analytic languages.
The barrier between East South Slavic and West South Slavic is historical and natural, caused primarily by a one-time geographical distance between speakers. The two varieties started diverging early on () and evolved separately ever since without major mutual influence, as evidenced by distinguishable Old Bulgarian, while the western dialect of common Old Slavic was still spoken across the modern Serbo-Croatian area in the 12th and early 13th centuries. An intermediate dialect linking western and eastern variations inevitably came into existence over time – Torlakian – spoken across a wide radius on which the tripoint of Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Serbia is relatively pivotal.
Uralic languages
The other major language family in Europe besides Indo-European are the
Uralic languages. The
Sami languages, sometimes mistaken for a single language, are a dialect continuum, albeit with some disconnections like between North, Skolt and Inari Sami. The Baltic-Finnic languages spoken around the Gulf of Finland form a dialect continuum. Thus, although
Finnish language and Estonian are considered as separate languages, there is no definite linguistic border or isogloss that separates them. This is now more difficult to recognize because many of the intervening languages have declined or become extinct.
Goidelic continuum
The Goidelic languages consist of
Irish language,
Scottish Gaelic and
Manx language. Prior to the 19th and 20th centuries, the continuum existed throughout Ireland, the Isle of Man and Scotland.
Many intermediate dialects have become extinct or have died out leaving major gaps between languages such as in the islands of
Rathlin, Arran or
Kintyre and also in the Irish counties of
County Antrim, Londonderry and
County Down.
The current Goidelic speaking areas of Ireland are also separated by extinct dialects but remain mutually intelligible.
Middle East
Arabic
Arabic is a standard case of
diglossia.
The standard written language, Modern Standard Arabic, is based on the
Classical Arabic of the Qur'an, while the modern vernacular dialects (or languages) branched from ancient Arabic dialects, from North Western
Africa through
Egypt,
Sudan, and the
Fertile Crescent to the Arabian Peninsula and
Iraq. The dialects use different analogues from the Arabic language inventory and have been influenced by different substrate and superstrate languages. Adjacent dialects are mutually understandable to a large extent, but those from distant regions are more difficult to understand.
The difference between the written standard and the vernaculars is apparent also in the written language, and children have to be taught Modern Standard Arabic in school to be able to read it.
Aramaic
All
modern Aramaic languages descend from a dialect continuum that historically existed through the Aramaization of the Levant (other than the original Aramaic-speaking parts) and Mesopotamia
and before the Islamicization of the Levant and Mesopotamia. Northeastern Neo-Aramaic, including distinct varieties spoken by both Jews and Christians, is a dialect continuum although greatly disrupted by population displacement during the twentieth century.
Armenian
The Armenian language has two standardized forms:
Western Armenian and
Eastern Armenian. Before the Armenian genocide and other significant demographic changes that affected the
Armenians, several dozen Armenian dialects existed in the areas historically populated by them. The most notable overarching survey of the Armenian dialects is the
Classification des dialectes arméniens (
Classification of Armenian dialects), a 1909 book by the Armenian linguist
Hrachia Acharian, published in Paris.
It is Acharian's translation into French of his original work
Hay Barbaṙagitutʿiwn ("Armenian Dialectology") that was later published as a book in 1911 in Moscow and New Nakhichevan. The French translation lacks dialectal examples. An English translation was published in 2024.
Acharian surveyed the Armenian dialects in what is now
Turkey,
Armenia, Georgia,
Iran,
Azerbaijan and other countries settled by
Armenians. After the Armenian genocide, linguists
Gevorg Jahukyan, Jos Weitenberg,
Bert Vaux and Hrach Martirosyan have extended the understanding of Armenian dialects.
Persian
The varieties of the
Persian language, including
Tajik language and
Dari language, form a dialect continuum. The divergence of Tajik was accelerated by the shift from the Perso-Arabic alphabet to a Cyrillic one under Soviet rule. Western dialects of Persian show greater influence from Arabic and Oghuz Turkic languages, but Dari and Tajik tend to preserve many classical features in grammar and vocabulary. Also the Tat language, a dialect of Persian, is spoken in Azerbaijan.
Turkic
Turkic languages are best described as a dialect continuum.
Geographically this continuum starts at the
Balkans in the west with Balkan Turkish, includes
Turkish language in
Turkey and Azerbaijani language in
Azerbaijan, extends into
Iran with Azeri and Khalaj, into
Iraq with
Turkmen language, across
Central Asia to include
Turkmenistan,
Uzbekistan,
Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, to southern Regions of
Tajikistan and into
Afghanistan. In the south, the continuum starts in northern Afghanistan, northward to Chuvashia. In the east it extends to the Republic of
Tuva, the
Xinjiang autonomous region in Western China with the
Uyghur language and into
Mongolia with
Khoton. The entire territory is inhabited by Turkic speaking peoples. There are three varieties of Turkic geographically outside the continuum:
Chuvash language,
Sakha language and
Dolgan language. They have been geographically separated from the other Turkic languages for an extensive period of time, and Chuvash language stands out as the most divergent from other Turkic languages.
There are also Gagauz language speakers in Moldavia and Urum language speakers in Georgia.
The Turkic continuum makes internal genetic classification of the languages problematic. Chuvash language, Khalaj and Sakha language are generally classified as significantly distinct, but the remaining Turkic languages are quite similar, with a high degree of mutual intelligibility between not only geographically adjacent varieties but also among some varieties some distance apart. Structurally, the Turkic languages are very close to one another, and they share basic features such as SOV word order, vowel harmony (except the Karluk languages and Khalaj)
Indo-Aryan languages
Many of the Indo-Aryan languages of the Indian subcontinent form a dialect continuum. What is called "
Hindi" in India is frequently
Standard Hindi, the
register of the colloquial Hindustani spoken in the
Delhi area, the other register being
Urdu. However, the term Hindi is also used for the different dialects from
Bihar to
Rajasthan and, more widely, some of the Eastern and Northern dialects are sometimes grouped under Hindi. The Indo-Aryan
also gave rise to languages like Gujarati, Assamese, Maithili,
Bengali language,
Odia language,
Nepali language,
Marathi language,
Konkani language and
Punjabi language.
Chinese
Chinese consists of hundreds of mutually unintelligible local varieties.
[ p. 72.]
The differences are similar to those within the Romance languages, which are similarly descended from a language spread by imperial expansion over substrate languages 2000 years ago.
Unlike Europe, however, Chinese political unity was restored in the late 6th century and has persisted (with interludes of division) until the present day.
There are no equivalents of the local standard literary languages that developed in the numerous independent states of Europe.
Chinese dialectologists have divided the local varieties into a number of dialect groups, largely based on phonological developments in comparison with Middle Chinese.[ p 299.]
The boundaries between the northern Mandarin Chinese area and the central groups, Wu Chinese, Gan Chinese and Xiang Chinese, are particularly weak, due to the steady flow of northern features into these areas.[ p. 12.]
Transitional varieties between the Wu, Gan and Mandarin groups have been variously classified, with some scholars assigning them to a separate Huizhou Chinese group.[ p. 162.]
There are sharper boundaries resulting from more recent expansion between Hakka and Yue, and between Southwestern Mandarin and Yue, but even here there has been considerable convergence in contact areas.
Cree and Ojibwa
Cree language is a group of closely related Algonquian languages that are distributed from
Alberta to
Labrador in
Canada. They form the Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi dialect continuum, with around 117,410 speakers. The languages can be roughly classified into nine groups, from west to east:
-
Plains Cree (y-dialect)
-
Woods Cree or Woods/Rocky Cree (ð-dialect)
-
Swampy Cree (n-dialect)
-
Eastern Swampy Cree
-
Western Swampy Cree
-
Moose Cree (l-dialect)
-
East Cree or James Bay Cree (y-dialect)
-
Northern East Cree
-
Southern East Cree
-
Atikamekw (r-dialect)
-
Western Montagnais (l-dialect)
-
Innu language or Eastern Montagnais (n-dialect)
-
Naskapi language (y-dialect)
Various Cree languages are used as languages of instruction and taught as subjects: Plains Cree, Eastern Cree, Montagnais, etc. Mutual intelligibility between some dialects can be low. There is no accepted standard dialect.
Ojibwe language (Chippewa) is a group of closely related Algonquian languages in Canada, which is distributed from British Columbia to Quebec, and the United States, distributed from Montana to Michigan, with diaspora communities in Kansas and Oklahoma. With Cree, the Ojibwe language dialect continuum forms its own continuum, but the Oji-Cree language of this continuum joins the Cree–Montagnais–Naskapi dialect continuum through Swampy Cree. The Ojibwe continuum has 70,606 speakers. Roughly from northwest to southeast, it has these dialects:
-
Ojibwa-Ottawa
-
Algonquin
-
Oji-Cree (Northern Ojibwa) or Severn
-
Ojibwa
-
Western Ojibwa or Saulteaux
-
Chippewa (Southwestern Ojibwa)
-
Northwestern Ojibwa
-
Central Ojibwa or Nipissing
-
Eastern Ojibwa or Mississauga
-
Ottawa dialect
-
Potawatomi
Unlike the Cree–Montagnais–Naskapi dialect continuum, with distinct n/y/l/r/ð dialect characteristics and noticeable west–east k/č(ch) axis, the Ojibwe continuum is marked with vowel syncope along the west–east axis and ∅/n along the north–south axis.
See also
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A language is a dialect with an army and navy (an aphorism spread among linguists)
-
Dialect, including the classification units "dialect cluster", "language cluster" and "dialect group"
-
Dialect levelling
-
Dialectometry
-
Diasystem
-
Diglossia
-
Koine language
-
Language secessionism
-
Linkage (linguistics)
-
Macrolanguage
-
Post-creole speech continuum
-
Ring species, an analogous concept in ecology
Notes
