A dialect continuum is a range of dialects spoken across a large geographical area, differing only slightly between areas that are geographically close, and gradually decreasing in mutual intelligibility as the distances become greater. Dialects separated by great geographical distances may not be mutually comprehensible. According to the Ausbausprache - Abstandsprache - Dachsprache paradigm, these dialects can be considered Abstandsprachen (i.e., as stand-alone languages). However, they can be seen as dialects of a single language, provided that a common standard language, through which communication is possible, exists. Such a situation is called diglossia. Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. ... Theoretical linguistics studies diverse questions: how certain languages managed to communicate, what properties all languages have in common, what knowledge a person must have to be able to use a language, and language acquisition. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonological point of view. ... Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ... Syntax, originating from the Greek words συν (syn, meaning co- or together) and τάξις (táxis, meaning sequence, order, arrangement), can in linguistics be described as the study of the rules, or patterned relations that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ... In the main, semantics (from the Greek and in greek letters σημαντικός or in latin letters semantikós, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ... Lexical semantics is a field in computer science and linguistics which deals mainly with word meaning. ... The Prototype is what a Stereotype is called in cognitive linguitics. ... Stylistics is the study of style used in literary, and verbal language and the effect the writer/speaker wishes to communicate to the reader/hearer. ... In linguistics, prescription is the laying down or prescribing of normative rules for a language. ... Pragmatics is generally the study of natural language understanding, and specifically the study of how context influences the interpretation of meanings. ... Applied linguistics is concerned with using linguistic theory to address real-world problems. ... Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. ... Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. ... Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. ... In linguistics and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics (CL) refers to the currently dominant school of linguistics that views the important essence of language as innately based in evolutionarily-developed and speciated faculties, and seeks explanations that advance or fit well into the current understandings of the human mind. ... Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and logical modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. ... Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how language is actually spoken now (or how it was actually spoken in the past), by any group of people. ... Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics) is primarily the study of the ways in which languages change over time. ... Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics) is primarily the study of the ways in which languages change over time, by means of examining languages which are recognizably related through similarities such as vocabulary, word formation, and syntax, as well as the surviving records of ancient languages. ... Etymology is the study of the origins of words. ... A linguist is a person who studies linguistics. ... Lack or scarcity of data can hold the clasification of a language. ... A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος, dialektos) is a variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic area. ... In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a property exhibited by two or more distinct languages when speakers of one or more of the languages can readily understand at least one or more of the other language(s) without intentional study or extraordinary effort. ... The Ausbausprache - Abstandsprache - Dachsprache framework is a tool developed by sociolinguists, e. ... A standard language (also standard dialect or standardized dialect) is a particular variety of a language that has been given either legal or quasi-legal status. ... In linguistics, diglossia is a situation where, in a given society, there are two (often) closely-related languages, one of high prestige, which is generally used by the government and in formal texts, and one of low prestige, which is usually the spoken vernacular tongue. ...

In sociolinguistics, a language continuum is said to exist when two or more different languages or dialects merge one into the other(s) without a definable boundary. Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. ... A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος, dialektos) is a variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic area. ...

Romance languages

The Romance languages of Portugal, Spain, France and Italy are often cited as the canonical example of this, although in recent times the intermediate dialects have been moving toward extinction mainly because of the French government's attitude towards these peasant tongues. This is also true for some non-dominant intermediate languages, like Occitan and Franco-Provençal. Romance languages in the world: Blue – French; Green – Spanish; Orange – Portuguese; Yellow – Italian; Red – Romanian The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ... In linguistics, language death (also language extinction, linguistic extinction) can be thought of as a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language idiom is decreased. ... Occitan, or langue doc is a Romance language characterized by its richness, variability, and by the intelligibility of its dialects. ... Franco-Provençal is a Romance language consisting of dialects that can be found in Italy (Valle dAosta, Piemonte, Calabria, Apulia), in Switzerland (cantons Fribourg, Valais, Vaud, Neuchâtel, Geneva, non-German speaking parts of Bern, but not Jura, where the dialects spoken are French) and in France (Dauphinois...

Germanic languages

The many dialects making up German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Low German were another example. They formed a single dialect continuum, with three recognized literary standards. Although Dutch and German are not mutually intelligible, there were numerous transitional dialects that are, for example Limburgish, spoken in parts of the Netherlands and Belgium, and the Low Franconian dialects across the border in Germany (although Limburgish is nowadays sometimes considered a language in its own right). Afrikaans is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia with smaller numbers of speakers in Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Zambia. ... Low German (also called Plattdeutsch, Plattdüütsch or Low Saxon) is a name for the regional language varieties of the Low Germanic languages spoken mainly in northern Germany, southern Denmark and eastern Netherlands. ... A literary language is a register of a language that is used in writing, and which often differs in lexicon and syntax from the language used in speech. ... Limburgian (Dutch: Limburgs, German: Limburgisch, French: Limbourgeois) is a group of Franconian varieties, spoken in the Limburg and Selfkant regions, near the common Dutch/Flemish(Belgium)/German border. ... Low Franconian is any of several West Germanic languages spoken in the Netherlands, northern Belgium, and South Africa. ...

Another example was the area where the river Rhine crosses the border from Germany to the Netherlands. On both sides of this border, the people living in the immediate surroundings spoke an identical language. They could understand each other without difficulty, and would even have had trouble telling just by the language whether a person from the region was from the Netherlands or from Germany. However, the Germans here called their language German, and the Dutch called their language Dutch, so in terms of sociolinguistics they were speaking different languages. Loreley At 1,320 kilometres (820 miles) and an average discharge of more than 2,000 cubic meters per second, the Rhine (German Rhein, French Rhin, Dutch Rijn, Romansch: Rein, Italian: Reno) is one of the longest and most important rivers in Europe. ...

Chinese

The spoken variants of Chinese are highly divergent, forming a continuum comparable to that of the Romance languages. However, all the variants more or less share a common written language, though there are vernacular variations in vocabulary and grammar, and also even in the characters. ^{[citation needed]} Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. ...

The written language originally shared by all dialects was Classical Chinese, which was in normal use up until the early 20th century. In pre-modern times, Northern Baihua grew up alongside Classical Chinese as a standard vernacular dialect. The modern standard dialect, Putonghua (often called Mandarin), is largely based on Baihua. Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of very old forms of Chinese , making it very different from any modern spoken form of Chinese. ... Vernacular Chinese (白话 [白話]; in pinyin: báihuà, literal meaning: Plain Language) is a style of written Chinese which is based on Standard Mandarin. ... Standard Mandarin refers to the official Chinese spoken language used by the Peoples Republic of China, the Republic of China on Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore. ...

Within the dialects, gradations do exist between pure local vernacular and the more refined speech of the better educated that incorporates elements from the standard language or written language.

Of course, the development of the divergent Chinese languages was made much easier because the characters used for writing Chinese are not tied closely to pronunciation as alphabetic or syllabic scripts are. In other words, a Cantonese speaker may write his language much the same as a Mandarin speaker and yet pronounce the written text totally differently. Cantonese (Traditional Chinese: 粵語; Simplified Chinese: 粤语, Cantonese: Yuet6yue5; Mandarin pinyin: Yueyu, Yụet (Guangdong) language) is one of the major dialect groups or languages of the Chinese language or language family. ... Mandarin, or Beifanghua (Chinese: 北方話; Pinyin: Běifānghuà; literally Northern Dialect(s)), or Guanhua (Traditional Chinese: 官話; Simplified Chinese: 官话; Pinyin: Guānhuà; literally official speech) is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. ...

Arabic

Arabic is a classic 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) - which form a dialect continuum reaching from the Maghreb in North Western Africa through Egypt, Sudan, and the Fertile Crescent to the Arabian Peninsula - have diverged widely from that. Because Arabic is written in an Abjad, the difference between the written standard and the vernaculars also becomes apparent in the written language and so children have to be taught in school to articulate Modern Standard Arabic to be able to write it. Arabic can mean: From or related to Arabia From or related to the Arabs The Arabic language; see also Arabic grammar The Arabic alphabet, used for expressing the languages of Arabic, Persian, Malay ( Jawi), Kurdish, Panjabi, Pashto, Sindhi and Urdu, among others. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... The , , (Arabic: recitation, also transliterated as Quran, Quran, Quran, Koran, and Alcoran), is the holy book of Islam. ... Marrakesh, Morocco, in front of Atlas Mountains in Maghreb The Maghreb (المغرب العربي ; also rendered Maghrib (or rarely Moghreb), meaning western in Arabic, is the region of Africa north of the Sahara Desert and west of the Nile — specifically, coinciding with the Atlas Mountains. ... Africa is the worlds second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia. ... The Fertile Crescent is a historical region in the Middle East incorporating Ancient Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. ... The Arabian Peninsula The Arabian Peninsula (in Arabic: شبه الجزيرة العربية) is a peninsula in Southwest Asia at the junction of Africa and Asia consisting mainly of desert. ... An abjad is a type of writing system where there is one symbol per consonantal phoneme, sometimes also called a consonantary. ...

Northern India

The languages spoken in Northern India form a dialect continuum. What is called 'Hindi' in India is actually Standardized Hindi, the Sanskrit-ized version of the colloquial 'Hindustani' spoken in the Delhi area during the time of the Mughals. However, the term Hindi can be used to enclose all its dialects from east to west - from Bihar to Rajasthan. The Indo-Aryan prakrits also gave rise to languages like Gujarati, Bengali, Oriya, Marathi and Punjabi. Of these, Punjabi can probably be included in the northern Indian continuum. Gujarati is also in some ways close to the dialects of Hindi spoken in the southern Rajasthan region. The Indo-Gangetic Plain is a rich, fertile and ancient land encompassing most of northern and eastern India, the most populous parts of Pakistan, and virtually all of Bangladesh. ... Hindi (हिन्दी hind), an Indo-European language spoken mainly in North, Central, and West India, is the official language of the Indian Union. ... Sanskrit ( संस्कृतम् ; pronunciation: ) is an Indo-European classical language of India and a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. ... The word Hindustani is an adjective used to denote a connection to India, or, more precisely, the historical region that encompasses Northern India, Pakistan, and nearby areas. ... It has been suggested that National Capital Territory of Delhi be merged into this article or section. ... The Mughal Empire (alternative spelling Mogul, which is the origin of the word Mogul) of India was founded by Babur in 1526, when he defeated Ibrahim Lodi, the last of the Delhi Sultans at the First Battle of Panipat. ... For other uses, see Bihar (disambiguation). ... Rajasthan (राजस्थान) is the largest state of the Republic of India in terms of area. ... The Indo-Aryan languages form a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian languages, thus belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. ... {{Infobox Language |name=Gujarati |nativename=ગુજરાતી GujarātÄ« |region[[Pakistan|speakers=1 million |rank=122 |familycolor=Indo-European |fam2=Indo-Iranian |fam3=Indo-Aryan |fam4=Western Indo-Aryan |script=Gujarati script |nation=Gujarat |agency=Language Academy |iso1=gu|iso2=guj|iso3=guj |notice=Indic}} Gujarati (ગુજરાતી GujarātÄ«) is an Indo-European... Bengali or Bangla (বাংলা ) is an Indo-Aryan language of South Asia that evolved as a successor to Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit. ... Oriya is the official language of the Indian state of Orissa. ... Marathi is one of the widely spoken languages of India, and has a long literary history. ... Punjabi (also Panjabi; in GurmukhÄ«, PanjābÄ« in ShāhmukhÄ«) is the language of the Punjab regions of India and Pakistan. ...

West and Central Asia

The languages of Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Northern India also form a dialect continuum of Indo-Aryan languages from Persian in the west slowly emerging as Baluchi then Sindhi, Punjabi and Urdu. Most of these languages developed due to extensive intermixing of the populations of the areas as the various Persian and Indian kingdoms exerted their influences in these areas. The language Urdu developed from Persian, Hindustani, Turkish, Arabic and other local languages during the period of the Mughal rule in the subcontinent under patronage of the court. Afterwards, it spread widely throughout the area. Other languages such as Pushto and Seraiki can also be included in this continuum. For other uses of this term see: Persia (disambiguation) The Persian Empire is the name used to refer to a number of historic dynasties that have ruled the country of Persia (Iran). ... The Indo-Gangetic Plain is a rich, fertile and ancient land encompassing most of northern and eastern India, the most populous parts of Pakistan, and virtually all of Bangladesh. ... The Indo-Aryan languages form a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian languages, thus belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. ... Persian is a language spoken in Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Southern Russia, neighboring countries, and elsewhere. ... When referring to central asian peoples, Baluchi is an alernative spalling of Balochi (qv). ... Sindhi (سنڌي، सिन्धी sindhī) is the language of the Sindh region of South Asia, which is now a province of Pakistan. ... Punjabi (also Panjabi; in Gurmukhī, Panjābī in Shāhmukhī) is the language of the Punjab regions of India and Pakistan. ... The phrase Zaban-e Urdu-e Mualla written in Urdu Urdu () is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan family that developed under Persian, Turkish, and Arabic influence in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1200-1800). ... The phrase Zaban-e Urdu-e Mualla written in Urdu Urdu () is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan family that developed under Persian, Turkish, and Arabic influence in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1200-1800). ... Persian is a language spoken in Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Southern Russia, neighboring countries, and elsewhere. ... Hindustani is a term used by linguists to describe several closely related idioms in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent. ... Countries where Arabic is spoken. ... The Mughal Empire (alternative spelling Mogul, which is the origin of the word Mogul) of India was founded by Babur in 1526, when he defeated Ibrahim Lodi, the last of the Delhi Sultans at the First Battle of Panipat. ... Pashto (پښتو ; also known as Afghan, Pathan, Pushto, Pashtoe, Pashtu, Pushtu, and Pukhto) is the language spoken by the Pashtun people who inhabit Afghanistan and the western provinces of Pakistan. ... Siraiki (Saraiki, Seraiki, Multani and Southern Punjabi) is an old language or dialect mostly spoken in southwest Punjab and central Pakistan by approximately 14 million people[1]. It is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Iranian subfamily. ...

Creole

A more or less similar interaction takes place between a creole language which lacks prestige, and its more prestigious relative. The relationship between Gullah and African American Vernacular English on the one hand, and standard American English on the other, is a good example of this. Some speakers can glide throughout the continuum depending on the subject and the context. // A creole language, or just creole, is a well-defined and stable language that originated from a non-trivial combination of two or more languages, typically with many distinctive features that are not inherited from either parent. ... Gullah is the name of both an ethnic group and its English-African creole language. ... African American Vernacular English (AAVE), also called Black English, Black Vernacular, or Black English Vernacular (BEV), is a type variety (dialect, ethnolect and sociolect) of the American English language. ... American English (AmE) is the dialect of the English language used mostly in the United States of America. ...

There are many other examples throughout the world.

See also

• Diasystem
• Sprachbund