Let us say that we take a population of US residents and put them on a colony on the moon. And then suddenly lose the ability to space travel and communicate with them. Let us say that the moon has been terraformed and they are now self-sustaining, but cannot even receive TV signals from us.
How long would it take before the people in the US could not understand the Moonians? How long before theirs went from a distinct dialect to a distinct language (if it would ever.)
It probably varies. Just as an example, English from 1600 (i.e., Shakespeare) is pretty easily understandable today; English from 1300 (i.e., Chaucer) is generally understandable, but difficult; and English from 1000 AD is pretty much a different language (Old English), though many of the words are vaguely identifiable.
OTOH, French went through many changes in a much shorter time.
I would say that one factor would be whether there were books or some other method of preserving written works. If everyone is literate, that will slow change, since they need to read the older books.
Linguists will usually say about 500 years, but that depends on a lot of variables. My guess is that the smaller the population, the quicker the change would be. If it were just a few families, and never got much bigger, then it might just take a few generations. OTOH, we often see that the people who take a language with them to a new place or more likely to preserve it as it was (eg, Iceland), so it might be that the earth bound English speakers are the determining factor.
Written, yes, but even Shakespearian English spoken with a period-appropriate accent is a challenge. Spoken Middle English (Chaucer) might as well be a foreign language (or at least a distant dialect). Listen to this without looking at the printed word.
One of the many factors in language change is exposure to other languages. Without that, the moon-colonists’ language would still change, but probably not as rapidly. The reason Old English changed so dramatically between about 1000 and 1200 is usually credited to the Norman invasion and heavy influx of French. More isolated and more peripheral groups tend to be more conservative, though of course they still innovate and change.
Good point, except there would be another important factor driving change-- the new environment. They would be facing situation quite foreign to their earth-bound cousins and would probably need a new vocabulary to deal with that.
One thing we don’t know yet is how this might be affected by recorded voice – movies, songs, old sitcoms, whatever.
It doesn’t seem uncommon for the spoken language to drift somewhat alongside a stabilized written language; but what happens if people come home from work in the lunar mines and listen to old re-runs?
I asked a somewhat similar question here, one the more interesting points is that it depends on what kind of media they have access to. The deviation might take longer if they have a large repository of Earth media.
I’m not sure, but I can tell you that Spanish as it was written and probably spoken at the time of ‘The Cid’ (ie, the reconquista of Spain from the Moors), more closely resembled modern Portuguese than it does modern Spanish. If I remember my history right, Portugal became its own independent nation at about that time with a degree of social isolation.
I know that written English (or perhaps it is only written British English) has changed in a number of ways since even the 1940s. Words that were hyphenated (‘to-morrow’) are currently not.
To judge from my students’ writing, words that were hyphenated yesterday are currently not. Come the moon-colony revolution, I suspect the hyphen and the apostrophe will be first against the wall, but that’s orthography / punctuation rather than sound / grammar.
As a measure:
The Dutch (and Huguenot, but compelled by circumstance to be Dutch-speaking) colonists of South Africa spoke the Dutch of their time in the 1630s. Many of their descendants speak Afrikaans today. From what I’ve been given to understand, and perhaps a South African may have better data than I do, contemporary Dutch and Afrikaans are not mutually intelligible – understandable with effort, but only to about the extent a Tuscan and an Aragonese can make themselves understood to each other using their respective dialects of Italian and Spanish.
The spread of the Polynesians took place between about 1000 AD and, say, 1700. The dialects spoken on the various islands they colonized in this period have varying degrees of intelligibility, but by and large two islands not in the same group and otherwise chosen at random are going to be in much the same predicament as the Dutch/Afrikaans and Tuscan/Aragonese folks above: enough similarity to make oneself understood in part with effort, but emphatically not mutually intelligible in the same manner as someone from Dublin, Manchester, Edinburgh, Auckland, Melbourne, Cape Town, Ottawa, Miami, or San Francisco can read this post with full comprehension.
I think I’d suggest a 300-year limit on clear mutual comprehensibility based on those data points.
And of course this is addressing the overall “Izzit still the same language?” issue, not whether there will remain some elements mutually comprehensible. It’s possible to construct a sentence about two people going to a restaurant which, by the fluke of preserved common words and grammatical forms and mutual borrowing, will be comprehensible to a Spanish-speaker from Lima and a Russian-speaker from Moscow – each will think the other has an accent from Hell, but know what he’s saying, even though those languages have documentedly been divergent for in excess of 2500 years.
It all depends on how much you are thrown by accents. I know people who can’t understand a modern English accent because it throws them. However, the times I’ve heard it spoken, it was merely an odd accent: the words were reconizable.
True, but if the speaker spoke slowly and carefully, you could probably get the gist.
Of course it depends on what we mean by mutually intelligible. It’s one thing if the two people conversing are trying to make themselves understood, but it’s another thing if you’re listening in on a conversation by two native speakers.
A-men. On a tour bus in Edinburgh, I could not understand a word of what the Scots tour guide was saying - the accent was too thick. My husband could, but he grew up in Belfast. For me, it might as well have been a foreign language.
I can’t make much sense of Robbie Burns’ poetry either.
When I was in Scotland, I found that if someone walked up to me and started talking, I usually couldn’t understand what he was saying. Once I figured out the subject and got some context, it was much easier. Still a struggle, but all the difference in the world compared to the first scenario. It’s like your mind can’t filter out the noise until you have some idea of what to expect.