Re: South Estonian language/dialect?

In article <47820DD9.9090507@xxxxxxxx>, "J. Anderson"
<andersons6@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

martin wrote:

Thanks for that Eugene, it was most informative. I suspect one would
find a similar continuity of dialects every five kilometres as one
travelled from Friesland down to Flemish Brabant

Or perhaps even from Kirkenes in north-easternmost Norway all the way to
Dunkerque in France or Bolzano in Italy!

No, it breaks down at the border between Danish, (Low) German, and various
types of Frisian. Within Germanic there are three primary dialect
continua:

1. The North Germanic continuum, starting in the parts of Northern Norway
where Norwegian (as opposed to Saami or Finnish) is the local language,
and extending down through Norway and Sweden, with the Norwegian part of
it being somewhat dodgy because local dialect differences tend to
intensify in mountainous landscpaes where neighboring communities do not
communicate much due to the mountains, valleys, and fjords, and extending
down in Scania, Denmark, and those Frisian islands where Danish and
Frisian coexist and mutually influence wach other. It breaks down at the
Danish/German border, where the locals don't usually speak to each other
in their own language, but choose between local Danish, local Low-German
dialect or, increasingly, standard High German.

The two insular varities of North Germanic, Faroese and Icelandic, are too
differentiated and isolated to be part of this continuum, even if there is
some mutual comprehensibility between Faroese and certain local varities
of Nestern Norwegian.

2. The West Germanic dialect continuum begins at the Atlantic coast of the
Netherlands and northern Belgium and Luxembourg, extends across all of
Germany except for the relift areas where an older indigenous language,
Sorbian, a Western Slavic language divided into two rather distinct
varieties, Upper Sorbian (center Bautzen) and Lower Sorbian (center
Cottbus), are spoken in south-easternmost Germany in linguistic relict
areas ("islands") adjacent to the Polish and Czech borders. The West
Germanic area extends eastwards through Austria to the Hungarian and
southwards across the border into northern Itay, as well as in a
southwesterly direction to the northern part of Switzerland and
Liechtenstein. The southern part of the continuum covers a mountainous
area and, as in Norway, the degree of linguistic differetiation is higher
than in the flatlands of the northern and central areas. The official
languages include Dutch in its Netherlandic and Flemish variants,
Letzebuurjesh, West, North, and East Frisian, and High German. The once
important Low German (Saxon[1]) has now given up all but the most basic
functions to the super-regional High German standard, within which several
robust and quite distinct regional standards exist along the southernmost
tier: Alsatian, Swabian, Bavarian, Saxon[2], and numerous local varieties
of Swiss and Austrian German.

3. The English dialect continuum. English was originally an offshoot of
Saxon[1] with some Frisian and Jutish(?) admixture. It started as a
colonial extension of the West Germanic dialectal continuum, but
linguistic isolation, influence from indigenous Celtic speech, and the
layers of influence and restructuring resulting from the speech of Norse
and French-speaking invaders as well as from the extraordinary impact of
Latin and, to a lesser extent, Classical Greek, and then, starting in the
15th century, of the introduction of English to areas all over the world
consequent to colonialism and empire building, today constitutes several
non-contiguous dialect continua, the largest being in North America. The
speech used for the most informal private communication in English shows
such a wide range of variation that a speaker of Broad Australian,
American inland southern, Jamaica, and northern British/Scots have
considerable difficulty understanding each other, with additional
difficulties offered by some of the more recent second-language-based
native speaker varieties of countries such as India, Hong Kong, Singapore,
Nigeria, and Kenya. In some areas these varieties have evolved so far from
more "standard" Englishes that they are regarded as "daughter languages"
of English. They include Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea, Krio of Sierra
Leone, and the amalgam of English, Dutch, Portuguese, and Western and
Cetral African coastal languages known as Sranan that is widely used in
Surinam.


Regards,
Eugene Holman
.

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