Reasons for Diversification of Romance Languages in the Middle Ages?

[Queequeg]

So long story short, on a laugh I tried one of the anti-ADHD meds my sister takes and I was on for 10 years and I ended up talking with a UChicago linguistics friend of mine about a theory I developed after maybe, um, 4 straight hours of reading about Romance linguistics.

It's actually pretty incredible how diverse most of the Romance-speaking countries are.  France is a relative exception but that's recent.  In Spain or Italy you run in to a new language every few hundred miles, maybe sooner.  I started thinking that this is a pretty common phenomenon in the Arabic-speaking world as well; a Jordanian and an Egyptian would, without resorting to a modern dialect based on "Classical Arabic", have a great deal of difficulty understanding eachother, and a Khuzestani Arabic speaker, a Yemeni and a Moroccan don't speak anything like the same language at home.

It struck me that perhaps the existence of the Common, Quran Arabic might have facilitated this diversification, perhaps even assisting in the formation of local Arabic-based patois  we now call Egyptian Arabic or Aramaic-influenced Lebanese Arabic.  I think the existence of a Common Arabic facilitated this linguistic balkanization, and the ability of Arabic to balkanize facilitated assimilation in to a form of Arabic.

Lemme explain what I mean.  Let's say there are four cousins named Mohammed in 720, one in Grenada, one in Tunisia, one in Damascus and one in Dagestan.  All of these Muhammads can understand each other both in everyday conversation and in their official language.  However, by 1300, they'd all be speaking vastly different dialects-likely different languages-at their dinner tables and when meeting fellow Arab dignitaries.  That is, the change the local language was allowed to go as quickly as it wanted to, because the Arabs who needed to communicate with each other were always capable of communicating with each other. 

I think it's possible something was true in the Latin West in the Dark-High Middle Ages.  In 800, dignitaries from Asturias and Francia could understand each other, they'd just have to speak Latin.  So John in Asturias de Oviedo, John in Milan, John in Paris and John in Toulouse could always understand each other if all Johns was educated, or if this was official government capacity, but their ability to communicate with each other meant that every valley in Spain and Italy was free to get its own language.  I'm not sure when the switch over to local languages would be in each case, or how it would work.  The difference is the Latin West breaks up after Dante, perhaps even earlier in some cases. 

I think the Latin case is probably more complicated than I'm making it.  Members of Crusading Orders or pages could have probably udnerstood each other, but I bet there was some kind of rough, shared Romance dialect used across most of the northern Med based on Ligurian, French and Venetian.  No idea though.

Does any of this make sense? 

[Duque de Bragança]

I think the Latin case is probably more complicated than I'm making it.  Members of Crusading Orders or pages could have probably udnerstood each other, but I bet there was some kind of rough, shared Romance dialect used across most of the northern Med based on Ligurian, French and Venetian.  No idea though.

Does any of this make sense?

Are you referring to the original Lingua Franca, which kept evolving till the Sabir, itself having varying phases (North Italian/Occitan/Portuguese) ? Sabir survived till the 19th century, roughly the conquest of North Africa by the French.
Of course, the Lingua Franca concept spread out elsewhere.

In (western) Iberia, the break of intelligibility would be after Dante I think, cf. Judeo-Castilian still pretty close to both Castilian and Portuguese.

PS: Frankish extinction is another matter to consider (850 till 1000 AD?) even if the priests handling foreign communications would know some Latin.

[Razgovory]

You really shouldn't be taking other people's meds, Spellus.  This is perhaps a good example why.

[Caliga]

You really shouldn't be taking other people's meds, Spellus.

You're right, of course, but this is a pretty interesting topic anyway.

[Caliga]

Spellus: two points...

1.  Your comment about France: I thought France was pretty diverse too.  I mean, aren't there still Norman, Breton, Occitan, Picardie, etc. influences on the local dialects?  Maybe I didn't understand your point there.

2.  Isn't it possible nobles employed translators back then as politicians do now?  I was under the impression that throughout the Mediterranean Jews often served in that role since they tended to be more mobile anyways.

[Josquius]

My surprise would be more at how LITTLE romance language diversity there is (again with France as a bit of an outlier).
That Spanish and Italians have such an easy time with each other's languages, not to mention the Romanians and their easy time in the west, is quite remarkable looking out from a bastard-English perspective.

[Admiral Yi]

I don't think the theory is very logical.  It's based on the assumption that elites are filled with a burning desire to create local languages, and are given the freedom because they still possess a universal language to communicate with other elites.

It makes more sense to me that local languages evolved organically, based on the lack of an education system that passed on the rules of language.  Bottom up, not top down.

[Barrister]

I think it's a mistake to think that everyone started out speaking a common language (Latin in Europe, Arabic in the Mid-East), and languages diverged from that point.

Both languages were brought in by empires and foreign conquest.  The locals in Iberia, or Morocco, were already speaking their own indigenous languages.  Then yes, the imperial language gets introduced and the elites start speaking in, but that's going to be modified quite heavily by the language of the original people of the area.

[crazy canuck]

I think it's a mistake to think that everyone started out speaking a common language (Latin in Europe, Arabic in the Mid-East), and languages diverged from that point.

Both languages were brought in by empires and foreign conquest.  The locals in Iberia, or Morocco, were already speaking their own indigenous languages.  Then yes, the imperial language gets introduced and the elites start speaking in, but that's going to be modified quite heavily by the language of the original people of the area.

Agreed.  The other thing the theory does not account for are the large movements of populations that took place during the collapse of the Roman Empire which also impacted the languages spoken in specific areas.

[The Brain]

katmai wasn't born back then.

[barkdreg]

You guys do realize that France has only become a "one-langauge-state" after brutally oppressing all local languages and dialects for at least 200 years?

[crazy canuck]

You guys do realize that France has only become a "one-langauge-state" after brutally oppressing all local languages and dialects for at least 200 years?

That was one of Caliga's points 

[barkdreg]

Indeed. I just wanted to stress the oppressing part.

[Valmy]

You guys do realize that France has only become a "one-langauge-state" after brutally oppressing all local languages and dialects for at least 200 years?

Eh it was the style at the time. Everybody was doing it. And they were not languages but rustic Patois 

[lustindarkness]

ADHD meds?