Ordinary language change creates dialects

A. We can understand what dialects are only by shedding the common misconception that a dialect is a degraded version of the standard language. What creates dialects is not sloth but simple language change.

B. Recall how several languages can develop from one, as the Romance languages did from Latin.

C. Dialects are simply the intermediate stage in this process: at a certain point, a language has changed in several directions into new varieties that are not divergent enough to be different languages altogether but are obviously on their way.

D. We have records of French, for example, at an intermediate stage between Latin and its current state. At that point, one writer complained in 63 A.D.:

Spoken Latin has picked up a passel of words considered too casual for written Latin, and the grammar people use when speaking has broken down. The masses barely use anything but the nominative and the accusative... it’s gotten to the point that the student of Latin is writing in what is to them an artificial language, and it is an effort for him to recite in it decently.

E. Here is an example of the same sentence in several different English dialects:

F. Most languages are bundles of dialects like this.

1. English borrowed warrant from French, but in Standard French, the word is garant. Warrant is borrowed from the Normandy dialect, which often had w where Standard French has g.

2. Italian dialects are so different from one another that the dialect of Sicily is essentially a different language from the standard.

3. The situation is similar in Germany. In Standard German, “You have something” is Du hast etwas; in a southern dialect, Schwäbisch, it is De hesch oppis.