Unifying influences on dialects

Communication lines such as roads (if they are at least several centuries old), river valleys, or seacoasts often have a unifying influence. Also, important urban centres, such as Paris, Utrecht, or Cologne, often form the hub of a circular region in which approximately the same dialect is spoken. In such areas, the prestige dialect of the city has obviously expanded. As a general rule, those dialects, or at least certain dialectal features, with greater social prestige tend to replace those that are valued lower on the social scale.

In times of less-frequent contact between populations, dialectal differences increase; in periods of greater contact, they diminish. The general trend in modern times is for dialectal differences to diminish, above all through the replacement of dialectal traits by those of the standard language. Mass literacy, schools, increased mobility of populations, and, more recently, the ever-growing role of mass communications all contribute to this tendency. Naturally, the extent of such unifying action varies greatly in different linguistic domains. Also, the arrival of immigrant groups, especially in growing urban complexes, has increased dialect differentiation somewhat. Nevertheless, the most thorough example of linguistic force exerted by a single dominating civilization belongs to ancient times: in the Hellenistic era, almost all ancient Greek dialects were replaced by the so-called Koine, based on the dialect of Athens.

Mass migrations may also contribute to the formation of a more or less uniform dialect over broad geographic areas. Either the resulting dialect is that of the original homeland of a particular migrating population, or it is a dialect mixture formed by the leveling of differences between migrants from more than one homeland. The degree of dialectal differentiation depends to a great extent on the length of time a certain population has remained in a certain place. Thus, it is understandable that the diversification of the English language is far greater in the British Isles than, for example, in North America (especially if the number of dialectal differences is considered on a comparable area basis, such as the number per 1,000 square miles). In the United States itself much greater diversity is evident between dialects in old colonial America—along the Atlantic coast—than between dialects west of the Appalachians. It is also typical that phonological differences are more far-reaching in Switzerland between Swiss-German dialects than throughout the vast territory where the Russian language is spoken, extending from St. Petersburg to eastern Siberia. Such a situation results not only from migrations of the Russian population (as compared with the centuries of Swiss stability) but also from the contrasting geographic configurations: in Russia there is unobstructed communication in many directions; in mountainous Switzerland the territory is carved into small isolated units.

Migrations and, more rarely, geographic phenomena may in some areas cause a much stronger dialectal differentiation in one direction than in others. Isoglosses in the United States, for example, run predominantly in an east-west direction, reflecting the westward stream of migration during the colonization of areas west of the Appalachians. Similarly, the majority of isoglosses in Russia follow latitude, but in the opposite (west-east) direction.

Focal, relic, and transitional areas

Dialectologists often distinguish between focal areas, which provide sources of numerous important innovations and usually coincide with centres of lively economic or cultural activity, and relic areas, places toward which such innovations are spreading but have not usually arrived. (Relic areas also have their own innovations, which, however, usually extend over a smaller geographic area.) Relic areas or relic phenomena are particularly common in out-of-the-way regional pockets or along the periphery of a particular language’s geographic territory. An example of a focal area in the United States is the Boston region, while rural Maine and New Hampshire and Cape Cod and Nantucket Island are typical relic areas.

Britannica Quiz

The Great British Vocabulary Quiz

The borders of regional dialects often contain transitional areas that share some features with one neighbour and some with the other. Such mixtures result from unequal diffusion of innovations from both sides. Similar unequal diffusion in mixed dialects in any region also may be a consequence of population mixture created by migrations.

In regions with many bilingual speakers (e.g., along the border between two languages), dialects of both languages will often undergo changes influenced by the other tongue. This is manifested not only in numerous loanwords but often also in the adoption of phonological or grammatical features. Such phenomena are particularly frequent in a population that once spoke one language and only later adopted the second language. In extreme cases a so-called creolized language develops. (Creoles are pidgin languages that have become the only or major language of a speech community.)