natural "interlanguages"

[Beli Orao]

I am specifically talking about the "languages" that spontaneously arise when two people who speak related, but not entirely mutually comprehensible languages try to converse. Either speaker may have some knowledge of the others' language, but not up to fluency. Are there any rules that dictate the features of the language that the two use to communicate?

To use one example, years ago I sat next to a Czech speaker on an airplane. We did not have a common language, but tried to converse anyway. After about 15-20 minutes of fumbling, he picked up one some Serbo-Croatian patterns, and I on Czech ones. He tried to imitate whatever pronunciation or grammar he could pick up, and I did the same. After an hour or so, we were both speaking a Serbo-Czech mix, sharing a large number of basic vocabulary words and "agreed upon" noun-declension and adjectival patterns.

[linguoboy]

I would imagine that these would be governed by the same rules which govern the formation of koinés: speakers would eschew the most marked features of their respective varieties and the one with higher prestige would have the upper hand.

Portunhol, for instance, looks more like Spanish than Portuguese because interintelligibility is asymetrical, with Lusophones understanding more Spanish than Hispanophones understand Portuguese.

[Viktor77]

I can't tell you if there are rules but I knew a Slovene who conversed with a Slovak without problem.

[Skomakar'n]

Aw. I wish this kind of situation was a possibility for me, but speaking to Norwegian or Danish people is naturally no problem, as I'm Swedish. It just works out. Our languages are too similar to cause much trouble. Icelandic I've been studying for too long, and I'm slowly getting there with Faroese.

I'm more interested in how I could have this work out with, say, a Dutch speaker, without using English. That could be interesting and not completely impossible, I imagine.

[Ser]

Portunhol, for instance, looks more like Spanish than Portuguese

How so?

because interintelligibility is asymetrical, with Lusophones understanding more Spanish than Hispanophones understand Portuguese.

Where does this come from?

[Bristel]

because interintelligibility is asymetrical, with Lusophones understanding more Spanish than Hispanophones understand Portuguese.

Where does this come from?

I would suppose from my exposure to Portuguese and Spanish that Spanish seems more "conservative" in pronunciation, plus the missing /n/ that nasalized vowels in Portuguese would be easier to spot in Spanish than going from Spanish to Portuguese, among other things.

[Beli Orao]

I'm more interested in how I could have this work out with, say, a Dutch speaker, without using English.

I think that it would be more difficult for Germanic speakers as your languages have diverged more, whereas the various Slavic languages are still quite similar.

[Aurora Rossa]

I think that it would be more difficult for Germanic speakers as your languages have diverged more, whereas the various Slavic languages are still quite similar.

So it seemed to me, looking at word lists. I kept wondering what distinguished them as languages if they have so many words in common with relatively little variation it would seem.

[Bristel]

I think that it would be more difficult for Germanic speakers as your languages have diverged more, whereas the various Slavic languages are still quite similar.

So it seemed to me, looking at word lists. I kept wondering what distinguished them as languages if they have so many words in common with relatively little variation it would seem.

They don't get along for very long... Remember Yugoslavia?

Oops, edited: because of nationalism. I'm generally convinced that Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian are one language with some minor dialectical changes which are exaggerated because of nationalism.

[Beli Orao]

[rant]

Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are not only based on the same language, they are based on a single dialect. Yes, people from back where I'm from call one dialect four separate languages (you forgot Montenegrin). Embarrassing, I know.

[/rant]

[linguoboy]

I think that it would be more difficult for Germanic speakers as your languages have diverged more, whereas the various Slavic languages are still quite similar.

So it seemed to me, looking at word lists. I kept wondering what distinguished them as languages if they have so many words in common with relatively little variation it would seem.

Um, there's more to linguistic divergence than just wordlists? Trying looking at the inflectional systems, for instance.

[Yng]

I think that it would be more difficult for Germanic speakers as your languages have diverged more, whereas the various Slavic languages are still quite similar.

So it seemed to me, looking at word lists. I kept wondering what distinguished them as languages if they have so many words in common with relatively little variation it would seem.

Um, there's more to linguistic divergence than just wordlists? Trying looking at the inflectional systems, for instance.

Yeah those are pretty much identical too. They are, after all, pretty much all slight variations on Stokavian. The way Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian etc are actually spoken locally probably varies considerably more, though - IIRC there are dialects with almost no nominal inflection in the east, for example.

[jmcd]

I think that it would be more difficult for Germanic speakers as your languages have diverged more, whereas the various Slavic languages are still quite similar.

So it seemed to me, looking at word lists. I kept wondering what distinguished them as languages if they have so many words in common with relatively little variation it would seem.

Um, there's more to linguistic divergence than just wordlists? Trying looking at the inflectional systems, for instance.

Yeah those are pretty much identical too. They are, after all, pretty much all slight variations on Stokavian. The way Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian etc are actually spoken locally probably varies considerably more, though - IIRC there are dialects with almost no nominal inflection in the east, for example.

I think it may be somewhat confusing people because there are two similar discussions at once: 1. the similarity of the Slavic languages and 2. the similarity of the Stokavian languages.

[Grunnen]

Aw. I wish this kind of situation was a possibility for me, but speaking to Norwegian or Danish people is naturally no problem, as I'm Swedish. It just works out. Our languages are too similar to cause much trouble. Icelandic I've been studying for too long, and I'm slowly getting there with Faroese.

I'm more interested in how I could have this work out with, say, a Dutch speaker, without using English. That could be interesting and not completely impossible, I imagine.

This makes me think of a holiday when I was in Sweden some years ago. I was there with a group of Dutch and Swedish people, and many of us didn't speak English very well. Such as me (my English then was far worse than it is now). So we tried to speak English with each other, and that worked to some extent, but constantly people wanted to use words they didn't know in English. We figured out quickly that using the Dutch or Swedish word mostly worked, because it would either be like English or be recognisable to all of us anyway. So after a few days we had formed our own English dialect that I think was fairly incomprehensible for most speakers of English. Also taking into account our strong accents. But it wasn't a Dutch/Swedish interlanguage, it really was English with a Dutch or Swedish substrate (depending on the speaker) and a Dutch/Swedish superstrate that we all shared. We did have great fun with it btw.
I do agree that it would probably be possible to leave out the English part altogether and just mix Swedish and Dutch, but then people either need a lot of time and determination, or they must have some knowledge of the other language beforehand I think.

[hwhatting]

Yeah those are pretty much identical too. They are, after all, pretty much all slight variations on Stokavian. The way Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian etc are actually spoken locally probably varies considerably more, though - IIRC there are dialects with almost no nominal inflection in the east, for example.

I think it may be somewhat confusing people because there are two similar discussions at once: 1. the similarity of the Slavic languages and 2. the similarity of the Stokavian languages.

Exactly. The Slavic languages are similar enough that knowing one, you can pick up what is being talked about in any of the others if it's spoken slowly or if you have a written text, but they're sufficiently dissimilar that one won't understand all the details and, knowing one, you won't be able to correctly speak most of the others. Some are closer than others - from my personal experience, I got along quite well when I was speaking Polish and the other side was speaking Czech. When you know Russian, reading Bulgarian technical texts is also easy - much easier than understanding everyday Bulgarian or reading novels. That's due to the fact that for abstract concepts, both languages draw heavily on Church Slavic (which to a high degree was developed in Bulgaria) and then Bulgarian in its turn loaned a lot of terminology from Russian in the 19th century. The grammars of both languages are quite different, though - Russian has (minimum) six cases and several inflectional classes for nouns, but a relatively simplified system of verbal categories, while Bulgarian is more like the Romance languages - almost no case system left, but a lot of fusionally and analytically formed verbal categories.

[Civil War Bugle]

One of my friends, who is Bulgarian, was able to understand the lyrics of Russian songs I showed her, and initially assumed they were archaic Bulgarian. There seemed to be a good amount of semantic drift, enough for her to guess what the words meant based on context but only after a second or so of thinking the word choice was very strange. Anecdotes for the win!

[Beli Orao]

I've always parsed Bulgarian (phonologically, at least) as a mix of Serbo-Croat and Russian, with Serbo-Croat slightly dominant. For some reason it is the hardest South Slavic language for me to understand (while I speak relatively conversational Macedonian, and understand it almost perfectly...aren't Bulgarian and Macedonian supposed to be standardized dialects of Eastern South Slavic?)

[hwhatting]

I've always parsed Bulgarian (phonologically, at least) as a mix of Serbo-Croat and Russian, with Serbo-Croat slightly dominant. For some reason it is the hardest South Slavic language for me to understand (while I speak relatively conversational Macedonian, and understand it almost perfectly...aren't Bulgarian and Macedonian supposed to be standardized dialects of Eastern South Slavic?)

There seem to be many Bulgarians who think of Macedonian as a Bulgarian dialect. Well, at least Macedonia has an army - dunno about a navy...

[BloodMerchant]

Shanghainese is essentially mostly a mix between Ningbo dialect and an old Songjiang dialect (closely related to Suzhou dialect). Much of the vocabulary is largely derived from that old dialect, but its phonology is influenced by Ningbo dialect, with small influences elsewhere, such as Jianghuai Mandarin or some other varieties of Wu. Modern Shanghainese arose as a koine between migrants from the adjacent provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces. After the Taiping rebellion, Suzhou dialect ceased to be the lingua franca of the region and was replaced by Shanghainese as more Wu-speaking migrants moved in addition to some Jianghuai Mandarin-speaking migrants. Intelligibility is symmetrical between Shanghainese and Suzhou dialect, but asymmetrical between Shanghainese and Ningbo dialect in favor of Ningbo. Folks from Ningbo and Zhoushan (which used to be administratively a part of Ningbo) can understand Shanghainese, but Shanghainese find some trouble to understand Ningbo dialect unless if they've been exposed to it quite a bit. There are some Shanghainese who still speak the 'native language' (which is derived from the old Songjiang dialect). It's Shanghainese, but a variety that's subjected to less 'outside' influences. I also have to mention all the other varieties of Wu are also undergoing further koineization into a common Northern Wu koine. Most Northern Wu varieties are becoming more similar to Shanghainese with each generation.

[Izambri]

*Arriving late*

Catanyol (castencià for Valencian, castellorquí for Balearic) - Catalan + Spanish. Specifically Catanyol is a pseudolanguage, the product of Spanish interference in minorized Catalan, but it could be a mix language between a Catalan speaker and a Hispanophone.

And I suggest Catoccitan - Catalan + Occitan. Both make up the Occitano-Romance languages, so a Occitanocatalan koiné is possible.