Languages Quotes

“In fact, it is pretty certain that within, say, 20 or 30 years, local differences would have emerged, so that at minimum there were local accents. Given that the world changes, and that it changes in different ways in different cultures, there would be new words and expressions limited to particular places, but there would also be somewhat different local forms of speech. Within, let us say, 50 years, there would be clear local dialects, and quite certainly by the end of a century some of these would be so different from one another that speakers from some places would have considerable difficulty in understanding the speech of those from some other places. Depending on how those differences lined up with social and political realities, it would soon become common to speak of them as different languages.”
― Stephen Anderson, Languages: A Very Short Introduction