What determines how language in a particular country evolves?

Why is French for

example so different from German? You know, there's there's no simple measure of
how different languages are from one another. In fact, if you look at the languages
structurally, the way a linguist would look at the French is different from the
other Romance languages in a variety of ways, which are, which make it more similar
to the German and other Germanic languages. There are a number of features of
French which are sort of Germanic and character. Incidentally, Old French middle
France, a French in the medieval period was not it was like the other Romance
languages. So something happened to it that made it less like the romance languages
and more like the Germanic languages. How does language change over time? How did
18th century French change compared to 12th century French, but you know, when we
talk about language change, that's very misleading. I mean, up until the the turn
of the century, you could find people in nearby villages in France with virtually
could not understand when the idea of a national language is a pretty modern
phenomenon.

It has to do with the rise of nationalism and communication and so on. And when we
talk about language changing, what's actually happening is that it's kind of like
species changing. There's a mixture of all sorts of dialects. And the mixture of
these things changes over time. And, you know, you take a look at it a few
centuries apart, it looks like there's a different language. I mean, within a
couple of generations, the language can change structurally in quite dramatic ways.
And of course, it's a lexicon, you know, the words of the language, well, that's a
different matter altogether. So when technology develops, you get a whole new
vocabulary. But if you were in France in the 12th century, and you understood all
the nuances of language, could you have predicted how these various languages would
have evolved over time is a partially random, it's not actually random. For all we
know it might be completely deterministic. There's just too many factors involved.
speakers of English can be misled by this English is relatively homogeneous. You
know, I mean, I just came from Boston and I understand that everybody in Portland,
but that's not true. Most of the world

Most of the world language that you can get very different languages pretty close
by. And much of the world is what we would call a multilingual with the rise of
national states, and especially international communications and national education
systems and all these things, which is a pretty modern phenomenon, then you get
what we call national languages. Now, as I say, English is unusual. You're a pre
colonial times, there were just hundreds of thousands probably of different
languages spoken and what's now called United States well, through the destruction
of the indigenous population, and the conquest by speakers of basically one group,
you ended up having a large homogeneous language. Some French theorists, for
example, who argued that they must work very hard to keep the French language pure.
What does that mean? doesn't mean anything. Virtually every national language,
every national culture, or at least the European ones, maybe others has a mythology
that that's the only real

Pure language and all the others are corrupt. But what does it mean for the
language to be pure? First of all, there is no such thing as a language. There are
just lots of different ways of speaking that different people have which are more
or less similar to one another. Why is pronunciation and intonation so important to
language? Why aren't words themselves sufficient to convey meaning? Well, you have
to understand somebody else's words, they're part of your knowledge of language is
a way of decoding noises that you hear and converting them into a system that
matches your own representations. Not knowing that decoding system to work, the
systems have to be close enough, you and I can do it. But again, that's a little
artificial. That's because of the artificial unity of the English language spoken
in the United States. I happened to be in England last week, and I can find myself
in places in England where I don't understand what they're saying. If I listened to
them for a while, we can establish communication but you have to kind of return
your system and some manner that's not understood so that you can begin to decode
what you're hearing.

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