How long can a language last before it's unrecognizable?
Languages change over time, but how fast? Do they all evolve at the same speed? And how long does it take before a language is no longer recognizable?
In the last video:
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we traveled to Australia to meet a quirky language that seemed to change way too quickly. Then Swadesh entered and told us that no, actually, all languages change at the same pace. His idea is called glottochronology, and it's been abandoned and criticized over the decades.
we traveled to Australia to meet a quirky language that seemed to change way too quickly. Then Swadesh entered and told us that no, actually, all languages change at the same pace. His idea is called glottochronology, and it's been abandoned and criticized over the decades.
Discover some of the reasons why language change rates do indeed vary. Still, with facts, abstraction and a dose of speculation, could we still get to the bottom of this "how long" question? Take another linguistic trip to Australia with brief stopovers in Norway and Iceland, and let's see if we can find something to say about how long a language remains recognizably intact, or "intelligible". Then we'll separate "unintelligible" from "unrecognizable" by moving from single languages to language families, and finally end up with two broad answers to this question.
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