[data_hope]

I wonder how different / similar these romance languages are, compared to the reference frame I have: German dialects. German dialects can be mutually unintelligible, young germans typically know standard german and thus have a "common ground" for communication, also they usually speak a form of the dialect that is already considerably closer to the standard "high" language of newspapers and televisions, than what their grandparents or their great grandparents speak / spoke. Sometimes (typically in documentaries), they even subtitle dialect speakers.

So yeah, I wonder if depending on the context, the classification of languages and dialects differs.

[XaspR8d]

Well there's a notorious adage, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy".

I think academics shy away from attempting to make the distinction except when extremely obvious, and instead talk directly about quantitative measurements and feature overlaps (isogloss is a search term that may be useful here). Dialect/language lines will often have completely different shapes when you look at different distinctions in lexicon, phonetics, syntax, etc. If I had to generalize though, in a particular language "chain", linguists seem to identify an order of magnitude more separable languages than non-academics do. (Consider the cases of huge macrolanguages like "Chinese" & "Arabic", or even "Italian", whose singular labels by laypeople are pretty universally rejected.)

It doesn't help that people are generally unaware of the incredible political pressure most nations put on presenting a singular linguistic front, when the truth is much much more muddled. As a result, the common parlance distinction between dialect & language often verges on meaningless.

[jackjeff]

My experience is that it's possible for people to understand each other. But the farther you go and the more difficult it gets. It's mostly the accent and the word endings that change.

My family is from Aveyron/Tarn (near Albi). We can understand texts from Frederic Mistral, written in Provençal (near Marseille) even though it sounds weird. My uncle says he had some success speaking Occitan in the Italian Piedmomd. However neither my parents nor my uncle understand any of the Catalan spoken in Barcelona. (I do, but I'm fluent in Spanish and not in Occitan...)

I think my parents (born in the 1950s) are the last generation fluent in Occitan. In France, even though it's now being taught as a second language, it's essentially gone. My mom told me she used to be punished for using Occitan at school whether in the classroom or during recess. I remember when I was a child, the farmers used to speak it among themselves (or more likely to their elders). The same people today only really speak French, even among themselves.

[pmontra]

Italian dialects can be mutually unintelligible too. TV and internal migrations consolidated standard Italian to the point that local dialects are basically dead in some areas (for example Milan) but there are people in smaller cities that are actively bilingual, their dialect and Italian.

My father remembers that they could tell the town of origin of somebody by little variations of accent and vocabulary, over distances of less than 10 km in a well populated and well connected area centered around Milan.

[toyg]

> local dialects are basically dead in some areas (for example Milan)

Uela, you have to consider that Milanese dialects basically overlapped modern Italian already - as standardized on the works of Alessandro Manzoni, a writer from Milan. The accents still survive though, and even a few words.

It's incredibly funny to observe language in motion. At one point in the '90s, a few rappers living in the city I come from (Bologna) popularized a bunch of local slang in their songs. Nowadays, youngsters from Milan use that slang as native and strongly believe it originated there.

[pmontra]

Do they use it correctly? Example: the roman "sti c...i" is very often used with the opposite meaning of the original here, that is: as a surprise, probably by guessing.

And by the way, "bagaglio" always surprises people here.

For the non Italians, among the other things the Milan accent basically swaps the open and closed e sounds. I have to change the way I say spaghetti when I'm outside region :-)

[robocat]

> My father remembers that they could tell the town of origin of somebody by little variations of accent and vocabulary.

I have seen this in Ireland where upon meeting someone new, one Irish person would guess the other person as coming from a small village (of a few hundred people).

[iandioch]

This is somewhat true, but many of the accents are not as strong anymore.

The Irish language itself is interesting. Before standardisation, I'm told the Irish of the north of the island was more similar to Scots Gaelic than that of the south. Many of the regional dialects have disappeared now though.

[data_hope]

I can tell apart from whick village around my home village comes from just by hearing them say the word "eier" (eggs).

[interfixus]

Amazingly, up here north of Germany, in the tiny land of Denmark, Danish dialects manges to be mutually incomprehensible. Or at least they did, up until about a generation ago. Going to the northenmost or westernmost regions, I find no shortage of people I simply do not understand. On the other hand, a lot of Norwegian - officially a different language - appears to me like a distinct, but unproblematic dialect.

Interestingly, in this small, flat, homogenous country, linguistic faultlines can still be persistent and razor sharp, clearly reflecting population boundaries from way, way back - the viking age and earlier. Travel some thirty kilometers between some neighbouring major towns, and hear the tone of spoken language change abruptly about midway.

[jacobush]

This IS interesting. Some thoughts:

Norway was ruled from Denmark, so the danish ruling class in Norway probably spoke a similar dialect to yours. (See bokmål, basically danish style Norwegian.)

Norway has dialects VERY different from each other - these were used as stock for an attempt at standardization of non-danish-inspired language, which they call "nynorsk". Which is confusing, because it's basically a mix of OLDER norse dialects. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivar_Aasen

In Norway, the very distinct local dialects makes sense, because people were separated by high mountain ridges. (The same story goes for Greek dialects, but I digress.)

So it IS indeed interesting that Denmark, which is very flat, still has these sharp boundaries. :)

[interfixus]

Everything you said. And yes, obviously I'm thinking primarily of Norwegian bokmål. Although I do comprehend at least som spoken fjeldnorsk. Having had a Faroese girlfriend, and some exposure to Icelandic does help :)

Rhythm and intonation of spoken Danish shifts markedly down towards the southern islands. No difficulty of compehension whatsoever, but it's clearly a dialectal belt with a history quite different from neighbouring parts of Sjælland (or "Zealand"). I'd love to see a genetic mapping of the local communities. I'm almost certain that lots of corresponding patterns would turn up.

[herewulf]

It probably compares very similarly to the German dialect situation in that it is a dialect continuum. The dialects become less intelligible as geographic distance increases.

The article alludes to this at the end:

"Romance linguistics teaches that by walking across the former Roman Empire from Sicily to Normandy, every pair of neighboring villages can understand each other."

"Language" vs. "dialect" is also very tricky because politics often come into play to demarcate the two. The classic saying is that a language has an army and a navy whereas dialects do not (i.e.: languages are associated with nation states).

And the classic example is that of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish which due to high mutual intelligibility are often linguistically thought of as dialects of one language. However, each one belongs to a nation state whose inhabitants would likely often disagree that they speak "a mere dialect".

Edit: Stepped away from the computer for a long while before actually posting, hence the similarity to the answer below.