Why Russia has no great variation even across huge expanses of territory?
Why is Russian so uniform?
Don't know.... Maybe there's a physical law for that, linguistic convection streams need a large volume to maximize their mixing efficiency... And the larger the territory, the more homogeneous the dialect distribution tends to be...
In France there are very few noticeable differences between Lille and Lyon, or from Lille to Lyons, over distances of ca. 700 km.
On the other hand the borderline to Southern (i.e. Occitan) accents is still very sharply defined. Going from Bordeaux downstream, there are huge lexical and phonetic differences differences between both sides of the estuary.
In France there are very few noticeable differences between Lille and Lyon, or from Lille to Lyons, over distances of ca. 700 km.
On the other hand the borderline to Southern (i.e. Occitan) accents is still very sharply defined. Going from Bordeaux downstream, there are huge lexical and phonetic differences differences between both sides of the estuary.
My assumption would be that as the Russian Empire expanded, Russians would move into the new areas, so the language spread quickly... Whereas in Germany, the language and dialects have been in place for several hundred years.
The answer , if Slavic languages speakers can make themselves understood to each other using their respective languages than the speakers of Romance or Germanic languages it's because the differences between them are narrower that they resemble each other so much in phonology, lexicon, and grammar.
More so between the dialects of a Slavic language like Russian.
More so between the dialects of a Slavic language like Russian.
The same sort of thing also happened in the western United States, which is the youngest part of the country... from the west coast to the midwest, I probably couldn't even distinguish any of the accents. I'm sure I could with practice, but I've never really felt the need. I couldn't tell you the difference between a "California accent" and my own accent, even though I'm many miles away from California (Oklahoma, in fact). New England accents and Southern accents are very distinctly different, though, and it's probably no coincidence that these are the oldest parts of the United States. New England in particular has a lot of variation in its accents... New York alone is home to several accents, though I don't know how easily I could distinguish them.
- Kef
- Kef