“Immigrants Should Speak American”

[Igel]

10. We aren't speaking the a true English language.

However, our English is just as much heir to Shakespeare as the Queen's English or estuary English.

Dialectal differentiation is a bear. Their language has changed since our countries parted ways. So has ours. They're mutually intelligible with a bit of good will. They're a single language.

Now, if you compare outliers, extreme dialects, you can find mutually unintelligible varieties. And if you take extreme monolinguals, you can find more. My parents, native speakers of Midlands American English but exposed to no accents beyond some Southern or Appalachian varieties for the first 65 years of their lives had a devil of a time in London. Their American Midlands phonemes weren't wide enough, to speak, to accommodate even educated, cultured British English.

There are splitters in linguistics just like there are splitters in botany. Every little difference is enough to create a new language, worthy of nurturing. Mostly that provides money for textbook writers and government program recipients. "No, no, that's not just English, Texan English, or West Texan English. It's Central Northwestern Permian Basin English! We must create a dictionary, differentiated grammar, and government programs to ensure its survival and not let it be swamped by Standard Permian Basin English or, even worse, by Western Texan English!"

Of course, the dictionaries differ by 15 words, but take a battery of 15 linguists working full time for 10 years to produce. The pronunciation differences are scant, and there is one syntactic difference. But it's a free-standing language. This kind of drivel afflicts a lot of lesser-studied language groups and those riven by political differences--just look at how Serbo-Croatian, easily one language with two main variants and 3 cross-cutting dialects, is now Serbian, Croatian, Montenegran, and Bosnian; Torlak Serbian is more divergent than most of those from each other, but is still just part of Serbian. Cakavian Croatian is also divergent, but is just Croatian. Macedonian is increasingly non-Bulgarian, but Bulgarian claims it as a dialect of Bulgarian. Moldovan is easily Romanian.

The same works in biology. Varies species of wolves are important to keep separate not because they're divergent but because of politics.

I'm more of a lumper than a splitter in . I have no problem admitting that Echinofossulocactus or some Sulcorebutia are so divergent as to easily be 2-3 or more species, but if your species boundaries aren't clear then just consider them one variable species. Even if it does mean that some people don't get naming rights or we can't have 4 endangered species because suddenly each species with a small area is part of a large, common species with a large area.