In the Middle Ages you could walk from one end of the Iberian Peninsula (say, from Lisbon) to one end of Switzerland or Italy, and with each place you stop in talking in a slightly different way, but not in such a different way that it was impossible to not understand each other, unless you were talking about language isolates (like Basque) or intrusions due to the vagaries of conquests, migrations etc. Same for the Germanic languages, the Slavic languages etc.
How well does this survive in your country and your neighbouring countries today? And by this, I don’t mean picking a few old people, I mean having high chances to be able to do this town hopping as the majority of the inhabitants of the town speak a similar variety as the next town over. That’s what I mean by well preserved or well maintained.
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You mean across international borders, right? Not between towns in the same country.
For Italy it depends which border you cross.Into Switzerland you will find people in the far south who speak Italian… different from my Italian, but certainly understandable.
OTOH I didn’t meet people in Slovenia who spoke much Italian, maybe they learnt a few words… even right near the border using English was more useful than using Italian.
Of course that goes both ways! I doubt there are many Italians in Friuli who can speak or understand Slovenian.
I think the language has standardized a lot. Of course there are still regional accents but it’s not like I can understand Dutch and Frisian like my ancestors could. I now speak a weak dialect that is flawlessly understood even beyond the Alps.
Some regions have code switching between dialect and standard German.
You’d be pretty hard pressed trying to find anyone who speaks Finnish outside of Finland. And although Estonian is a related language, I at least can’t understand it. And Hungarian even less so.
You can walk from Lisbon to Corunna and it’s still a dialect continuum in the same language… among rural people. Younger people are adopting standards imposed with education and with them, the difference is noticeable. Still, there is more movement of people between Galicia-Portugal than Galicia-rest of Spain, and communication is acceptable enough, even more so with Brazilians.
Between the Galician-Portuguese bloc and the Spanish and Catalan, all dialects have virtually disappeared, with some people pretending to speak extinct languages with heavy standardized accents in Portuguese or Castilian. Same with France, having the Occitanian languages been driven to practical extinction.
National standards supplanted most dialects, and Spanish is a threat to the languages mentioned before. French almost completed that process.
Most of the peninsula speaks Spanish (Castilian) due to the Reconquista; so the dialects are of the same language and with no communication problems.
Basque has no dialect continuum but with itself, and as stated its main problem is getting phased out in favor of Spanish and French, in their respective administrations.
German and Dutch have such a continuum where people in Gelderland and Bentheim/Westmünsterland, and Limburg and Rheinland can often understand each other through their dialect of Dutch or German.
Inside the German speaking countries there’s a dialect continuum mainly from north to south, and in the south also from west to east. The three poles are Low German, Alemannic, and Styrian. Standard German is made from the central and southern variants.
In case of the Balkans I think you can go from Slovenia to Bulgaria (as you said in continuum, because you would have to jump over Hungary and then go to Slovakia and the Czech republic to be understood) and understand each other.
Why I mentioned Slovakia and Czechia was because last year in Prague I wanted to ask if I can buy tickets in the tram and after I failed to get an answer in English I just said few words “plati” (pay) “vo” (in) “tramvaj” (tram) these are all Macedonian words which are exactly the same in other South-Slavic languages.
I have felt that further I go (northern in Serbia/Croatia or eastern in Bulgaria) harder it is to speak Macedonian and I switch to the local languages, which I find very very similar to my native.
I think that’s due to the grammar differences. We have closer language (grammatically) with Bulgarians, but the vocabulary is influenced more by the Serbian language especially in the capital which is 50km from the border and we use more Serbian words in our dialect.
I would argue that today it’s more words and phrases rather than entire languages.
Pretty good, there is an entire country that speaks our language.
Um. I speak a language isolate!
And, taking into account the Romance languages spoken here… I would say there is no dialect continuum. Irun (a border city) is predominantly Spanish-speaking, and Hendaia (another border town, right next to Irun) is predominantly French-speaking. Everyone I’ve met from Irun has a heavy Castilian accent when speaking Spanish, and I assume people from Hendaia have a Metropolitan French accent when they speak French.
We are one of those conquerors.
The old Volga-Hungarians have been wiped out by the Mongols in 1235, but you can still find native Hungarians in the historic regions of Hungary in the Carpathian basin. Aside froma few dialectal words it has always been easy to understand them.