Saturday, January 12, 2019

The ASJP and Afrikaans in Patagonia

I read two amazing articles about language today.

From the first: The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) can actually assign a single number to the difference between two defined languages. Apparently, there are mostly two dinstinct groupings when comparing all languages/dialects. This means that given the score between two languages/dialects A and B (a number between 0 and 1), it can be deduced with this simple number whether A and B are different languages or simply different dialects of the same language.

The second article I read was about the study of Afrikaans speaking people in Patagonia. To me it is so interesting and mystifying that such communities exist, and the things we can learn from it are numerous. The Afrikaans language is already that of a group of people who left the Netherlands and settled in South Africa, whereby the language slowly changed from Dutch to Afrikaans. And then some of those Afrikaans speaking people ("Boers") left after losing their territory to the British. They settled in Patagonia and continued to speak their language at home, while also learning Spanish to integrate in the local communities. The youth now are mostly speaking Spanish and therefore the Afrikaans spoken there is dwindling.

Now I must ask, how do Afrikaans and Dutch score on the ASJP? And what is the score when comparing the Afrikaans spoken in Patagonia to the Afrikaans spoken in South Africa?

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