Dialect levelling
Means by which dialect differences decrease / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Dialect levelling?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
Dialect levelling (or leveling in American English) is the process of a dialect increasingly adopting features with widespread social currency, due to contact with one or more other dialects, at the expense of more local or traditional features.[1] Typically, this comes about through assimilation, mixture, and merging of certain dialects, often by language codification, which can be a precursor to standardization. One possible result is a koine language, in which various specific dialects mix together and simplify, settling into a new and more widespread form of the language.
Dialect levelling has been observed in most languages with large numbers of speakers after industrialization and modernization of the areas in which they are spoken. However, while less common, it could be observed in pre-industrial times too, especially in colonial dialects like American and Australian English or when sustained linguistic contact between different dialects over a large geographical area continues for long enough as in the Hellenistic world that produced Koine Greek as a result of dialect leveling from Ancient Greek dialects.