Future linguists are going to be dealing with americanised Korean and Chinese. Mandarin and Cantonese share orthography and not much else. I still don't understand how Portuguese and Spanish speakers can understand each other. Farsi speakers tell me Dari speakers (one of the Afghani languages along with Pashto) sound like they speak with a 16th century accent.
Greek has Demotic and Katharevousa. Louis de Bernieres writes in "Captain Correli's mandolin" implying that the English officers in ww2 sounded to the Greek peasantry like Shakespearean actors, all taught Greek in boarding school, but only speaking "high" Katharevousa Greek, not the common Demotic. He does this by using archaic English writing.
English code switching .. is that really that different yo? Yeet me out of here. Valley girl speak.. the list of dialect and pronunciation in contemporary US culture of the last 50 years is immense.
> I still don't understand how Portuguese and Spanish speakers can understand each other.
I bet that without a relatively large amount of exposure they can’t and then suddenly it’s really obvious what the other person is saying. That’s my experience listening to Nigerian English. Didn’t realise the guy working next to me was speaking English with his compatriot for two weeks and then suddenly I understood. Written Portuguese and Spanish are very similar, like Norwegian and Danish levels of similar, or Scots and English.
One interesting thing about Portuguese and Spanish is that the comprehension isn't symmetrical: Portuguese speakers understand Spanish ones all right, but vice versa is a bit of a struggle.
In fairness, Brazilians often also struggle to understand Portuguese as spoken in Portugal. I (native Spanish speaker from South America) can understand Brazilian Portuguese pretty well, even if I've never studied it. Portuguese from Portugal, I cannot really understand when spoken. It sounds very similar to Galician, which I also can't really understand.
Greek has Demotic and Katharevousa. Louis de Bernieres writes in "Captain Correli's mandolin" implying that the English officers in ww2 sounded to the Greek peasantry like Shakespearean actors, all taught Greek in boarding school, but only speaking "high" Katharevousa Greek, not the common Demotic. He does this by using archaic English writing.
English code switching .. is that really that different yo? Yeet me out of here. Valley girl speak.. the list of dialect and pronunciation in contemporary US culture of the last 50 years is immense.