Language Border - Important Concepts

Important Concepts

The concept of mutual intelligibility is vague. More important, the ability to distinguish languages from one another can also be difficult, since some languages share writing systems but are spoken differently and some are identical when spoken but are written using different alphabets. There are often also shared terms between two languages, even between languages that have nothing to do with each other. For example, Spanish is spoken in most Central American and South American countries, but also in Spain. There are subtle but recognizable differences between the dialects—but, there are different dialects even within the country of Spain. In many cultures there are still subtle differences between the terminology (called the register) used when talking to your boss and talking to your mother or talking to your friends. So, where are the language borders?