John VanSickle <evi### [at] kosherhotmailcom> wrote:
> High German, Low German, and Dutch are actually rather specific points 
> along a very smooth spectrum.  I am told that if you were to walk from 
> southern Austria up through Germany all the way up to the Netherlands, 
> you will observe no sudden shifts in the speech of the locals at any 
> given point.  The exceptions occur if you wander into a French-speaking 
> area or a region whose inhabitants have consciously altered their 
> dialect (in order to conform to another dialect).

> In a like manner, walking from the tip of the boot of Italy, up the 
> coast into France, and then down into Spain will result in to sudden 
> shift in language along the way (although signs placed by the government 
> will generally be in the official dialect).

  In contrast, if you were to walk from Sweden to Finland to Russia,
you'll find three languages that couldn't be much more distinct and
unintelligible to the others.

  (Of course inside Finland the dialect will change gradually from west
to east, but there are still very sharp divides between Swedish and
Finnish, and Finnish and Russian.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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