On 5/23/2012 9:17 AM, Warp wrote:
> 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.)

Primarily because at least two of these languages are next to the third 
because of recent (in linguistic terms) migrations.

Regards,
John

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