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Article: Where do modern languages come from?(Features)(Learning)(The Notebook)
- Article from:
- The Christian Science Monitor
- Article date:
- January 11, 2000
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 The Christian Science Publishing Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Most people don't realize that the language they use in daily conversation is constantly evolving. Languages often include various dialects - spin-offs of an original language that are peculiar to a region or community. The French spoken in Provence is very different from that in Paris, for example. Often, a dialect will continue to evolve until it becomes its own language, as in the case of Haitian Creole (derived from French, but not recognizable to most French speakers).
All modern languages are evolved versions of ancestral languages. Spanish, for example, derives from Latin, as do the other Romance languages: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and ...