All the world is a continuum

A. As standard languages shade into dialects, dialects shade into creoles, while languages often shade into one another via chains of dialects. The sense a language map gives us of “languages” checkering the globe often corresponding to country boundaries, then, is highly misrepresentative (although inevitable).

B. For example, “Spanish” is a bundle of dialects in Spain. Spanish shades into Portuguese through the Galician dialect(s). In the New World, there are hundreds of Latin American dialects of Spanish. In Ecuador, Spanish intertwined with Quechua and resulted in Media Lengua. There are two creole Spanishes in the New World, Papiamentu and Palenquero of Colombia, where Spanish began again mixed with African languages. In the Philippines, there is a dialect cluster of Spanish creoles. In the United States, a new dialect of Spanish is emerging that borrows heavily from English: Spanglish. Meanwhile, there are Portuguese dialects in Brazil, Africa, and Southeast Asia; the one in Brazil has semi-creole varieties as a legacy of its slave plantation beginnings. There are various Portuguese creoles in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia.

C. The same kind of reality is true for a great many “languages” in the world. All people speak complex varieties of language, differing in clinal degree from one another and often not assignable as any one “thing.”