Two Villages, Forty Speakers, One Proposed Orthography
A linguist is documenting a language spoken by about 40 fluent speakers, all over 60, in two villages, A and B, in a river valley. Children in both villages speak the national language, and adults under 50 code-switch heavily. Recordings show that speakers over 70 in Village A produce a consistent vowel-length contrast that conditions tone; speakers aged 50–65 in the same village produce the contrast variably. Village B differs from A in about 20 percent of basic vocabulary and in the reflex of one consonant. Consultants from A call B's speech 'broken,' while B's speakers say A's variety is 'the old way.' A mission literacy organisation wants a single orthography and has proposed writing tone with diacritics; a community meeting is scheduled next month. The linguist has one field season left and no funding for intelligibility testing.
1. On the evidence, should A and B be treated as one language or two? What would change your judgment?
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The evidence is insufficient for a confident decision, but the default in documentation is to treat A and B as varieties of one language until mutual intelligibility is tested. A 20 percent difference on a basic vocabulary list is suggestive of distinct varieties but not decisive; the single consonant reflex difference and the asymmetric attitudes ('broken' versus 'the old way') point to a socially ranked dialect continuum rather than two unrelated codes. What would change the judgment: recorded intelligibility testing, such as comprehension of recorded text or sentence repetition, with monolingual speakers; comparison of the phonological systems; and evidence about whether children acquire both. Attitudes matter for Ausbau-type decisions - whether speakers want separate recognition - but they do not establish linguistic distance. Any ISO code decision should be made with the community and documented as provisional.
2. Is the vowel-length variation in Village A a sound change in progress or language attrition? How would you tell?
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Apparent-time evidence alone cannot separate change in progress from attrition. A change in progress typically shows systematic, qualitatively consistent variation across age cohorts, with the innovative variant used categorically by the youngest fluent speakers and socially evaluated. Attrition shows within-speaker variability, interference from the dominant language, loss of low-frequency forms, and morphological simplification rather than regular phonological reorganisation. The confound here is that everyone under 50 is a heavy code-switcher, so the 50–65 group is not a clean younger cohort; they may be transitional for reasons of language shift. To distinguish: compare the same speakers across tasks and years (panel data), check whether the variant correlates with proficiency and use frequency, examine whether the change is lexically diffuse or phonologically regular, and test whether tone conditioning is being lost along with vowel length. If it remains ambiguous, report it as such.
3. What should the linguist recommend about the orthography, given the community meeting and the missing intelligibility data?
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The linguist should not recommend a single orthography as though the linguistic question were settled. Practical recommendations: present the community with the evidence and the trade-offs - a phonemic orthography that writes the contrast versus one that omits it for simplicity and transfer to the national language; note that tone marking with diacritics raises literacy-load issues and that the decision should follow which contrasts speakers perceive as salient; treat the A-and-B question as a policy decision for the community, and consider whether one orthography can accommodate both through shared conventions plus dialect-specific letters; and flag the missing intelligibility and variation data honestly rather than filling the gap with authority. The mission organisation's proposal is one option, not a neutral default, and the community meeting is the appropriate forum, with the linguist as adviser.