History of the German Language

• how languages change
• people interested in historical linguistics often see language as not being static
• - variety; slight grammatical differences from one person to the next
• - seeds of language change over generations

Diachronic - a historical development (over time)

Synchronic - a snapshot of language just one moment in time

Neither is wrong but historical linguistics focuses on diachronic analysis

Abstraction - not traditional, taking something away from reality 

Case loss occuring in German over the last several centuries 

• for the most part nouns are not marked for cas except genitive, dative plural and n-nounss (weak masculine nouns)

Variation - diachronic development

e.g. 

• mit den Kindern (more Distanzsprache)
• mit den Kinder (more Nähesprache)

Mutual intelligibility - can be understood

• Dialects tend to be theoretically mutually intelligible whereas languages tend not to be (exceptions; Swedish, Danish, Norweigan)
• Different languages have different degrees of mutual intelligibilty

Max Weinreich "A language is just a dialect with an army and a navy"

e.g. army and navy -> states have these -> nation-states - tend to attatch a language to a nation state

There is no linguistic way to differentiate between languages and dialects

• A language is something defined through political parameters not linguistics
• Mutual intelligibilty - some different languages/dialects can be understood