#Yes and no. Consider Quebcois and, for that matter, Hungarian. You know #(in fact, you know better than I) that when I cultural group transported #whole to a new location, one of the things that can happen is that the #language "freezes." There are no dialects of Hungarian, and the language #stopped evolving (with the exception of foreign loan words) some thousand #of years ago. >Hunh. I find that dubious, but I haven't the resources to check it out >here and now. Languages don't freeze. What *does* happen is that after a >couple centuries someone from the more urbanized motherland visits the >colony, observes a number of features that he knows have been lost back >home, and says "Wow! These guys are stuck in time!"... without noticing >the developments that have occurred in the colony that are parallel to, >or independent of, ones in the motherland. It may not "freeze", but I believe there are cases where language spoken in isolation can retain much of the usage it had before being isolated. That's probably not very clear, so I'll give you the example that makes me think this is so. My wife is Estonian. Her Dad can speak to Finlanders, with difficulty, and her grandmother with even more difficulty. Generally Finlanders and Estonians have little difficulty understanding each other, but my wife's family comes from a little village in Estonia that had been isolated for several generations (until the Nazis rooted them out). Several years ago an Oxford scholar came to stay with Dagmar (grandma) and study her version of Estonian because "it was so close to how the language was spoken several hundred years ago". As for Quebecois - they have purposefully tried to keep their French "pure" by disallowing loan words and policing usage. So I guess it has frozen, but this is not something that has happened naturally. It's also interesting to note that by the time the Quebecois decided to police their language it had already become a dialect of continental French, so their pure French is in fact not pure at all. *Strange Canadian fact* The French taught in schools outside of Quebec is not Quebecois - it is Parisian French. Figure that one out.