The Dialect Continuum Live
The dialect continuum refers to the idea that over small geographical distances, language changes negligibly, but over a long distance these changes add up and become large. For instance, if you took a flight from Calcutta to Delhi, you’ll hear completely different languages in the two places. But if you walked between these two cities, visiting each village and noting their local language, words etc. you’ll notice very small shifts till you reach Delhi. There will be no ‘dividing point’ where Bangla becomes Bhojpuri, Bhojpuri becomes east UP Hindi, then Braj, Awadhi and finally the Punjabi style Hindi common in India.
A caveat is in order here: due to the spread of mass media over the last three hundred years, languages have become increasingly standardised. In all likelihood, Bengali in the Odisha border is probably more similar to Dhaka Bengali than Odiya. Nevertheless, one can still observe the continuum somewhat.
Having introduced the idea, there are two videos which display this continuum brilliantly. These are clips from UP, which is a very large state (esp. in breadth). As a result west UP and east UP have very different languages, though both are essentially Hindi. Note that to UP’s east is the large language Bengali, and to its west is the large language Punjabi.
The first video is from western UP, an interview of some rural locals. The second one is from eastern UP, an election rally of OP Rajbhar, an SP ally.
Anybody who has heard Bengali and Punjabi will immediately notice how similar Rajbhar’s language is to Bangla (though its grammar is still that of Hindi-Urdu), while the rural locals’ language sounds much more like Punjabi, especially that of the older man.
This Wikipedia page has an awesome example of the same sentence being spoken in various dialects of Bengali. Indeed, it is striking how a Jhargram Bengali and a Chittagong Bengali, speak the ‘same language’, but the two are quite different nevertheless.
This is an incredible, live example of the dialect continuum in action. Essentially, all languages are the same. But like the game of Chinese whispers, small changes add up until you have different ‘languages’.