Potential for different dialects, languages, and cultural identities in Westeros.

[broken one]

Look what happened to proto-slavic language over 1000 years. Today we have to use germanic English to communicate XD Big territory and long long LONG time should have led to significant differences.

It is everlasting middleages in Westeros, most people do not travel too much etc.

[Aebram]

20 hours ago, FictionIsntReal said:

 

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They had close to 10 thousand years to blend. 

10 thousand years would normally mean MORE linguistic diversity. The real South America is less linguistically now compared to the past is because the Spanish & Brazilians colonized it mere centuries ago.

First, a minor correction.  I think you meant to say "Portuguese," not "Brazilian" above.  Obviously Brazil didn't colonize itself.

But more importantly, I think you're arguing against yourself here.  Ancient indigenous languages are still spoken by some people in South America.  But the vast majority of people across the continent speak Spanish or Portuguese.  Why? Because they were conquered by an invading power that imposed its will on the population. That was 500 years ago, and I don't think there are any new languages that have sprung up since then, or old ones that have been revived. The same thing presumably happened in Westeros.

[FictionIsntReal]

1 hour ago, Aebram said:

First, a minor correction.  I think you meant to say "Portuguese," not "Brazilian" above.  Obviously Brazil didn't colonize itself.

Correct. And note that Spanish & Portugese are both descendants of latin hailing from the Iberian peninsula. They diverged from each other over time. Wouldn't we expect the same thing to happen in Westeros?

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But more importantly, I think you're arguing against yourself here.  Ancient indigenous languages are still spoken by some people in South America.  But the vast majority of people across the continent speak Spanish or Portuguese.  Why? Because they were conquered by an invading power that imposed its will on the population. That was 500 years ago, and I don't think there are any new languages that have sprung up since then, or old ones that have been revived. The same thing presumably happened in Westeros.

Inhabitants of the New World were decimated by disease, which is why there are so few indigenous people now in North America (which had less in the way of dense agricultural civilizations and had an environment more hospitable to Europeans). Westeros contains at least one region, the North, which was never conquered at all. As was pointed out by one of the links here, even that region is too large to be politically & linguistically unified. Consider the sub-continent of India. It is now politically unified (because this is an era where communication technologies support polities which are much more spread out), but it has an enormous profusion of languages. In the southern four states, most people speak an entire different FAMILY of languages (Dravidian), whereas above most people speak Indo-European languages which branched off from the Aryan invaders thousands of years ago.

[Aldarion]

15 hours ago, frenin said:

That it lasted longer doesn't mean it was never a tinderbox, it was. 

I agree on the rest.

Maybe, but Yugoslavia was much worse in that regard - largely due to a) all of A-H territories being culturally similar while Yugoslavia had two very different cultures (Central European Catholic and Eastern European Orthodox) and b) Yugoslavia attempting a much greater degree of centralization (whereas Austria at least on paper still respected Croatian Parliament and historical rights, though that too varied).

But as I noted, you can have a long-lasting yet culturally and ethnically heterogenous state, but only if you use Roman model of limited overhead and extreme local autonomy.

[Fool Stands On Giant’s Toe]

On 10/21/2020 at 5:48 AM, broken one said:

I imagine block of water 200 metres tall,  30 metres deep/thick (how thick is the wall anyway?), the width is unimportant, it would fall along the whole width. gotta divide it by 2 as water would flow north and south (depends on slopes). As it falls and goes in both directions its really not that much and the water level would drop down quickly. I think some black brothers would even survive

True. If the base of the wall is lower then sea level and the diameter of the  tunnels gets smaller well. I’m just thinking something catastrophic like the broken arm. Maybe Valyria with water. We got wrym ways around the wall. We got a giant wyrm living under castle Black. A hungry one that drools from its lip when people enter its mouth. It would take a thousand years or so to construct all that but if you were the one who failed breaking the neck before maybe you’d just try harder. Connecting both the eastern and western seas may be an overachievement.