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speakers from neighbouring villages is threatened, even though speakerswill often be aware, sometimes acutely, that their neighbours speak alittle differently from them. The greater the distance travelled, thegreater the total number of differences between the speech of one’spresent location and that of one’s starting point, and such accumulationof differences causes a correspondingly increased degree of mutualincomprehension, to the extent that the speech of a Galician fishermanwill be barely understood, if at all, by a fisherman on the coast ofCatalonia.³In fact, dialect continua are not only unaffected by internal administrativeboundaries (such as those which divide Galicia or Cataloniafrom the rest of Spain), but also pay no heed either to national frontiers.The northern Peninsular dialect continuum is part of a broaderRomance continuum which extends in unbroken fashion over all theEuropean territory where descendants of Latin are spoken (with theexception of now-isolated varieties of Romance such as Rumantsch inSwitzerland and the various kinds of Romanian used in Romania andother parts of the Balkans). At the level of everyday rural speech, thePyrenees do not form a frontier; the varieties spoken on the northernand southern flanks of the central Pyrenees have long been known tobe similar and, to a substantial degree, to be mutually intelligible(Elcock 1938). Similarly, in the eastern Pyrenees, there is close continuitybetween the speech used on Spanish territory and that used inneighbouring parts of France; we are here discussing the way in whichCatalan straddles the political frontier.It will be appreciated from this discussion that geographical variationis a two-dimensional phenomenon. Although our main example (ajourney across the nor thern Peninsula) presents linguistic variation inone dimension only, the fact is that variation is observable in whateverdirection or combination of directions one moves across a territory
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