Processes of Change

We expect to find dialect differences dispersed along a geographic continuum, under normal circumstances. That is, unless some contingency disrupts the geography, we expect to find only minor differences in the speech of one community and the communities on either side. The differences proliferate as distance increases, so that dialect differences are greater in communities further away. This pattern of dispersion is known as a dialect continuum (Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 5–7). It is a model t