The Inquestia Times. L'Inquestia

A Sprachbund is the usual German term employed in linguistics in order to describe a language which has experienced a high level of convergence with another, and that as a consequence of this close proximity, the languages - be they genetically related or not - are "bound" together, meaning their mutual influence on one another can be felt in many ways. For instance, as it relates to the Indian Subcontinent, the fusion between the Dravidian (Tamil) and Indo-Aryan (Hindi) languages make the two unrelated language groups close as far as sharing many distinguishing features, and this aside from a commonly shared vocabulary in reference to the similar culture and values held by the two separate groups of speakers. Much the same can be observed in Romanian, an Italic language (from Latin), which because of the close proximity of other unrelated languages in Central and Southeastern Europe, basically the Slavic languages in the Balkans - around the Black Sea-, as a consequence of t...

Some of the first Europeans who crossed the Atlantic and settled onto North America's distant shores, at the beginning of the 17th century, came from France. Having allied themselves with the five Algonquian-speaking Nations of the Wabanaki Confederacy (composed of the Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki and Penobscot), these early French settlers intermarried and adopted local Amerindian customs "du pays" (native customs) and the land they inhabited, corresponding mostly to present-day Nova Scotia, would be known as La Cadie or l'Acadie - Acadia - and its inhabitants the Acadiens (Acadians) and later known as Cadiens (Cajuns) in Louisiana. Most of these early French settlers that formed the "first families" of Acadia came primarily from the Poitou, Aunis and Saintonge regions of western France. In fact, since the vast majority of these new settlers originated from Poitou, the Acadian French language of today still preserves most of the arch...