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← Language & CommunicationAcross the Iberian Peninsula, which consequence follows from a gradual dialect transition zone containing numerous isoglosses with overlapping distributions?
A)Sudden code-switching becomes common
B)Lexical borrowing rates sharply decline
C)Syntactic simplification rapidly expands
D)Mutual intelligibility changes gradually across space✓
💡 Explanation
Mutual intelligibility across dialect continua changes gradually due to the cumulative effect of numerous isoglosses that define the transition zone. Because the dialectal differences accumulate incrementally, a speaker understands their neighbors, but those further away, less well. Therefore, intelligibility shifts gradually, rather than through a sharp divide, because of the diffusion and overlap of linguistic features.
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