History UsefulNotes / SeparatedByACommonLanguage

* In Spain, the most common form of "You" (in the singular) is ''Tú'', while ''Usted'' is used for strangers, superiors, the elderly, i.e. anyone supposed to be treated with respect. In most of Latin America, ''Usted'' is the default form, while ''Tú'' is only used with family, close friends, and small children, or to insult someone or speak to God (seriously). (Basically the same rules as French ''vous''/''tu'', really--down to the "better ask" variability when it comes to one's parents-in-law.) In Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, the default form of "You" is ''Vos'', which is what was used in place of ''Usted'' elsewhere before the 1600s. ''Vos'' sounds extremely archaic to Spanish speakers when not accompanied by a Plate River basin accent... unless it's Central America, where ''Vos'' can also be used at home but nowhere else. Confused?

** South Koreans will have a hard time understanding North Koreans because of decades of limited communication between their countries. Many South Koreans find the North Korean accent to be bizarre and nigh-incomprehensible. North Korean, in general, is regarded as archaic[[note]]it can be considered a preservation of Korean as used by those in the northern part of the peninsula in the 1930's and 40's[[/note]] by South Koreans because it's developed with little foreign influence -- further reinforced by their main exposure to North Korean being from intentionally dramatic propaganda broadcasts. A good comparison is to the modern American English dialect with FloweryElizabethanEnglish. In fact, all the text translated from the North Korean dialect into English is usually translated in this way by both English-speaking news agencies and the North Korean government itself when they decide to translate their speeches into English.\\\
Foreigners who never study Korean (and a few who study Korean -- but only the Southern standard) would often think that the texts and speech from both standards of Korean look and sound identical, but this is not true. There are differences (see Website/TheOtherWiki's [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North%E2%80%93South_differences_in_the_Korean_language article]]) between the two standards, in terms of spelling and grammar, but they're actually trivial and negligible; the most drastic difference between them would be vocabulary. North Korea refuses to use foreign loan words so it uses equivalent coinages, while South Koreans simply borrow foreign words directly.

* Korean has split into several distinct forms due to geopolitical isolation.
** South Koreans will have a hard time understanding North Koreans because of decades of limited communication between their countries. Many South Koreans find the North Korean accent to be bizarre and nigh-incomprehensible. North Korean, in general, is regarded as archaic[[note]]it can be considered a preservation of Korean as used by those in the northern part of the peninsula in the 1930's and 40's[[/note]] by South Koreans because it's developed with little foreign influence-- further reinforced by their main exposure to North Korean being from intentaionlly dramatic propoganda broadcasts. A good comparison is to the modern American English dialect with FloweryElizabethanEnglish. In fact, all the text translated from the North Korean dialect into English is usually translated in this way by both English-speaking news agencies and the North Korean government itself when they decide to translate their speeches into English.
** The two countries have subtle differences in spelling, which can lead to confusion and mis-pronunciation when reading text. Also, North Korea refuses to use foreign loan words so it has to come up with workarounds while South Koreans simply Koreanize the spelling and pronunciation of foreign words that have no local equivalent. For example, there's the case of the Korean spelling of Egypt's capital, Cairo: In the North Korean dialect, it's spelled with the Arabic spelling ''al-Qāhirah'' or its equivalent in the Korean spelling (까히라, ''kkahila''). On the the other hand, in the South Korean dialect, the same city is spelled using the English name (Cairo) as proxy (카이로, ''kailo'').

* The verb ''coger'' is probably the most (in)famous example of SeparatedByACommonLanguage in Spanish. It means "get" or "pick up" in Spain and a few Latin American countries (Chile, Perú, Ecuador, Colombia, etc.), but in Mexico and many South American countries, it's an offensive word that means "to fuck." In Costa Rica, at least among younger people, it can mean both. So if you say something completely innocent like ''voy a coger eso'' ("I'm going to take/pick that up") some people will look at you weirdly or make fun of you.

* The verb ''coger'' is probably the most (in)famous example of SeparatedByACommonLanguage in Spanish. It means "get" or "pick up" in Spain and a few Latin American countries, but in Mexico and many South American countries, it's an offensive word that means "to fuck." In Costa Rica, at least among younger people, it can mean both. So if you say something completely innocent like ''voy a coger eso'' ("I'm going to take/pick that up") some people will look at you weirdly or make fun of you.

* Cars: While equivalents of "vehicle" (''vehículo'') and "automobile" (''automóvil'', as well as its short-hand ''auto'') are used on both sides of the pond, the most common, colloquial term akin to the word "car" is ''carro'' in Latin America and ''coche'' in Spain. In Spain, a ''carro'' is a cart, while in Mexico, a ''coche'' is a carriage. In the Caribbean, ''coche'' is used as the shortened form of ''cochecito'' which means baby stroller. In Guatemala, a ''coche'' is a pig: Spanish ''cooperantes'' have been known to get confused by the number of ''coches'' the average poor rural Guatemalan family has.

* A "Chaqueta" is a sport coat in Chile, but is a "masturbation" in Mexico; a "Saco" is a sack in Chile, but is a sport coat in Mexico; the term used by the mexicans to refer a sack is a "Costal".

* A "Chaqueta" is a sport coat in Chile, but is a masturbation in Mexico; a "Saco" is a sack in Chile, but is a sport coat in Mexico; the term used by the mexicans to refer a sack is a "Costal".

* The names of colors in Spanish differ from place to place. Brown can be "''cafe''", "''marrón''", or "''pardo''". Pink can be "''rosado''" but also the shorter "''rosa''". Purple is either "''violeta''", "''morado''", and "''purpura''".

** Some English words also mean very different things in Philippine English. For example, ''salvage'' in the military and police context means "[[DeadlyEuphemism summary execution]]." Girls should be careful about calling themselves ''tomboys'' – that term often means "lesbian" in the Philippines.
** In Tagalog, ''puto'' has two meanings, which depend largely on the intonation: ''pu''-to means male-whore, pu-''to'' means rice cake.

* SeperatedByACommonLanguage/{{English}}

** An interesting example also happens when talking about video game consoles: In Latin America, video game consoles are referred to in masculine terms, while in Spain, they are referred to in feminine ones instead. This is because during the 80s and 90s, consoles were referred to as "sistemas" in Latin America exclusively, which is masculine there, while Spain used "consolas" exclusively, which is feminine. Due to language drift and the heavy influence of Spaniard video game magazines in Latin American media, Latin Americans started to refer video game consoles as "consolas" as in Spain, but the masculine terms remains. As an example, the [[UsefulNotes/NintendoEntertainmentSystem NES]] is referred to as "el NES" o "el Nintendo" in Latin American, while in Spain, it's "La NES" or "La Nintendo" instead. In both cases, the term "consola" is used on both sides of the world.

NOTE: This trope is a common occurrence in Arabic, what with being spoken in about 20 countries, some of which have multiple dialects, and whose dialects are often mutually unintelligible (much as in German, Chinese, and Italian). In general there are two broad dialect groups in Arabic, Western (''Maghrebi'' in Arabic) and Eastern (''Mashriqi'' in Arabic). The line between them falls somewhere in the big desert that separates Libya and Egypt. Within the Eastern group, there is further variation: there is Nile Valley Arabic (Egyptian and Sudanese), Levantine (Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, and Palestinian), Gulf (Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait), Iraqi (also spoken in southwest Iran), and Yemeni. Each country typically has a unique dialect nevertheless mutually intelligible with the others within its group, and there is often some cross-group intelligibility as well: Egyptians – particularly those from Cairo and northward – can typically understand western Levantine (everything but the far eastern reaches of Syria, eastern Jordan being a desert wasteland), while eastern Syrians can understand at least some Iraqis, and many Iraqis can understand Kuwaiti and northeastern Saudi. Some examples:

Differences between the American and British versions of English (abbreviated by scholars as [=AmE=] and [=BrE=]) have been cropping up since the first British colonists began settling the east coast of North America in the early 17th century. The colonists, faced by a "new world" filled with new things that the mother tongue lacked vocabulary words for, began either coining their own or borrowing ones from the natives. The political upheaval and separation caused by UsefulNotes/TheAmericanRevolution, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France%E2%80%93United_Kingdom_relations#Language French influenced British's words]], Spanish, indigenous American, and African influences in North America, the fact that most stages of the Industrial Revolution (with all the new technologies it created) happened in the 19th and early twentieth centuries and the fact that the two countries are separated by several thousand miles of water led to further diversion between the two dialects.

* Another example is between Taiwanese/Fujian Hokkien and Hong Kong Cantonese. In Cantonese, ''chai yan'' means ''police''. In Hokkien, it means ''jelly''. Cue Fujian viewers watching the original Jackie Chan ''Police Story'' dubs questioning themselves ''why did Jackie Chan just call himself a jelly?''. Also, in Hainanese, ''chia pui'' means to ''eat rice''. Unfortunately, in Hokkien, it means to ''eat '''fat'''''.

It gets even worse when you take the difference in loanwords into account. Malaysians has a tendency to shove Arabic loanwords in formal speech and texts, albeit much less in casual speech. Not so much in Indonesia, they tend to use Dutch loanwords, calques and local coinages instead; in spite of Dutch never being an official language in Indonesia, the Indonesian language borrowed many a word from Dutch, and as a result speakers from both countries may be confused by the difference in vocabulary, especially when asking the locals where the post office is (Malay: "pejabat pos", Indonesian: "kantor pos"), trying to rent a bicycle (Malay: "basikal", Indonesian: "sepeda"), or buying a ticket (Malay: "tiket", Indonesian: "karcis") though there's a tendency in younger Indonesian exposed to English to use loanwords from English.\\\

It gets even worse when you take the difference in loanwords into account. Malaysians has a tendency to shove Arabic loanwords in formal speech and texts, albeit much less in casual speech. Not so much in Indonesia, they tend to use Dutch loanwords, calques and local coinages instead; in spite of Dutch never being an official language in Indonesia, the Indonesian language borrowed many a word from Dutch, and as a result speakers from both countries may be confused by the difference in vocabulary, especially when asking the locals where the post office is (Malay: "pejabat pos", Indonesian: "kantor pos"), trying to rent a bicycle (Malay: "basikal", Indonesian: "sepeda"), or buying a ticket (Malay: "tiket", Indonesian: "karcis").\\\

Differences between the American and British versions of English (abbreviated by scholars as [=AmE=] and [=BrE=]) have been cropping up since the first British colonists began settling the east coast of North America in the early 17th century. The colonists, faced by a "new world" filled with new things that the mother tongue lacked vocabulary words for, began coining their own. The political upheaval and separation caused by UsefulNotes/TheAmericanRevolution, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France%E2%80%93United_Kingdom_relations#Language French influenced British's words]], Spanish, indigenous American, and African influences in North America, the fact that most stages of the Industrial Revolution (with all the new technologies it created) happened in the 19th and early twentieth centuries and the fact that the two countries are separated by several thousand miles of water led to further diversion between the two dialects.