The fact that English has been spoken in England for 1,500 years but in Australia for only 200 explains why we have a great wealth of regional dialects in England that is more or less totally lacking in Australia. It is often possible to tell where an English person comes from to 1 about 15 miles or less. In Australia, where there has not been enough time for changes to bring about 2 regional variation, it is almost impossible to tell where someone comes from at all, although very small differences are now beginning to appear. It is unlikely, however, that there will 3 be as much dialectal variation in Australia as there is in England. This is because modern transport and communication conditions are very different from what they were 1,500 or 4 100 years ago. Even though English is now spoken in many different parts of the world many thousands of miles apart, it is very unlikely that English will ever break up into 5 number of different non-intelligible languages in the same way that Indo-European and Germanic did. German and Norwegian became different languages because the ancestors of the speakers of these two languages moved apart geographically, and were no 6 in touch and communicating with one another. In the modern world, barring unforeseen catastrophes, this will not happen, at 7 in the near future. As long as Americans and British people, for instance, are in touch with one another and want to communicate with one another, it is most unlikely that their dialects will drift so far apart 8 to become different languages.