Divergence (linguistics)
In contrastive linguistics, divergence is understood as the tendency towards the mutual development of variants of a linguistic element. As a result, two distinctive elements of the same order can develop from this process and ultimately establish themselves in parallel in the same language system.
Divergence can occur on different levels of the language system: on the phonological or morphological level in the divergence of allophones or allomorphs and in their establishment of their autonomous existence; also in the area of word formation and phraseologization .
With regard to individual languages, divergence processes can lead to language splitting, which means that two or more variants of an initially (relatively) uniform language "A" develop into an independent language "B". An example of this is the development of the Romance languages from Vulgar Latin .