Erghhh... Prescriptivism

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Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪ »

I don't know how to begin, but there's one thing I'd like to talk about. This is the language prescriptivism.

I like linguistics. I'm excited I'm going to be in Polish Linguistics Olympiad final. I like languages. I like changes in them too. I wish Polish would be as diverged as English is. I also think the changes in language are unstoppable. But I find Poles disliking or even afraid of them. There's one friend of mine who said he's proud our language is very homogeneous, but he also would like us to have a king, so I have problems treating him seriously. My mother is an example of a small paradox - she says she doesn't like language liberalism, but consistently doesn't release coronal stops before liquids, as I and my little brother do too, we have a glottal stop there, and doesn't see any discrepancy. Having that and some other people's opinions in mind I can't decide what attitude is the best. I prefer laissez-fairism, but I'd like you to share with your opinions, too.

P.S. If I have terrible mistakes I'm not aware of I apologize, but I'm tired after revising to... urrmm... English voivodeship competition. A paradox.
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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by Travis B. »

Standard English is actually pretty coherent, aside from the difference between rhotic and non-rhotic varieties; case in point, RP and GA are much closer together than NAE varieties are or EE varieties are overall. Furthermore, traditional dialects in both the UK and North America have been on the way out for a while now, being largely replaced by wider regional varieties closer to the standard varieties, and in the case of North America, non-rhotic varieties (except for AAVE) being replaced by rhotic varieties.

As for Polish, the reason why it is the way it is now is because of massive population movements around the time of WW2 causing very significant dialect leveling; previously, Polish was not that different from, say, German in the level of dialect diversity. In the English-speaking world, in recent times, increased population mobility has been having a similar effect, albeit not on as dramatic of a level.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by Sumelic »

I have mixed feelings about prescriptivism.

I don't have any problems in theory with regular sound changes that occur only in some regional varieties and not in "standard" English. E.g. the pen-pin merger (that's so widespread that I actually feel uncomfortable calling it non-standard, although by the usual definition I think it pretty clearly is) or the ferry-furry merger. I think it's stupid when people describe these kinds of things as "sloppy" or "slovenly". I guess even linguists may kind of endorse this view, in a more-or-less value-free way, with the concept that sound changes may occur to reduce articulatory effort for the speaker. But to me, it just seems like a really unrealistic conceptualization of the matter. A sound shift is no evidence that one speaker is "lazier" than another in the usual sense of "lazy". That said, there are probably some regular sound changes that would sound bad to me or that I would find unpleasant due to cultural prejudices or just some kind of aesthetic reaction. But I think I would find it easy to mentally dismiss this sort of viewpoint as unjustified.

However, I have a pretty strong dislike of spelling pronunciations and some kinds of analogical reformations. For example, I don't like the pronunciation of "stigmata" as /stɪgˈmɑːtə/, even though this is the one that comes naturally to me and probably the one I've heard the most. I prefer /ˈstɪgmətə/ because the penultimate vowel was unstressed and short in both Greek and Latin. I guess this may be an irrational extension of an I think understandable original desire not to use non-standard spelling pronunciations (as a child there were various words that I read before hearing, and therefore guessed a completely wrong pronunciation for).

I like to learn about interesting grammar variations like "I'm finished my homework" or "Anymore I go to the other store." (Reading sentences with positive "anymore" gets on my nerves because they aren't grammatical for me, but I still find it interesting that this usage exists and I wouldn't want it to disappear.) But I do have a bit of a prejudice, that I think is really unjustified, against grammatical forms that appear to be hypercorrections. E.g. the old prescriptivist bugaboos like "between you and I" or "The man whom I thought helped me the other day."

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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by Curlyjimsam »

I don't know anything about variation in Polish, but it's possible there's more variation than you realise, because polite people don't talk about that sort of thing and like to pretend there's less variation than there really is out of an unconscious fear of undermining Polish national identity or something.

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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪ »

Curlyjimsam wrote:I don't know anything about variation in Polish, but it's possible there's more variation than you realise, because polite people don't talk about that sort of thing and like to pretend there's less variation than there really is out of an unconscious fear of undermining Polish national identity or something.
Well, you are partially right, Poles don't have linguistic awareness, but I say from experience that even then they try to pronounce words orthographically, e.g. "książkę" book.FEM-SG-ACC is for some people [ˈkʲɕʌũ̯s̠kɛũ̯] or even with [z̠] instead of [s̠], but I, my friends and even my Polish language teacher have [ˈkʲɕʌ̃n̠s̠kɜ]. People don't know the orthography doesn't have to perfectly resemble the language. They really don't have any variation, 'cause they try to speak more prestigeously. I'd say I'm not a lower class member, although I used to, and then I used hypercorrect pronunciation, but now I have a distinction between "jest" be.3S-PRES and "je" eat.3S-PRES not as [ˈjɛ̈s̪t̪] vs. [ˈje] but as [ˈjɛ̈] vs. [ˈje] and no one corrects me, everybody understands.

Again, if it's messy, sorry, can't focus.
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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by Nortaneous »

Sumelic wrote:E.g. the pen-pin merger (that's so widespread that I actually feel uncomfortable calling it non-standard, although by the usual definition I think it pretty clearly is)
It's nonstandard and so is the cot-caught merger. Speaking of which, apparently there are some people in Boston who don't have the father-bother merger but do have the cot-caught merger. Weird.
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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by Travis B. »

Nortaneous wrote:
Sumelic wrote:E.g. the pen-pin merger (that's so widespread that I actually feel uncomfortable calling it non-standard, although by the usual definition I think it pretty clearly is)
It's nonstandard and so is the cot-caught merger. Speaking of which, apparently there are some people in Boston who don't have the father-bother merger but do have the cot-caught merger. Weird.
I personally cannot help but find it annoying when people try to treat features as more standard than they are when they are not actually found (near-)universally within the applicable dialect group, like dictionaries that use cot-caught-merged pronunciations. It is almost as if they are trying to destandardize things I have always viewed as being standard.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by Sumelic »

Travis B. wrote:
Nortaneous wrote:
Sumelic wrote:E.g. the pen-pin merger (that's so widespread that I actually feel uncomfortable calling it non-standard, although by the usual definition I think it pretty clearly is)
It's nonstandard and so is the cot-caught merger. Speaking of which, apparently there are some people in Boston who don't have the father-bother merger but do have the cot-caught merger. Weird.
I personally cannot help but find it annoying when people try to treat features as more standard than they are when they are not actually found (near-)universally within the applicable dialect group, like dictionaries that use cot-caught-merged pronunciations. It is almost as if they are trying to destandardize things I have always viewed as being standard.
Hmm... I’ve never really had this experience (since I don’t think my idiolect has any features that are conservative relative to GA), but I can see why it would be annoying. I have had the experience of trying to quickly check whether a word has /ær/, /ɛr/ or /er/ in non-merged dialects and finding that the (American English) dictionary I was using only described merged pronunciations.

I wonder if the pronunciation guides given in the usual American English dictionaries are consciously “dumbed-down”, and if so, if there’s any evidence that this actually has the intended effect of making them more usable for linguistically naïve readers.

It seems vaguely plausible that it would be harder to remember a transcription system where two different symbols corresponding to the same sound, but I wouldn’t think you’d expect most people to memorize the dictionary's vowel transcription system at all—that’s why many print dictionaries have example words printed somewhere in the margins. And for online dictionaries, I’d imagine the vast majority of users prefer to listen to audio for pronunciation rather than reading a transcription. I dunno, I mean I think I was a little confused as a child about why some words were written with “ô” and others with “ä” in the dictionary, but I don’t remember it interfering in any way with my ability to use the pronunciation guides.

All of the other motivations I can think of for transcribing the merged rather than un-merged pronunciation seem pretty lame to me. Maybe cost and effort (if you’re a merged speaker, you don’t have to verify whether a word has /ɑ/ or /ɔ/? But it’s really easy to check other dictionaries for this kind of information, or in a number of cases it can be inferred from the spelling). Or maybe it’s to avoid having to decide which form to give in uncertain cases, like “fog” and “cog”? But I don’t see why you’d want to avoid mentioning the variation here; it seems more useful to explicitly note it and give both forms (and I don’t think the extra space needed for this would be prohibitive).

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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by Travis B. »

In dictionaries, unmerged pronunciations, even if the are less standard, are always better than merged pronunciations, because the reader can easily derive merged pronunciations from them, while the opposite clearly is not true. Your GA this day, e.g., is generally Mary-merry-marry merged, but it would probably be superior to provide Mary-merry-marry unmerged pronunciations, because the reader can readily figure out the merged pronunciations from them, but not vice versa.

People should be capable of merging different phonemes as specified in a dictionary, and if they cannot, that is their fault. But you cannot expect anyone to unmerge pronunciations that have already been merged for them.
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Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪ »

Travis B. wrote:People should be capable of merging different phonemes as specified in a dictionary, and if they cannot, that is their fault. But you cannot expect anyone to unmerge pronunciations that have already been merged for them.
I don't want to make your statement false, but I have come up with a question: what to do then with splits?
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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by Travis B. »

ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪ wrote:
Travis B. wrote:People should be capable of merging different phonemes as specified in a dictionary, and if they cannot, that is their fault. But you cannot expect anyone to unmerge pronunciations that have already been merged for them.
I don't want to make your statement false, but I have come up with a question: what to do then with splits?
For things like a dictionary, it probably depends upon how standard the split is, especially if one outcome of the split merges with another phoneme (which is extremely common). In most cases, the best thing to do would be to go with what is most standard, except possibly when a split does not interfere with any other phonemes, (e.g. the /æ æː/ split in Australian English), where then it might just make sense to represent the split regardless.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by Pole, the »

Travis B. wrote:Standard English is actually pretty coherent, aside from the difference between rhotic and non-rhotic varieties; case in point, RP and GA are much closer together than NAE varieties are or EE varieties are overall.
This reminds me of how, recently, I have been talking with my grandfather about English or Polish or something and I said that American English and English English are actually very close, and I said that they are probably much closer than — I made a guess — standard Polish and rural dialects of Podlasie.
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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by Qxentio »

As a German student of linguistics, I have only recently started finding out about all the variation that got lost in the last 300 years, especially in the last century. It frustrated me and made me sad to see that dozens if not hundreds of dialects were levelled and virtually died out for the sake of standardization and nationalism.

People used to be multilingual everywhere, even in the middle ages. If you had business with anyone who wasn't from your general area, you learned communicating in another dialect or a different language. And it was only with the rise of nationalism in the 18th to 20th centuries that single language policies became widespread in European nations. And with it came prescriptivism. The whole tradition of linguistics is, sadly, deeply tied with prescriptivism.

A standard language such as Standard German is a great cultural achievement because it allows people to communicate freely from one end of the dialect continuum to the other. It is great as a language of literature, administration and superregional communication. But with its advent, all the small regional languages, dialects and argots were essentially wiped out. What remains is a 98% standardized language with tiny influences of the dialectal substratum. A lot of regional identity, culture and connection to the elder generations is gone, just like that.

I'm from the Hannover Region. Up until a few years ago, I believed the meme that people in my area just spoke perfect "dialect-free" Standard German. I also believed that using the dative instead of a genitive was a sin and that most people of foreign descent just spoke bad German. If I hadn't started studying and researching those things on my own, I would have kept believing all that jive.
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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by Travis B. »

Pole, the wrote:
Travis B. wrote:Standard English is actually pretty coherent, aside from the difference between rhotic and non-rhotic varieties; case in point, RP and GA are much closer together than NAE varieties are or EE varieties are overall.
This reminds me of how, recently, I have been talking with my grandfather about English or Polish or something and I said that American English and English English are actually very close, and I said that they are probably much closer than — I made a guess — standard Polish and rural dialects of Podlasie.
It should be noted that the vast majority of variation in English varieties is phonological, with there being only a limited amount of lexical variation, and little morphological or syntactic variation aside from notable variation in preterite and past participle forms. For instance, what I speak normally is very different from RP, but almost all that is the phonology, but lexically it differs little from it (with a very large proportion of the places where it does differ from RP are also places where GA varies from RP), and aside from my penchant for using non-standard past participle forms and variation in how plural marking is used and a few things like got versus gotten it is morphologically and syntactically almost identical - such that the two look nearly identical aside from a few notable lexical items and some past participle forms when written down.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪ »

My family is originally from Lesser Poland. I don't remember anything from its Polish and now I speak Łódź Polish. My further family laughs at my constructions, like "What did you say?" is for me "Cożeś peedzia?" instead of standard "Co powiedziałeś?". Similarly I use "że" in relative clauses: "... that you walked." is "... żeś szed." instead of "...że szedłeś.". I don't know Pole where you are from but could you tell me if you know people using these constructions?

P.S. We also use the verb "wziąć" (to take) to emphasise a little effort made during an action, so if someone is lazy I'd tell him "Weź coś zrób!" and if something happened relatively quickly, "Wzięli dali radę i wygrali.".
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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by Pole, the »

My family is originally from Lesser Poland. I don't remember anything from its Polish and now I speak Łódź Polish. My further family laughs at my constructions, like "What did you say?" is for me "Cożeś peedzia?" instead of standard "Co powiedziałeś?". Similarly I use "że" in relative clauses: "... that you walked." is "... żeś szed." instead of "...że szedłeś.". I don't know Pole where you are from but could you tell me if you know people using these constructions?

P.S. We also use the verb "wziąć" (to take) to emphasise a little effort made during an action, so if someone is lazy I'd tell him "Weź coś zrób!" and if something happened relatively quickly, "Wzięli dali radę i wygrali.".
These are quite standard for non-standard Polish.
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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪ »

Ok, I was told it isn't any "non-standard standard" and they hear it from me for the first time. Dunno how.
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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

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As a German student of linguistics, I have only recently started finding out about all the variation that got lost in the last 300 years, especially in the last century. It frustrated me and made me sad to see that dozens if not hundreds of dialects were levelled and virtually died out for the sake of standardization and nationalism.
German is still infinitely many times more diverse than Polish.

I've been studying for a few months with two students from Bavaria. What perplexed me, they were using a different variety of German when they were speaking to each other, versus when they were speaking to Germans from other regions. While I could understand bits of the latter (I was learning German several times in the past), the former was a total enigma to me.
ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪ wrote:Ok, I was told it isn't any "non-standard standard" and they hear it from me for the first time. Dunno how.
You can take a look at Fudyń, which was created by a Polish conlanger a few years ago as an extrapolation of the current linguistic trends in colloquial Polish, most notably the consonant elision, e.g. /tɕɛkavɛɡɔ/ → /tɕɛkaɛɔ/ → /tɕɛkaɔː/.
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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by Viktor77 »

Since we're talking about prescriptivism, shall we talk about what is perhaps the world's most standardized and therefore controlled (in the sense of language authorities exercising control) language, French? The French authorities on language are so stuck up their asses that the Académie française goes out of their way to deny the idea of French as a pluricentric language with multiple centers of authenticity (think English, with American and British English). This is clearly the case. No one can deny that Quebec has their own variety of French for which they have their own norms and which is not subjugated to the norms of Parisian French. But the French language authorities will go to any length to deny it.

As a result of attempts to render French a monolithic language, dialectal leveling is widespread. The dialects of the langues d'oc have been leveled out considerably since WWII, and no one would dare call any of the langues d'oïl still spoken anything but dialects of French, also fairly leveled out. What's interesting is that, while rural dialects are leveling out, sometimes to the point of full dialect loss, urban dialects are becoming the new centers of variation. If you want to look at variation in France you go to the ZUPs, the zones urbaines prioritaires, and look at contact between French and immigrant languages. My advisor works extensively on variation in the suburbs of Paris. It's rather fascinating how variation shifted from the rural areas to the cities mostly after the Second World War.

Still, the Academy would have you believe that France is not a multilingual country...they'll do anything they can to bury their heads in the sand lest they "lose" the poor langue de Molière to variation and change....

This is why there such a huge gap between spoken and formal written French. I struggle to come up with another language in which this gap is bigger actually.
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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

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As a result of attempts to render French a monolithic language, dialectal leveling is widespread. The dialects of the langues d'oc have been leveled out considerably since WWII, and no one would dare call any of the langues d'oïl still spoken anything but dialects of French, also fairly leveled out. What's interesting is that, while rural dialects are leveling out, sometimes to the point of full dialect loss, urban dialects are becoming the new centers of variation.
Something similar is predicted to happen to Polish, but after several years of studying in Poznan, all I have experienced are slight lexical variations or set phrases, in particular wiara (“people”), wuchta (“a large number”), wuchta wiary (“a large number of people”) and tej (Canadian English “eh”).

Also there's a factor of lexical regionalisms spreading via television, especially through major broadcasters located in Warsaw and Wroclaw.
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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by Travis B. »

English sticks out because while there has been dialect levelling in many places, there simultaneously there has been notable innovation dialectally as well, of course primarily phonologically. Case in point, the NCVS has transformed the dialects of the Inland North such that they have vowel systems considerably different from GA when they were significantly closer to it, say, 50 years ago. (I speak noticeably further from GA than do my parents, who both grew up here in southeastern Wisconsin.)
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by mèþru »

The lack of lexical differences is because of the levelling/creolisation effect of colonisation and mass communication. There used to be much more localism, and there still a little in older speech, or in signs advertising local things. The UK seems to have much more lexical variety than in the US east of the Mississippi.
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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by linguoboy »

mèþru wrote:The lack of lexical differences is because of the levelling/koineïsation effect of colonisation and mass communication.
FTFY.

It would be interesting, btw, to try to measure lexical diversity not just in terms of the total number of variants but the breadth of their use. What I mean is, when people say the UK has more lexical diversity, what that generally means is "most people use one of one or two terms, but there are still some elderly people in scattered rural areas who use one of a host of alternatives". (The USA has this, too, btw; just check out the DARE sometime.) But I can think of several examples where the USA has several competing regional variants for a commonplace term no one of which dominates. Pop vs soda vs coke is the best known example, but there are others.

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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by mèþru »

I thought it's the same effect as with related mutually unintelligible or partially intelligible varieties?
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Re: Erghhh... Prescriptivism

Post by Salmoneus »

Qxentio wrote:As a German student of linguistics, I have only recently started finding out about all the variation that got lost in the last 300 years, especially in the last century...

...People used to be multilingual everywhere, even in the middle ages. If you had business with anyone who wasn't from your general area, you learned communicating in another dialect or a different language...
...A standard language such as Standard German is a great cultural achievement because it allows people to communicate freely from one end of the dialect continuum to the other. It is great as a language of literature, administration and superregional communication. But with its advent, all the small regional languages, dialects and argots were essentially wiped out.
The thing is, this is still the case; it's just that modern transportation and communication mean that the scale is a little different. People in most of the world still ARE multilingual, reverting to a lingua franca when communicating with people outside of their tiny local bubble. There still ARE small regional languages.

An example of a small regional language today is Standard German. Almost useless outside of a small local community of less than 100 million people. Accordingly, there is massive multilingualism, with the majority of Germans (something like 55%) now also speaking English (to varying degrees of proficiency, of course, although in general both online and in person I've found the standard, at least for the young, very high). English proficiency is highly correlated with economic success. And of course for even smaller languages than German - Dutch or Norwegian, for instance, the level of English proficiency is even higher. Sweden already has nearly 90% of its population being English speakers (with 40% of the population rated as "very good" English speakers). Large sectors of the economy are dominated by English, and English has been adopted as a standard language even by corporations and organisations with few native speakers - Renault requires management employees not only to pass an English proficiency test but to demonstrate that their English proficiency is continually improving. Apparently 2/3rds of French engineering schools now require English proficiency to graduate.

Where people used to talk a local dialect at home, and Standard French or Standard German when interracting with outsiders, now they tend to speak (something like) Standard French or Standard German at home and English when interracting with outsiders. Or instead of village standard vs regional standard vs national standard, they now speak regional standard vs national standard vs international standard. The world has gotten bigger.


Having said that, the degree of diglossia and regional variation in German is still remarkable, as is the degree of pride Germans seem to feel for their local dialects. Compared to English, at least! There has been wholesale loss of the most divergent English dialects over the last century, there is general contempt for dialects, and the tradition of diglossia has largely been lost.
[The flip side of the way that everybody on TV or in politics or management spoke 'BBC English', was that at home they could speak their own dialect. Now, you're meant to not hide your real dialect - which, yes, allows a few mild dialects into the national public eye, but also effectively bars those with strong accents from large parts of the economy - they can't put on a standard accent because then they'd be pretentious, snobbish ponces, but they also can't get good jobs because they're ill-educated backwater rubes...]

I have a friend who grew up in Switzerland - he would speak his local Swiss dialect around the town (not that he had one of the really strong rural ones, but still), and swiss standard german to people from other parts of switzerland, and standard german to german-speakers from outside switzerland, and english to people from outside the germanophone area...
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