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Comment by njarboe | Hacker News Reader

What I found interesting is that there are 5 strong dialects of Romansh with no single one dominating. In 1982 a unified version was produced and is used in some administrative offices (and makes having "Romansh" an official language of Switzerland less of a headache), but the people speaking the different dialects don't want to change to the new version. Makes sense that these small Alpine valley cultures want to speak the language their ancestors have evolved over the millennia, not some newfangled mashup.

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> Makes sense that these small Alpine valley cultures want to speak the language their ancestors have evolved over the millennia, not some newfangled mashup.

That sounds reasonable, except for the fact that many, if not most, of the modern European national languages are in fact, newfangled mashups. National language standards are by and large the invention of the past few hundred years, where they either took a single regional language and called it the language language (such as French) or they kind of "mashed up", artificial standard (such as German). And yet somehow, these languages eventually took hold.

If Romansch doesn't die out in the next century, it's highly likely that a single standard will emerge.

They took hold because of education standardization and active governmental campaigns to suppress variant dialects.

Portugal did exactly the contrary.

We have put activities in place to try to save Mirandese.

In Spain likewise, after the civil war, regions got active to ensure their local languages strive alongside Spanish.

In Germany some states have the option of children having after school activities in the regional dialects.

Which German state does offer "regional dialect" school activities? Is this something that is done by public bodies?

Some info about learning Cologne dialect.

https://www.sk-kultur.de/inhalte/themen/akademie-foer-uns-ko...

An initiative to teach Bavarian in the schools

http://m.spiegel.de/lebenundlernen/schule/bayerisch-lehrer-i...

There are similar initiatives for other dialects.

Sorry they are in German, just wanted to provide direct links, instead of Google translate.

I'm not sure it was ever the goal that everyone would _speak_ Rumantsch Grischun, as it is called, but the hope was that at least it would be used in writing (e.g. in school books) [1]. The resistance there is arguably more surprising.

[1] This is not too different from the situation with High German being used in education even though everyone speaks in dialects.

Is the goal perhaps more that this merged dialect could be intelligible to the speakers of all the dialects, such that it could be used to issue copies of laws that they could read, etc.?

Interestingly, that situation resembles the one of the bigger German speaking population.

The people are speaking their own dialects which differ that much that you can easily locate from which part of the country the speaker is from.

The native German Swiss only speak their Swiss German dialects among each other, with no single one dominating. In writing OTOH, standard German is used, although of course the usage of standard German has a much longer history than in the case of Romansh.

Dialects are often more the rule than not.

Italian German, French, an yea, e'en English, have mutually all-but-unintelligible variants.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=e34M6P1NXYM

"mutually all-but-unintelligible" doesn't make any sense. Should read "all-but-mutually unintelligible".

It's almost as if it were all unintelligible, but mutually.

I don't get it. Do you?

> but the people speaking the different dialects don't want to change to the new version. Makes sense that these small Alpine valley cultures want to speak the language their ancestors have evolved over the millennia, not some newfangled mashup.

Well heck, the same thing can almost be said of German.

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