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Comment by schroeding | Hacker News Reader

Eh, I wouldn't agree with that. In Germany, we had multiple top-down orthographic reforms in the past (e.g. Rechtschreibreform 1996, had many many significant, brand-new changes to make spelling and speaking more consistent) which were pretty forced, i.e. was not organic at all. I'm not saying it was bad, I like the current state of the German language - but it was not organic or democratic. Germanys equivalent to The Daily Mail even had an entire campaign against it with stickers and all.

And there is no true way to "vote with your feet" if you get punished for violating the official orthography.

Not to mention other sources of non-organic language change, like e.g. suppressing dia- or sociolects, but I also don't want to delve (hehe) too far. :P

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Nation-states generally tend to be hostile towards dialects historically because they are seen as disruptive to "national unity", and in more extreme cases, as latent separatism. And it feels like, because larger nation-states usually have more history of separatism (having forcibly assimilated more distinct local cultures), they also tend to be more touchy about that.

As a German, I don't think this applies to Germany all that much. For example, multiple German states have enshrined in their constitutions a specific protection for several minority languages (mostly Germanic languages like Low German or Danish, but also the Slavic language of Sorbian that's native to Brandenburg and Saxony). If anything, the state and county governments are working to preserve those local varieties.

Things are generally better today than they used to be in most places, but historically Germany did plenty of that (and I don't just mean the Nazis!), and that kind of history has very long term effects even once policy changes.

This is true now - it definitely wasn't in the past, especially until the 80s. My mother was still beaten (!) as a child by her teacher in Munich when she spoke too Bavarian. Eradication of dialect was the goal at the time, Hochdeutsch the only thing acceptable.

(But the reason was people thinking it's a "Bildungshindernis", a roadblock in the pursuit of knowledge, like if people speaking dialect were mentally challenged - not national unity)

Sometimes one is really just a shibboleth for the other. I grew up in Russia, and my native Southern Russian dialect was similarly derided as "uneducated peasant speech" by some schoolteachers, with a similar subtext - that, ironically, in an area where that dialect is predominant. But then you see the same argument applied to Ukrainian and Belarusian (that share some of the distinctive features) and realize that it's not just about being a "roadblock in pursuit of knowledge", even if that is used as a convenient justification that people might even genuinely believe in themselves when they use it - because they, in turn, were culturally conditioned to accept it as valid. It doesn't really make much sense as a reason when you think about it objectively, though.

>And there is no true way to "vote with your feet" if you get punished for violating the official orthography.

Ich hat das nicht verstanden. Ich kann mit meinem fusse wahlen.

Wie konnte ich fur schlecte Deutsch bestraft werden? Ich wohne nicht in Deutschland.

Und ja, meinem Deutsch ist sehr schlecht. Das stimmt. Kommen sie damit klar.

Edit: Fixed (without really improving) my terrible german.

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