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Languages used to be so much more fluid before the invention of printing. Now printing and primary schools have slowed the process down considerably, as well as
by mojuba 5y ago
Languages used to be so much more fluid before the invention of printing. Now printing and primary schools have slowed the process down considerably, as well as destroyed a lot of smaller dialects that never made it to printed literature. Same for gender dialects, I presume.
You could argue though that printing and schools are part of the human evolution.
- grozzle 5y agoTrue. Irish in its heyday had four rather different dialects, but today only the artificial compromise "fifth province" amalgam is taught in schools. Same with Japanese. There are some proudly, stubbornly distinct phrases in Kansai-ben and other regions, but the choice of the Meiji-era government to only teach Standard Tokyo Japanese in schools has had the desired homogenising effect. Even as recently as the 1940s, there are well-documented cases of teens from the south of England, sent to the north of England, to work in mines for the war effort, who simply could not understand the variety of English being spoken around them. Radio and TV smoothed out all those differences.