True. Irish in its heyday had four rather different dialects, but today only the artificial compromise "fifth province" amalgam is taught in schools. Same with

True. 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.