Simon Akam in the New Yorker has one of the best essays I’ve read (archived) about the struggle to standardize a language. Here’s the start:
Ask him how it all began, and he remembers the ice. It was a bitter morning in January, 1982, when Bernard Cathomas, aged thirty-six, carefully picked his way up a slippery, sloping Zurich street. His destination was No. 33, an ochre house with green shutters—the home of Heinrich Schmid, a linguist at the University of Zurich. Inside, the décor suggested that “professor” was an encompassing identity: old wooden floors, a faded carpet, a living room seemingly untouched since the nineteen-thirties, when Schmid had grown up in the house. Schmid’s wife served Rüeblitorte, a Swiss carrot cake that manages bourgeois indulgence with a vegetable alibi.
Cathomas had already written from Chur, in the canton of the Grisons, having recently become the general secretary of the Lia Rumantscha, a small association charged with protecting Switzerland’s least known national language, Romansh. Spoken by less than one per cent of the Swiss population, the language was itself splintered into five major “idioms,” not always readily intelligible to one another, each with its own spelling conventions. Earlier attempts at unification had collapsed in rivalries. In his letter, Cathomas said that Schmid’s authority would be valuable in standardizing the language. Cathomas wrote in German but started and ended in his native Sursilvan, the biggest of the Romansh idioms: “Jeu engraziel cordialmein per Vies interess e Vossa attenziun per quest problem.” Translation: “I thank you very much for your interest and attention to this problem.”
Schmid, the man he was counting on, hadn’t grown up speaking Romansh; he first learned it in high school, and later worked on the “Dicziunari Rumantsch Grischun,” a Romansh dictionary begun in 1904 and still lumbering toward completion. But the depth of his expertise was formidable. By the time Cathomas knocked on his door, Schmid had already sketched a plan for standardizing Romansh: a “majority principle” in which the most widely shared spellings across the idioms would win out.
“He really already had everything,” Cathomas recalled. “He had worked it all out in his head.”
What Cathomas hadn’t reckoned with was how quickly the tidy scheme, once loosed into the valleys, would ignite quarrels that engulfed Swiss classrooms, newspapers, and eventually cantonal politics—a parable of how an attempt to secure a language’s survival can feel, to those being standardized, like an assault on what makes them distinct.
I hope that lead-in entices you to read the rest; it’s gripping, sad, and funny, with sympathy for all sides. (And specially for J.W. Brewer, I cite the band name Liricas Analas ‘Anal Lyrics.’) Here’s a bit near the end:
The Lia Rumantscha is also asking the International Organization for Standardization to classify each idiom as a separate language. Some people doubt that this hyperlocalism will pay off. One member of the Zurich team told me about a Swiss firm that sold a G.P.S. device with directions spoken in Swiss German. “No one bought it,” he noted. “People said, ‘That’s not my Swiss German.’ ” You can give the machine a voice, he suggested, but people still want it to sound like their cousin.
I might add that I am the proud owner of a Lia Rumantscha publication, the Dicziunari rumantsch ladin-tudais-ch. Thanks for the link go to my dear old friend Dave, to whom I tip all my hats.
Attempts to create standard languages artificially, as opposed to picking one dialect and promoting it at the expense of others, seem rarely to work out well, not really pleasing anyone but their creators. (The one-dialect solution does work, so long as the speakers of that dialect are dominant anyway, usually politically, but sometimes culturally. If that’s not the case, you’re probably doomed.)
Even if the new creation isn’t stillborn, you end up with with XKCD’s standards problem:
https://xkcd.com/927/
very excited to read this!
especially because at my gut level “a ‘majority principle’ in which the most widely shared spellings across the idioms would win out” seems such an odd choice, since it doesn’t do anything to make the writing system coherent for any of the lects, much less make it easier for readers who are speakers of different lects to grasp how they’d each render a word. (it is a very useful thing about YIVO transliteration that it isn’t the primary writing system for yiddish, so it doesn’t interfere too much with (for example) ײַ being spoken as /ɑ:/ [the historical majority realization], /aj/ [the version implicit in YIVO transliteration], or even, if i’m remembering the small dialectological corners, /ɛj/)