# When did national standardized languages become the native language throughout a country?



## vince

Hello everyone,

When did national standardized languages become native languages throughout the country, or more accurately, throughout a Sprachraum?

For example, when did Standard French become a native language among everyday non-university-educated citizens in Provence, Wallonia, or Brittany? When did Standard High German become a native language in Bavaria, Baden, or Tyrol? I suspect that if you went back to the 18th century, took a random Italian person from Turin and dropped them in Rome or Florence, they wouldn't have been able to communicate. To what extent was this true?

I'm sure that the answer depends on a.) the country b.) the existence of a strong regional language c.) the existence of an ethnic identity distinct from the national identity, and d.) other sociolinguistic factors. I know that this process is still in the process of happening in places like rural China, and in other places, the regional language remains the predominant native language like in Alemannic Switzerland, Catalonia, and Hong Kong. I'd like to know the situation in the various regions of your country.


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## sound shift

vince said:


> For example, when did Standard French become a native language among everyday non-university-educated citizens in Provence?


According to something I read (I forget exactly what it was): It became the spoken language about 1920 in the towns and around the time of WW2 in the countryside.


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## ilocas2

In Czech Republic never. There is a diglossia in terms of sound changes and grammar between standard and colloquial Czech. Standard Czech has no native speakers.


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## danielstan

In Romanian Republic the differences between regions are minimal, to a degree where only difference in accent is noticeable.
Standard Romanian is based on the dialect spoken in the capital (Bucharest) and is learnt as native language in the entire Southern Romania (former Wallachia).
In Transylvania there is a noticeable influence of Hungarian in phonology (Romanian '_o_' is pronounced like Hungarian '_a'_, i.e. like English _a _in '_all_'). The stress is moved sometimes on first syllable, like in Hungarian.
In Moldova region (between Carpathians mountains and Prut river) we have phenomena of palatalization (groups [pe] , [pi] are pronounced [ke], [ki],
[bi] -> [ghi] ) and other differences in pronunciation.
Grammar is the same everywhere in spoken Romanian, vocabulary have regional words, but not to such degree to make conversation hard to follow.
Overall Romanian language was unitarian from Middle Ages till today - a rare phenomenon in Europe.
Dimitrie Cantemir wrote in this sense around 1700, pointing differences in pronunciation between Moldova and Wallachia, but most in regular transformation of some vowells, only.
Oldest surviving Romanian document, from 1521, is written in a language that does not need translation for 95% of it and the supposed pronunciation (as one could deduce it from a document written in Cyrillic alphabet which does not have letters for some Romanian sounds) is amazing resembling the Standard Romanian of today (like 80-90%, in my opinion).

Many Romanian linguists remarked the unity of Romanian over a sizeable territory, separated by Carpathians in 2 halves (in Middle Ages the biggest dialectal barriers were mountains, not rivers).
As 'after fact' explanations they mention the transhumance of Romanian shephards from Transylvania through Wallachia up to Dobrudja (near Black Sea).

The 'standardization' of Romanian started around 1848 and was an easy process, compared to other countries (Italy, for example, with its multitude of dialects).

Me, personally, I experienced my first conversation with a simple (not highly educated) woman from Republic of Moldova in 1990 (few months after falling of communism).
I was amazed to discover that we talked for 2 hours and we needed to explain some regional words only 2-3 times (she pronounced the trademark _Volvo _like _Volga_, when we talked about cars, etc.). Of course there were differences in accent, but nothing to make discussion difficult.

Note: during USSR times there were extremely rare cases when Romanian citizens traveled to 'Moldavian Socialist Soviet Republic' and viceversa.
The radio and television in Soviet Moldavia started to broadcast in 'Moldovan' language (the official name of it) in 1985, with the relaxation promoted by Gorbachev.


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## vince

danielstan said:


> In Romanian Republic the differences between regions are minimal, to a degree where only difference in accent is noticeable.
> 
> Overall Romanian language was unitarian from Middle Ages till today - a rare phenomenon in Europe.



That is fascinating. When there's a large region of linguistic uniformity, I generally attribute it to a relatively recent introduction of the language to an area. Hence why someone in California can understand someone from Nova Scotia with only minimal difficulty even though they are over 3000 km away. Was there significant movement between Moldova, Transylvania, and Wallachia throughout history?


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## danielstan

Your theory sounds good, for recent introduction of a language to a colonized territory.
I heard that Russian spoken at Vladivostok is similar to Russian spoken in Moscow (9,000 km away).
Also I read about the tendency of people migrating from Europe to the New World to use the centralized language from their country, not the local dialect they spoke in their village.
For example in Canada migrated people from various corners of France, including regions which resisted for centuries to the political center (Paris) imposing Standard French (Brittany, for example).
The French spoken in Canada was similar to that in Paris at the time.

For answering the question you ask I would mention that Moldova and Wallachia the medieval archives are very scarce, especially in matters like census.
As a side note, until 1860 the civil records (births, marriages, deaths) were kept in each village at the local church, the priest being one of the few literate people in his village.
They were autonomous provinces of Ottoman Empire for centuries and subject to many wars (usually lost) on their territories.
The only relevant information about migrations from Transylvania to Wallachia and Moldova are toponims with 'Ungureni' in many counties next to Carpathians:
Ungureni - Wikipedia
'Ungureni' does not mean Hungarians, but inhabitants coming from 'Hungarian parts'.
Many such toponims are in pair with 'Pământeni' (< Latin _pavimentum_, meaning 'autochtones', literally 'men of the land').
Example: Albeștii Pământeni, Argeș - Wikipedia   and  Albeștii Ungureni, Argeș - Wikipedia
In the Wallachian and Moldovan counties neighbouring the Székely Land - Wikipedia
we may encounter even today family names with Hungarian resonance, but with Romanian spelling.
Otherwise we may suppose that in the rest of the Carpathians the majority of the migrants were Romanians from Transylvania.

For the reversed direction of migration, the archives of Hungary kept record of many situations of Romanians crossing the mountains in Transylvania.
The phenomenon was quite intense during the XVIII century, when Ottoman Empire imposed foreign rulers (Greeks) for Moldova and Wallachia and these rulers imposed a heavy fiscality on the peasantry in order to keep their position (the tribute and bribes paid to the Ottomans escalated)
This part of the migration is often cited by Hungarians in their historical debate on why Romanians have majority in Transylvania.

I don't know if the migration of Romanians over Carpathians was bigger than in other peoples. The main reasons were economical (fiscal pressure) and the wars.

The dialectal differences in Italy or Germany were favored by the big number of city-states in these territories and the relative great degree of urbanization comparing to other countries in Middle Ages.
Wallachia and Moldova were mainly rural countries, while the small cities they had were populated with significant number of foreign traders.
In Transylvania the cities were populated mainly by Germans (Saxon colonists) and Hungarians.


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## Awwal12

vince said:


> Hello everyone,
> When did national standardized languages become native languages throughout the country, or more accurately, throughout a Sprachraum?


As soon as people start to recognize it as such. The problem is that "native language" is a rather vague term, as much as the very "language", in fact. People may recognize the standard as the same language they speak even when there are great objective differences between them. And, on the other hand, the situation when the spoken language has no noticeable differences with the literary standard is rather rare (it mostly happens when the standard language is very young AND there is no distinctive dialects). During the last century, for instance, Russian indeed became much more uniform (however, even before that it wasn't as diverged as, say, German dialects), yet some consistent difference between the spoken city coine and the literary standard language remains. Is it the same language or not? Everybody will likely agree that it's all Russian, although using the proper literary language in an informal situation will hardly pass unnoticed.


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## Nino83

I think when it is used in schools, andministration communication media and, consequently, it is often spoken at home and in the streets, as the sole language or as one language among other ones. 
In Italy it is said that the real unification was made by television.


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## apmoy70

Standard Modern Greek became the official language of the Greek state, quite recently, in 1976.
Until then, Greeks used two different varieties of the language (diglossia), one higher register (H) for official purposes called Katharevousa and one for everyday use called Demotic (L) that had evolved naturally from the Koine & Byzantine Greek.
In reality, Modern Greek after the formation of the modern Greek state in the 1830's was a dialect continuum with various degrees of intelligibility.
This phenomenon is described by the writer Dimitrios Vyzantios (1790-1853) in his play *Βαβυλωνία* (Babel) considered the first Greek play from newly independent Greece (written in 1836).
It's a slapstick piece of language miscomprehesion presenting a group of Greeks speaking in seven different dialects, from southern Albania, Crete, Aegean Islands, Ionian Islands, Cyprus and Asia Minor.
The seven characters in the play, cannot agree on a common vocabulary to perform a basic task, such as to order food, thus, an eighth character has to cobble together an eighth dialect which leads to hilarious events.
Standard Modern Greek is a fusion of the Athenian Demotic dialect, with archaic features taken from the Katharevousa higher register.


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## Penyafort

Regarding Catalan, one thing must be taken into account. The Crown of Aragon worked pretty much as a country by modern standards between the 12th and the 18th centuries, a sea power in the Mediterranean for a couple of centuries. James I founded the Royal Chancelery as soon as 1264, an institution that took charge of the writing of all types of documents, mostly in Catalan (Latin and Aragonese were also used), at a time when similar bodies elsewhere did it only in Latin.

This meant a very early standardization of official Catalan for writers, to the extent that nowadays it is hard to tell the variety of any text in medieval Catalan, despite the large literature in it and the fact that noticeable differences probably existed in the spoken language. Also, Ramon Llull (Raymond Luly) in the 13th century is considered the 'father of the language' because of the large amount of works he wrote in Catalan about topics that were written in Latin in other places, forcing him to increase the lexicon in a native way. For two centuries, Catalans would use that standard Old Catalan for serious prose works, but Occitan for poetry.

The anomalous situation started in the 15th century, with the dynastic union of Aragon and Castile. Although Aragon would maintain its laws, customs and languages for three more centuries, the influence of the Castilian language was obvious. Between the 15th and the 18th century, the Catalan nobility, priests, writers and traders started to use Castilian for certain A purposes, submitting Catalan to a B position, in a period known as Decadence that broke the transmission with the glorious literary stage of the past. Catalans never switched into Castilian (i.e., Spanish) but by the beginning of the 17th century, most educated people in large towns could understand Spanish.

It was, though, with the changes in the 18th century, that the impositions took place. The arrival of the Bourbon dynasty meant a suppression of Aragon's laws and the beginning of the uniformization of the country. Which implied a series of laws first to make Spanish be known by everyone in Catalonia, then to try to ban Catalan from the public spheres. Universal schooling in the 19th century and the improvements in road communications would quickly spread the knowledge of the Spanish language in rural Catalonia too. But the 19th century also brought Romanticism, which in Catalonia was conflated with a spirit of rebirth ('Renaixença'), a revival (first cultural, then also political) of the literary use of the Catalan language. This led to see how different modern Catalan was from the literary standard of the past, and the need there was for a new standardization, which would eventually take place at the beginning of the 20th century, political reasons causing two close but different standards to be implemented: a general one, centered on the educated Barcelonan speech (for Catalonia, Andorra and, with local adaptations, for the Balearic Islands, French Catalonia, and Alghero in Sardinia) and one for Valencia.

Catalans these days are in general fully bilingual in both Catalan and Spanish, the competence and use of them varying on the speaker. The fact that Spanish is a mother tongue today to half of the Catalans is not due to language switch by traditional Catalan families, but to massive waves of people coming from elsewhere in Spain -mainly the south- along the 20th century, and Latin America in the 21st century.

Spoken Catalan maintains dialectal variation (the main distinction being between the Western and Eastern blocks), but the written standard has been the same for everyone since more than a century now. In urban speakers, many of which have Catalan as their second language, the influence from Spanish in the language is obvious in their pronunciation and choice of vocabulary.

The Spanish spoken by the Catalans is the Northern/Castilian one, considered the standard in Spain, with minor but noticeable influences from Catalan in the phonology, syntax and vocabulary, specially in older and inland speakers. Southern and Latin American Spanish is spoken by 1st-generation newcomers, but their children usually speak standard Castilian as first language and standard Catalan as second language.


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## Red Arrow

This process started about 50 years ago in Flanders and still hasn't been completed. In the meantime we are stuck with "tussentaal". (a language in between Standard Dutch and its dialects)


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## danielstan

What about ABN? It this the same standard as 'tussentaal' ?

As I heard from some Flemmings, the Flemmish dialect is different enough in some sounds from the Dutch spoken in The Netherlands.
Is your king trying to speak like Dutchmen?

I also met Walloon guys who spoke ABN and they could hardly understand the West Vlaami dialect (which is quite used in West Flanders).


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## Nino83

It seems there are three dialectal areas in Flanders: Flemish (East and West Flemish), Brabantian, Limburgish. Tussentaal is mostly based on the Brabantian dialect (a mix of Brabantian and Standard Dutch). brabantian is spoken in the provinces of Antwerp, Flemish Brabant and Bruxelles.


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## Dymn

I think the difference between France and Italy, and Spain is that while in the former countries there was a huge linguistic continuum which has only been altered since relatively late, in Spain the growth of Castilian during the Reconquista has made it the most spoken language in the peninsula since very early, according to this map, probably in the 13th century.

Since during the Reconquista only Northern dialects managed to survive and push southwards, diversity is considerably lower than in other countries. The Iberian Peninsula is 580,000 km^2 large, yet there are _only _five Romance languages. Modern-day monolingual Castilian territory spans 380,000 km^2, with probably no morphological difference at all (only phonetic). Compare that with Italy's zillion of dialects (300,000 km^2).

I also think an early standardization and political unity helped a lot, compared to other countries.

I'd say that since very early, Castilian has been growing at the expense of Leonese (in Extremadura and León), Basque (in the Basque Country and Navarre) and Aragonese (in Navarre, Aragon and Valencia), this map shows it.

On the other hand, Castilian as a sizeable native language of the common people (that is, not only of the elite) is a 20th century phenomenon in Catalan-speaking territories and Galicia, with various reasons. I think in Galicia the main cause has been a breach of intergenerational transmission, and in Catalonia immigration from Castilian-speaking areas (map). In some areas (Alicante city) both causes have met, to the point where language replacement is almost complete. In Catalonia and Balearic Islands the current situation is fifty-fifty for Catalan and Castilian, a bit stagnated I'd say. Galicia is also fifty-fifty, but the trend is unfavourable for Galician I think.

I'm not sure about Asturias and Basque Country.


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## jmx

Dymn said:


> Since during the Reconquista only Northern dialects managed to survive and push southwards, ...


As I tried to explain in another thread, it is unproven, and in addition unlikely, that modern Spanish was born in any conceivable way in northern Spain.


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## Dymn

jmx said:


> As I tried to explain in another thread, it is unproven, and in addition unlikely, that modern Spanish was born in any conceivable way in northern Spain.


"Modern Spanish" can mean many things. The first step towards standardization happened in Toledo. But my understanding is that the language had been brought from the area around Burgos and Cantabria, and may have received influences from Leonese and maybe Aragonese.

Anyway, I'm far from an expert. Could you elaborate?


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## Red Arrow

danielstan said:


> What about ABN? It this the same standard as 'tussentaal' ?
> 
> As I heard from some Flemmings, the Flemmish dialect is different enough in some sounds from the Dutch spoken in The Netherlands.
> Is your king trying to speak like Dutchmen?
> 
> I also met Walloon guys who spoke ABN and they could hardly understand the West Vlaami dialect (which is quite used in West Flanders).


ABN = Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands = outdated term for Algemeen Nederlands (Standard Dutch)

The Flemish dialect*s* are indeed quite different from what is spoken in the Netherlands.
Our king speaks Dutch with a Walloon accent.

The West-Flemish dialect is incomprehensible for me. West-Flemish tussentaal, on the other hand, is easy to understand.
None of my West-Flemish friends ever tried to speak their dialect around me. I don't think they even consider it 'their' language. Their language is West-Flemish tussentaal.


Nino83 said:


> It seems there are three dialectal areas in Flanders: Flemish (East and West Flemish), Brabantian, Limburgish.


Exactly.


			
				Nino83 said:
			
		

> Tussentaal is mostly based on the Brabantian dialect (a mix of Brabantian and Standard Dutch). brabantian is spoken in the provinces of Antwerp, Flemish Brabant and Bruxelles.


No, there is not 1 form of tussentaal. There are thousands of forms. It is different for everyone. Everyone speaks it in their own way based on what they grew up with.

For instance, younger people from Limburg will speak a mixture of Standard Dutch, the Limburgish dialect spoken by their grandparents and random Brabantian influences they hear on TV.


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## Hachi25

ilocas2 said:


> In Czech Republic never. There is a diglossia in terms of sound changes and grammar between standard and colloquial Czech. Standard Czech has no native speakers.



It is the same in Croatia. "Standard Croatian language" is an artificial construct with no native speakers. Some dialects are close to that standard, but none of them completely matches with the standard variation of the language.


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## danielstan

On that area of ex-Yugoslavia, where there was 1 Standard Serbo-Croatian language before 1990, now they have many "standards" of Serbo-Croatian, even a Bosnian or a Montegrin langauges, with all the effort to make some differences between them.


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## jmx

Dymn said:


> "Modern Spanish" can mean many things. The first step towards standardization happened in Toledo. But my understanding is that the language had been brought from the area around Burgos and Cantabria, and may have received influences from Leonese and maybe Aragonese.
> 
> Anyway, I'm far from an expert. Could you elaborate?


I included a link to the other thread so that you or anyone can read it and post there. It's not very long, please read it and then post your questions there.


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## vince

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like there are artificial forms of certain languages declared to be "official" that no one speaks natively. I'm thinking Modern Standard Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Katharevousa Greek. That's not what I'm asking. For the sake of these three languages: when was it common for people to be able to understand such forms of the language, even if nobody spoke them as a first language?

My question as originally posed is mainly for countries where the dialect continuum is wide enough that people on opposite ends could not historically understand each other until the national language started to be widely understood.
When did people from Zurich become able to understand people in Berlin? When did people in Nice start being able to understand people in Paris? I think that for the case of China, if you traveled back 70 years most people in Shanghai could not communicate orally with someone in Beijing.


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## danielstan

I heard that in Israel the authorities are promoting as "official language" a revived ancient Hebrew (revitalization based on words from ancient texts), as a common language for people who immigrated during last 70 years from various corners of the world and do not speak natively the same dialect/language.
Interesting case of historical reconstruction of a language in modern times.


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## berndf

danielstan said:


> I heard that in Israel the authorities are promoting as "official language" a revived ancient Hebrew (revitalization based on words from ancient texts), as a common language for people who immigrated during last 70 years from various corners of the world and do not speak natively the same dialect/language.
> Interesting case of historical reconstruction of a language in modern times.


It is a little bit older than that. Modern Hebrew was created in the 1870s and at the time of the first Zionist settlers around 1900 it was already a fully functional language for daily use.


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## Ihsiin

vince said:


> Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like there are artificial forms of certain languages declared to be "official" that no one speaks natively. I'm thinking Modern Standard Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Katharevousa Greek. That's not what I'm asking. For the sake of these three languages: when was it common for people to be able to understand such forms of the language, even if nobody spoke them as a first language?



I wouldn't say that Modern Standard Arabic is an 'artificial' language – it is a standardised version of Classical Arabic, and the classical language was a natural and native (though obviously no longer) language. The degree to which it is understand in modern times is in line with literacy, since no vernacular dialects of Arabic also form a written standard (apart from Maltese, obviously). The interesting thing is how the increase in widespread literacy has caused the standard language to influence and normalise various vernacular dialects. In Arabic the distinction between the standard and vernacular languages remains substantial, perhaps because of the amount of divergence before widespread literacy. In languages where the divergence is not as great at this point (perhaps we can point at English?) the standard language would probably have a much greater influence on the vernaculars.


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## berndf

vince said:


> My question as originally posed is mainly for countries where the dialect continuum is wide enough that people on opposite ends could not historically understand each other until the national language started to be widely understood.
> When did people from Zurich become able to understand people in Berlin?


I usable standard for Modern High German that was used in Low, Central and Upper German regions developed in the early 16th century, soon after the invention of type setting. Educated, literate speakers could always communicate via the oral representation of this written standard. In some areas _speaking standard German_ is still called _nach der Schrift sprechen_ (_talk according to writing_). Some dialects are still often mutually unintelligible but the number of speakers using genuine dialect (rather than regionally "flavoured" versions of Standard German) is going down. Some areas, especially in the North, have completely lost their native dialects.


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## Oranje

The uniqueness of English dialects took a hit after the late 1880s after mandatory education such that today differences are mostly in choice of word and frequency rather than grammar. Most are moribund as native languages because they're not being learned by children and natives are extremely old. Even remaining differences in vocabulary have seen a decline with the introduction of Broadcast television.

The unity of spoken English is hard to date. Unity from Aberdeen to Plymouth by at least a majority of inhabitants in major towns probably coincides with the birth of giant industrial cities and ports from industry towns during the Empire. Good examples are Manchester and Glasglow. It can be no earlier than 1745 because Scottish Jacobites did not speak modern Scottish English as a native language. 

This is guess work, it must be confessed. In England, people very rarely wrote in the vernacular and it's hard to judge whether a letter is typical or whether a poem is exaggerating dialectal features.


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## Delvo

vince said:


> When did people from Zurich become able to understand people in Berlin? When did people in Nice start being able to understand people in Paris?


I do not believe that they ever wouldn't have been able to understand.



vince said:


> I think that for the case of China, if you traveled back 70 years most people in Shanghai could not communicate orally with someone in Beijing.


The common native language of Shanghai is a member of the Wu language family, which is unrelated to Mandarin, the language of Beijing. Is your question meant to include cases where the two places would speak unrelated languages, instead of either dialects of a single one or at least two very closely related and only recently split ones?


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## berndf

Delvo said:


> I do not believe that they ever wouldn't have been able to understand.


Züridüütsch is largely unintelligible to a German who hasn't studied it, even today, though it is one of the easier Swiss dialects and understanding it can be learned in a few weeks. With Bärndüütsch or Walliserdüütsch I am still struggling after decades in the country.


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## apmoy70

vince said:


> Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like there are artificial forms of certain languages declared to be "official" that no one speaks natively. I'm thinking Modern Standard Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Katharevousa Greek. That's not what I'm asking. For the sake of these three languages: when was it common for people to be able to understand such forms of the language, even if nobody spoke them as a first language?


Katharevousa Greek re-introduced in the language the dative case, the infinitive, that were long obsoleted, and revived the ancient syntax, built out of words shaped and ordered according to the rules and principles of Attic Greek, which is a different 'animal' than the modern vernacular.
Hoi polloi could passively comprehend it.

The people of my generation (late forties) with higher education, can passively comprehend Katharevousa Greek, cannot actively handle it though. 
Younger generations cannot get it at all and are in need of translation into Standard Modern Greek in order to comprehend even the simplest of structures such as Papadiamantis' short novels which are written in a simplified form of Katharevousa.
My parents' generation (both are in their early seventies) are fluent in Katharevousa since their whole education was based on it.

Despite Katharevousa being an artificial language however, it gradually pulled the modern vernacular up to a new higher level, by helping it trim away all the folksy, rustic and dialectal words, forms and syntax, giving rise to a new register called Standard Modern Greek which in reality is a fusion of the Athenian & Southern vernacular dialects with Katharevousa features.


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## Nino83

apmoy70 said:


> Katharevousa Greek re-introduced in the language the dative case, the infinitive


Maybe Standard German is the only example of language that has been successful in introducing a lost case, the genitive case, into the spoken language.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> in introducing a lost case, the genitive case, into the spoken language.


Where did you get that from?


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## Nino83

here


> The genitive case is common only in formal standard German, and its presence in a sentence can mark that sentence out as formal and standard. Genitives denoting possession or intimate connection are regurarly replaced in colloquial German by the preposition von plus a dative case. This construction "von plus dative" is current in all types of colloquial German, both colloquial standard and non-standard speech, though the dative is replaced by the oblique case in those types of non-standard speech which have no dative.accusative distinction.


Variation in German: A Critical Approach to German Sociolinguistics (Stephen Barbour, Patrick Stevenson) page 161

If one looks at the case system in continental West Germanic languages:

Low Franconian, no case:
north: de (from the nominative)
south: den (from the accusative)
Low German: de (nominative) den (accusative-dative)
Central West German (from Luxembourgish to Rhine Franconian): den (nominative-accusative) dem (dative)
Upper German (from East and South Franconian to Alemannic and South Bavarian): der (nominative), de(n) (accusative), (d)em (dative)

source: http://people.umass.edu/bhatt/752-s05/fleischer-relative-clauses-dative.pdf 
Dative and indirect object in German dialects: Evidence from relative clauses (Jürg Fleischer) page 5


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> here
> 
> Variation in German: A Critical Approach to German Sociolinguistics (Stephen Barbour, Patrick Stevenson) page 161
> If one look at the case system in continental West Germanic languages:
> Low Franconian, no case:
> north: de (from the nominative)
> south: den (from the accusative)
> Low German: de (nominative) den (accusative-dative)
> Central West German (from Luxembourgish to Rhine Franconian): den (nominative-accusative) dem (dative)
> Upper German (from East and South Franconian to Alemannic and South Bavarian): der (nominative), de(n) (accusative), (d)em (dative)
> source: http://people.umass.edu/bhatt/752-s05/fleischer-relative-clauses-dative.pdf Dative and indirect object in German dialects: Evidence from relative clauses (Jürg Fleischer) page 5


That is a synchronic comparison of modern standard and dialectal varieties of German and has nothing to do with their diachronic developments. German has been a diglossic language for at least half a millennium.


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## Nino83

> Among  German  dialects, we can observe some major differences from Standard German with respect to case.  Most importantly, the genitive case is virtually non-existent in nearly all  German dialects  (see  e.g.  Mironow  1957:  392,  Shrier  1965:  421,  Koß  1983).


Dative and indirect object in German dialects: Evidence from relative clauses (Jürg Fleischer) page 4


berndf said:


> German has been a diglossic language for at least half a millennium.


So instead of "reitroduced" is it better to say "mantained" (since there has been diglossia)? 
Anyway, the fact that in colloquial speech genitive tends to be avoided even today with 100% of alphabetization is a good indicator. Was genitive used more than it is today in speech during the previous centuries?


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> Was genitive used more than it is today in speech during the previous centuries?


The 16th and 17th centuries had even the opposite tendency with datives being replaced by genitives.


Nino83 said:


> So instead of "reitroduced" is it better to say "mantained" (since there has been diglossia)?


Or maybe like this: A strong diglossia helped to preserve the case system in standard language and prevented the dialectal/colloquial loss of the cases from "invading" the standard language as we have seen it in 20th century Dutch.


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## Sepia

In many cases media influence has a lot to do with it. Sometimes even starting with affordable print products like news-papers and cheap books and pamphlets.

In Denmark and Sweden it was certainly the school system around the turn of the century (1900). Likewise in Germany, backed up by two important additional factors: The printing industry's demand for standards in the orthography which resulted in the publication of the DUDEN dictionary - and a man by the name of Siebs who published a book titled Deutsche Bühnenaussprache (1898) - German Theatre Pronunciation - an attempt of finding the average of German pronunciation and introduce this as a pronunciation guideline for theatres all over Germany. Most of what he came up with is still the standard pronunciation on national German television and radio.


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## franknagy

The spoken Hungarian did not need standardization. The differences of the dialects were never been essential.
There was an common agreement in the spelling even in the fifteenth century. About a hundred years later, the first printed Hungarian Bible meant a new step of standardization.
The language renewal under the leadership of Ferenc Kazincy in the early 19th century fixed the spelling.
All other subsequent changes have had minor importance.


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## danielstan

I know from Transylvanian Szeklers the way they speak Hungarian is immediately detected as 'non standard' when they travel to Budapest. Sometimes they get remarks like "You don't speak properly Hungarian"...
I guess this is a matter of difference in accent, not of grammatical or vocabulary differences.

I heard there was an orthographic reform in Hungary so that the 'old spelling' is maintained today in family names, while the new spelling is in first names.
For example: Lajo*s* Ko*ss*uth has 2 ways of rendering the [sh] sound.


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## AndrasBP

danielstan said:


> I know from Transylvanian Szeklers the way they speak Hungarian is immediately detected as 'non standard' when they travel to Budapest. Sometimes they get remarks like "You don't speak properly Hungarian"...
> I guess this is a matter of difference in accent, not of grammatical or vocabulary differences.


Transylvanian Hungarians do sometimes use different vocabulary, some of which is influenced by Romanian. There are some minor differences in grammar, too, but all in all, the language spoken by Szeklers is remarkably similar to that spoken in the west, near the Austrian border, and both are almost fully understandable to a Budapester.



danielstan said:


> I heard there was an orthographic reform in Hungary so that the 'old spelling' is maintained today in family names, while the new spelling is in first names.
> For example: Lajo*s* Ko*ss*uth has 2 ways of rendering the [sh] sound.


Yes, the most notable change is the spelling of the /ts/ sound: before 1926, it was spelled 'cz', then it was simplified to 'c'. 
The old spelling is preserved in family names: Czeglédi, Debreczeni, Vincze, Tánczos, Rácz, Móricz.


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## Pedro y La Torre

I don't think that standard French was most people's native language in France until after World War II (this is particularly true in Alsace which reverted to being almost entirely German-speaking between 1871 and 1918). The spread of French was much more complete in historically Occitan-speaking territories at an earlier stage but I doubt that rural areas used French all that much outside official contexts until the 1930s or 40s. The case of Corsica is probably indicative, all islanders had a working knowledge of French by 1945 though Corsican remained used by almost everyone, either as a first or second language. However from the 1960s onward, there was a rapid decline in first language users of the Corsican dialect, to such an extent that more people now learn it in schools or university than speak it at home.

There were still first-language West Flemish speakers in the Nord Pas-de-Calais as late as the 1970s too. I think they are all very old or dead by now though.


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## Red Arrow

Those few West-Flemish speakers also have trouble understanding other West Flemish speakers. Has their West-Flemish been Frenchified or has our West-Flemish been Dutchified? Probably both.


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## berndf

Pedro y La Torre said:


> I don't think that standard French was most people's native language in France until after World War II


That is exaggerated. The shift from regional languages to French as most people's first language happened during the 19th century.


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## Pedro y La Torre

berndf said:


> That is exaggerated. The shift from regional languages to French as most people's first language happened during the 19th century.



Not in rural Occitana, Brittany or the Basque Country. Many soldiers turned up for duty in 1914 with an imperfect command of French.

It's safe to say that a majority spoke French more or less natively by 1900 (particularly post Jules Ferry) but it took far longer for French to supplant regional languages as the first language used in daily life outside traditional langue d'oïl and metropolitan areas.


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## Hulalessar

berndf said:


> That is exaggerated. The shift from regional languages to French as most people's first language happened during the 19th century.



I cannot speak for the whole of France, but in the mid sixties I stayed with a family in Ardèche on the banks of the Rhône. I was informed that both mother and father did not speak French until they went to school, which must have been the late twenties or early thirties. I do not know where they went to school, but if it was where their parents lived in the sixties it would not have been in a city. When we visited the grandparents mother and father spoke to them in Occitan or Arpitan but the children, who were my age, did not. I never heard Occitan spoken except when visiting grandparents. Mother and father and their siblings all spoke to each other in French.


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## Pedro y La Torre

Hulalessar said:


> I cannot speak for the whole of France, but in the mid sixties I stayed with a family in Ardèche on the banks of the Rhône. I was informed that both mother and father did not speak French until they went to school, which must have been the late twenties or early thirties. I do not know where they went to school, but if it was where their parents lived in the sixties it would not have been in a city. When we visited the grandparents mother and father spoke to them in Occitan or Arpitan but the children, who were my age, did not. I never heard Occitan spoken except when visiting grandparents. Mother and father and their siblings all spoke to each other in French.



Similarly I have relations in Brittany whose grandparents didn't speak French at all beyond filling out forms. Their parents spoke French and understood Breton while they themselves only speak French. This is a typical example.


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## berndf

Pedro y La Torre said:


> Not in rural Occitana, Brittany or the Basque Country. Many soldiers turned up for duty in 1914 with an imperfect command of French.
> 
> It's safe to say that a majority spoke French more or less natively by 1900 (particularly post Jules Ferry) but it took far longer for French to supplant regional languages as the first language used in daily life outside traditional langue d'oïl and metropolitan areas.





Hulalessar said:


> I cannot speak for the whole of France, but in the mid sixties I stayed with a family in Ardèche on the banks of the Rhône. I was informed that both mother and father did not speak French until they went to school, which must have been the late twenties or early thirties. I do not know where they went to school, but if it was where their parents lived in the sixties it would not have been in a city. When we visited the grandparents mother and father spoke to them in Occitan or Arpitan but the children, who were my age, did not. I never heard Occitan spoken except when visiting grandparents. Mother and father and their siblings all spoke to each other in French.


If you are saying that in the post war period people were still alive who were raised with a regional language as their first language then you are right. 

But the last generation where "most" (as you claimed) did not speak French as their first language was certainly born in the 19th century.


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## Pedro y La Torre

My original post was poorly worded. I meant that the shift to French as most people's native or first language was not complete until after World War II.

But indeed, the last generation where a majority spoke a language other than French was born in the 19th century.


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## berndf

Then we agree.


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