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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35547 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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In Hungary, the culture war angle seems a bit different than that. Here academic (usually leftist) linguists emphasize descriptivism and that no dialect should be stigmatized, there is no single correct way to speak, the standard language is more like customs of clothing while real language is organic and biological. I generally agree by the way. There's even a term, linguicism to describe prejudice against non-standard speakers, which may prevent people from getting hired etc. While there's a connection to the topic of Gypsies, these linguists also speak out in favor of not shaming non-Gypsy Hungarians for their dialect, inclusivity etc.

Why doesn't it work out like that in Germany?

Germans hate individualism with a passion. Blame it on protestant puritanism, or prussian uniformity, or whatever animation the nazis ran on, but each German thinks he knows exactly how things need to be in the world, and any aberration must be expunged with a vengeance. The right way to brew beer, the right way to build a machine, the right way to drive a car, the right way to engineer a society, the right way to respond to a novel virus, the right way to speak German. I'm fully prepared to believe that all of the current progressive mania is based on whatever the Frankfurt School did, because this modern big-government, small-individual ideology is exactly something Germans could come up with.

Maybe Hungary doesn't have the same hardon for collectivism?

I was specifically reacting to you attributing your wife's switch to standard German to some leftist influence. I would imagine German leftists would want to distance themselves from that Prussian style rigidity that you mention.

Superficially they do, and even substantially in some ways, but a leopard can't change its spots and more often than not they drift towards the same old uniformity-for-uniformity's-sake that most people here love.

There's even a term, linguicism to describe prejudice against non-standard speakers, which may prevent people from getting hired etc.

Language is for communication. If you speak in a dialect that is not mutually intelligible with the standard, or is only with difficulty, communication becomes more difficult. This is not "prejudice", this is a legitimate consideration.

That's not even the issue here. There are practically no speakers of dialects remaining who cannot make themselves understood without switching to the so-called standard. What we have is the remaining dialects, which are almost universally mutually intelligible given any but the dumbest or deafest listeners, being opposed by the dominant strain of cultural leftism.

Depends how close to the border you get. As a high-german speaker, I can say from experience that spoken Plattdeutsch is completely unintelligible to me. I'd have had more luck talking to that person in English - which is a problem if you're trying to book a room for the night! :) (We got through it with sign language.)

Sure, it happens. But how often?

That depends on whether the dialect actually hinders communication no?

This may or may not be the case, I might understand your accent perfectly well but still not like it for prejudicial reasons, e.g because it outs you as a backwards farmer or a privileged type worthy of resentment.

Motte: We're protecting against prejudice against those with clear but low-class dialects

Bailey: We're protecting people who speak unintelligibly and placing all the burden of communication on those who speak the standard dialect, and if they complain we call them bigots.

Are you saying that concern for dialect based discrimination is always a motte-and-bailey or just that it's exploitable as one?

The latter I don't doubt, the former I have to disagree. Sometimes it really is just about class, other commenters have already mentioned cases where intelligibility isn't an issue.

This doesn't happen in Hungary though. There are specific stigmatized grammatical quirks that are present in some dialects but they don't make understanding harder.

Imagine for example if there was a German dialect where instead of "größer als" they'd say "größer von". L And people who learned it so in their village would be ridiculed for it or assumed uneducated. "Haven't you paid attention at school? That makes no grammatical sense! It makes me cringe like hearing nails on a chalkboard!"

I know that in German there are dialects that aren't mutually intelligible with the standard, so there it can make sense to require standard knowledge for a job (not sure whether that's legal though). But in Hungarian we only have slight pronunciation differences, some regional words and some minor grammatical differences.

The question still stands: why don't inclusive German leftists fight for the proud right to speak dialect and fight against linguicism, encourage dialect use as a form of diversity etc? (maybe they do)

a German dialect where instead of "größer als" they'd say "größer von"

In English there are relatively few grammatical differences between the American and British standard dialects, but 'different than' vs. 'different from' strikes me as a perfect analog here.

Though both of those have a whole country where they are part of the local standard.

I know that in German there are dialects that aren't mutually intelligible with the standard

Those are few, and spoken by very few people, and even then most of them are very well able to modulate their speech to find some compromise in which they're intelligible while still retaining as much of their dialect as possible. Unintelligibles used to be more prevalent of course, but they're nigh-nonexistent by now.

The question still stands: why don't inclusive German leftists fight for the proud right to speak dialect and fight against linguicism, encourage dialect use as a form of diversity etc? (maybe they do)

Because tribal ideologies aren't designed in advance and built on rigorously logical foundations. Instead they coalesce around condensation nuclei and after that only shift under pressure. German leftism coalesced around cosmopolitanism, antinationalism and high german with as many anglicisms as possible as its common tongue because this distancing from dialects and even your own language signals that you have no actual national allegiance.

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