Re: [Ltru] Does 'de' really mean "only standard German"?

[John Cowan <[e-mail]>]

Randy Presuhn scripsit:

>  Consider a clearer example: the many flavors of "Gastarbeiterdeutsch"
> (Guest-worker German).  These are clearly not "standard German", but I
> can't believe that their initial subtag should be anything other than "de".

Again, I can't say, not knowing enough about the domain.  Are they
reasonably mutually intelligible with Standard German, or are we dealing
with a pidgin or creole here, or perhaps several?

Most of the English varieties I hear about me daily in NYC are clearly
"en", even if with a thousand different non-native phonologies.  Some of
them are English-based creoles, or varieties intermediate between creoles
and "en" itself.

But then again, English doesn't work like German or Chinese, where
there is at every location a contrast between "local language"
and "locally influenced variety of the standard language." 
(The creole-English-speaking areas are an exception, as is Scotland;
non-regionally, AAVE works like this too.)

There is no One True Way anywhere.

-- 
John Cowan  [e-mail]  http://ccil.org/~cowan
Any sufficiently-complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc,
informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
        --Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming (rules 1-9 are unknown)
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