Re: [Ltru] Standard german (Was: Consensus call: extlang

["Phillips, Addison" <[e-mail]>]

> > But for
> > Standard German, what could be used instead of "de" if we change
> "de" to mean "Any sort of German"?
>
> An appropriately registered subtag following de, if someone has a
> need
> to make the distinction.  (I don't see it as a change at all.
> Perhaps it's
> because I used to teach German, but for me "Standard German" is a
> narrowly defined and somewhat artificial beast, not to be confused
> with the welter of mutually intelligible varieties of German (i.e.,
> 'de')
> spoken all over the world.)  To misconstrue 'de' narrowly would, in
> my
> opinion, be like understanding 'fr' as limited to Parisian French.

I agree. I think all this discussion of "standard" language varieties misses the point. There is a certain lack of specificity to language codes in ISO 639 just as there is a deliberate lack of specificity in most language tag choices.

Often the most useful tag for German is "de". In some cases one might need a "de-CH" or "de-DE". Rarely will a "de-qxx-Latn-CH-1984-x-duerst-martin-2008-06-04-mittwoch" be of any use whatsoever, except as an illustration of tag folly. Ultimately, this thread is really about where "dialect" ends and "language" begins--a distinction that is necessarily indistinct and judgmental. Sometimes the "standard" form of a language forms the peak in the bell-curve of a language's usage and distribution and sometimes it won't. So what?

What's problematic here is the idea that someone might come along and say that any given variant flavor of German is "not German" because it isn't the standard form. At the same time, just about any language can be divided further and further. The question is the utility of a given division.

Addison

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