The Evolution of Modern Standard German

Summary

In Modern Western Societies, where standard languages are considered the most prestigious forms of linguistic expression, dialects tend to be derided as inferior — substandard — forms of speech. Few who disdain dialectal varieties, however, realize that the standard European languages themselves have been in existence for only a relatively short time — in the case of Modern Standard German no more than three centuries. Before the first comprehensive German grammar was published in the seventeenth century, manuscripts and printed works exhibited regional linguistic features and varied considerably in spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and vocabulary. On this evidence, the language historian can determine with reasonable certainty where a text written between the fourteenth and early seventeenth centuries was written or printed. From a linguistic perspective, the hallmark of the early modern German period was the gradual reduction of regional variation in the written language. Over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries written versions of local dialects were replaced with regional writing languages, which in turn yielded two major competitors in the sixteenth century. The standardization of German in the seventeenth century was a deliberate act of language planning undertaken by grammarians and literary scholars to create a form of the language free of regional linguistic characteristics — a Kunstsprache (artificial language, or language of the arts) that could be acquired only formally in an educational institution. This early form of literary German was the prerequisite for the emergence of a national German literature in the eighteenth century and set the linguistic stage for the classicism of Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller.

Modern Standard German arrived belatedly, a phenomenon attributable to the splintered political landscape of the early modern period. The area now comprising Germany and Austria was then part of the Holy Roman Empire, a multilingual and multicultural conglomerate of territorial states governed by princes set on increasing their individual dynastic powers. Their relentless struggles prevented the formation of a national political and cultural center of gravity comparable to London or Paris. Politically divided into more than 300 independent principalities, duchies, and counties, Germany had no national capital city with writing conventions sufficiently prestigious to be adopted by writers and printers in the provinces.