To be understood by their correspondence partners farther away, authors will naturally tend to reduce exceedingly local forms and incorporate loanwords from the dialect of the person they're writing to.
In the absence of long distance communication and travel, languages and dialects can diverge significantly in comparatively short time spans.
Variation that remains after dialect levelling may result in the "reallocation" of surviving variants to "new functions, such as stylistic or social markers".
Features from all over the British Isles and the Māori people, who had inhabited the island for 600 years prior to colonisation, can be identified in the form that New Zealand English has taken.
Settlements attracted people from all walks of life and created highly-diverse linguistic variation, but there were still families that lived in almost total isolation.
The research for this case study takes place in Rimburg, a small village on the southeast of Limburg, where Ripuarian dialects are spoken.
The southeast area of Limburg experienced rapid industrialisation at the turn of the 20th century with the largescale development of coal mining.
"Accommodation and dialect levelling should be understood in the light of the continuous struggle between... the tendencies towards unification on the one hand and those towards particularism and cultural fragmentation on the other" (Hinskens:42).
[21] Old High German (OHG) is an umbrella term to encompass what are in reality numerous divergent dialects – sometimes with hardly any mutual intelligibility.
Nonetheless, some monasteries and the Carolingian court did produce some vernacular writing, most of which was lost, but the remains of which form almost the entirety of the OHG corpus.
Court poetry, particularly Minnesang and epic poetry, enjoyed a particularly high prestige and Walter von der Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach (author of Parzival) and others while all but forgotten a few centuries after their death were "re-discovered" by 19th century romantic nationalists and have enjoyed enduring popularity ever since.
However, with the end of the Hohenstaufen, centralizing tendencies in both politics and linguistics came to a halt in the Holy Roman Empire and there was no longer an imperial patronage for poetry.
Standardization did not get fully underway until 13th-century Franciscans began a push to establish a literate public; however, at this time, 70% of the materials produced were in Medieval Latin, as opposed to German.
The Viennese imperial chancellery introduced influential spelling reforms, but most regions maintained their own systems, which resulted in five varieties of "printer's language" being used in publications.
While administration in prior eras had been handled largely in Latin and produced orders of magnitude less written material, the inventing of movable type printing and the widespread availability of cheap paper enabled a "bureaucratic revolution".
For this to succeed, two conditions had to be met: rapid distribution of the new translation at affordable prices (achievable thanks to printing) and a written vernacular that would be understood by as many people as possible.
Since so many people read his work, orthography began to stabilize and with a canonical Standard German corpus of sorts being developed, although this was largely limited to the Protestant north.
Despite the religious differences between the north and south of Germany, it was the existence of Eastern Central German that prevented the initial spread of Luther's linguistic forms.
The differences were further reduced, as the need for coherent written communication became paramount and Eastern Central German, now highly identified with Luther, became the linguistic medium of the north.
Low German, once the first language of the region and a subject of instruction, was displaced and restricted to use in comedic theater, and even there, it was used only by important figures.
While Luther had started out from a high prestige variety developed for the bureaucratic needs of statecraft, he himself claimed to have "looked the common people on the mouth" in deciding which terms or turns of phrase to use — even if that meant significant divergence from the Greek and Hebrew original.
The middle of the 18th century produced a slew of northern writers, who would ultimately shape the interaction between Catholic Germany, which had resisted Luther's linguistic influence, and the rest of the German-speaking world, directing the language's development path.
So the deutsche Bühnenaussprache was developed — initially intended for theater only, it would become the standard for radio, television and whenever someone from out of town tried to get understood by the locals.
Jacob Grimm and Rudolf von Raumer created controversy in the 19th century, as they proposed conflicting criteria for defining spelling.
The paper suggests that the development of urban society and an increasing degree of publicness were mentioned as important non-linguistic causes of the accelerating dialect levelling.
In this case study, Anderson (2002)[23] discusses dialect levelling of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) spoken in Detroit.
Anderson presents evidence that this linguistic marker has been adopted among speakers of AAVE in Detroit, in part because of contact with white Appalachian immigrants.
In other words, the diphthongization of /aɪ/ before voiced obstruents, which is a common feature of AAVE, has been levelled with that of southern white dialects and is now then being pronounced as a monophthong.
[24] The results indicated that the tonal leveling of Mandarin between these two ethnic groups started one generation earlier than the general patterns suggested by Trudgill.
Four factors were proposed to interpret the rapidity of this dialectal leveling: Language convergence refers to what can happen linguistically when speakers adapt "to the speech of others to reduce differences".