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How Did Print and Dictionaries Create Standard German? - Print Capitalism and Linguistic Codification in the Nineteenth Century | Sleepy Facts About History
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In the early nineteenth century, a child opening a school primer in a German village might have found her own hometown's name spelled according to rules devised hundreds of miles away. The words on the page did not match the speech of her parents or her neighbors. This gap between spoken dialect and written text was not a natural development, but a constructed order built by printers seeking wider markets, scholars compiling dictionaries, and state officials designing schoolrooms. This…
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