alt Hacker NewsThe German critique of Pennsylvania Dutch reminded me of how the Nazis critiqued Yiddish back in the day for not being High German and thus its speakers must themselves be of lower class/value
The German critique of Pennsylvania Dutch reminded me of how the Nazis critiqued Yiddish back in the day for not being High German and thus its speakers must themselves be of lower class/value
Setting Nazis aside, Germans are used to having a single source of correct grammar and vocabulary.
The first Duden was published in 1880 and helped standardize German language a lot, even though local accents and dialects still persist. But speaking in dialect is considered somewhat low-brow in German language space, unless you are Swiss; even there, people will code-switch all the time.
(E.g. during class, both the professor and the students would speak High German, but during recess, they would switch to Swiss dialect.)
A rural language of peasants who do not use even old tech such as newspapers and radio and reside on a huge territory will necessarily diverge into a barely mutually intelligible family of local dialects, at least in the spoken form. Basically the Medieval or Early Modern standard situation.