Daily quote by Language

• Uniformism had created the demand that all people with an identical or similar literary language should draw together in common political units. Yet literary languages are usually artificial creations, coined by certain masters at a given moment in history and accepted by the upper classes. The English-speaking reader should bear in mind that the literary languages of the European continent are not of aristocratic or royal mark. "The King's English" has no equivalent either in the Germanic countries nor in the Mediterranean area. It usually is the upper bourgeoisie who speaks the literary, i.e., the artificially standardized language, with the greatest perfection, while there is often a "low-class" dialectical strain in the idiom of the nobility and even royalty. The Empress Maria Theresa spoke broadest Viennese, and this local dialect continued to be used by the Emperors of Austria until 1848. The late King of Saxony repeatedly used the Saxonian dialect, and argot expressions are far more widespread in aristocratic circles around Paris and Budapest than in the haute bourgeoisie, which always prided itself on a strongly standardized language, which is nothing else but an intranational Esperanto (understood and spoken everywhere inside the nation).
  • Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of the Herd (1943), pp. 128-129