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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Phonics associates letters and sounds - you can still memorize sound patterns that are different for different dialects, or make that association yourself by noticing how people speaking your dialect speak the same words. Keep in mind that you could teach British English with phonics, for instance.

Also, school indoctrination is far from omnipotent, regional dialects can survive even if the children are taught a standardized form in school and over the internet. Maybe that will stop being the case in the near future, but children interact with peers, their families, and other locals a lot more, and can make themselves understandable to foreign city-folk/mainlanders/whatever with little effort - whereas the opposite would involve internalizing and speaking the standard form while in an environment where everyone speaks differently, but switching back to the local dialect to speak to your own parents and friends, or weirding them out by speaking the standardized way. There isn't a lot of pressure to change. It can depend on mutual intelligibility, though - very minor differences may get smoothed out, very major differences can cause you to choose standard, I'm not sure it's predictable.

As an aside: Versions of a language can diverge pretty significantly. Diglossia is fascinating - it happened in Greece, before my time, but not that far back, just a few decades ago. What happened is that the "high-status" (official, pretentious, archaic, literary, ...) version of the language mostly disappeared, and is now only really used in sayings, when referencing history, for fancy labels, or for comedic effect. Of course part of the reason is that government changed what was taught in schools, it's not all natural - but the high-status language itself wasn't natural to begin with. Ordinary dialects based on geographic regions still very much exist.