The standard is just lucky

A. When a language is a written one, one of the dialects is usually chosen as the standard dialect, used in writing and public contexts. But an important thing to notice is that standard dialects usually develop alongside nonstandard ones, rather than the nonstandard ones developing from the standard.

B. “A standard is a dialect with an army and a navy”—standards become standard because they have “the juice” in some way. Francien French became predominant because the national courts settled in its region; Castillian Spanish because it was spoken by the armies who advanced southward to defeat the Moors; Tuscan Italian because that region produced Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

C. Standard English is the dialect that happened to be spoken in the region where London was. Before this, England was a patchwork of very different dialects. In the late 1400s, printer William Caxton told a story of a Londoner who had barely been able to make himself understood in Kent, the region just next door, because he had asked for eggs instead of using the Kentish dialect word, eyren.

D. France was also once home to many distinct dialects. This was seen as a problem as France coalesced from a patchwork of feudal duchies into a nation. The Abbé Grégoire, a Catholic priest and revolutionary, worried in 1789 that:

France is home to perhaps 8 million subjects of which some can barely mumble a few malformed words or one or two disjointed sentences of our language: the rest know none at all. We know that in Lower Brittany, and beyond the Loire, in many places, the clergy is still obliged to preach in the local patois, for fear, if they spoke French, of not being understood. The dialect of French that had developed in the Paris area was imposed on the population for practical reasons.

E. Standard today, dialect tomorrow. Ukrainian and Russian are similar enough that for a Russian, learning Ukrainian straddles the boundary between learning a new language and adjusting to a variety of Russian itself. Indeed, before the Ukraine was cordoned off as a separate region in the Soviet Union, it was a region within Russia, and the speech of the Ukraine was considered a kind of “Russian.” When the center of power in Russia was Kiev, the speech of the Ukraine was considered the “best” Russian. After this, however, Ukrainian was dismissed as the speech of peasants. Then, when the Ukraine became a political entity, Ukrainian again became a “language.” The difference had been in culture and politics, not in the speech variety itself.