Darryl Myers offers a rich and interesting comment on my Lingua Franca post last Thursday, observing that German is a interesting case to look at. It is indeed.
Splitters (those who incline toward maximizing the number of different languages posited) might point out that some of what we treat as varieties of German are separate languages by the familiar test of mutual intelligibility. A German speaker from Bonn or Berlin will not understand Swiss German dialects like the speech of the Zurich area (sometimes known as “Züritüütsch”) without doing a lot of work. Züritüütsch” differs not just lexically and phonologically but syntactically as well: There is a subordinate-clause construction with a dramatically different word order that has been theoretically important (for references see Chapter 16 of my The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax). So in principle German could be counted as…