ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the author's view of the world and linguistic research interests have developed in the course of life through personal experience, and with the concept of globalization. In the author's location, everyone spoke a more or less broad Swabian dialect. The author's own problems with dialect arose from accent, which was typical of all native dialect speakers. The transnational developments helped to extend the view beyond the national German horizon with its standard variety. The main reasons for the decline of French and German can be guessed easily as the nearly total destruction of both countries by the two world wars and German Nazism. Languages which comprise different standard varieties are called pluricentric. For a general understanding of the concept of a standard variety of a language, it seems helpful to see it as the sum of the forms of the language that can be used without risk of being sanctioned for speaking it in public.
