[...]speakers, unsure of themselves in what is, afterall, a foreign dialect, look to the written convention for guidance. The school-teacher, coming usually from a humble class and unfamiliar with tha actual upper-class style, is forced to the pretense of knowing it, and exerts authority over a rising generation of new standard speakers. A great deal of 'spelling pronounciation' that has become prevalent in English and in French, is due to this source. In a standard language like the German, which belongs originally to no one class or district, this factor is even more deep-seated: the spoken standard is there largely derived from the written.
- Bloomfield (1935), a pag.487