[samus]

The origins of Standarddeutsch trace back to Martin Luther's bible translation that exposed a huge audience to a very important text, which was most importantly also written to be approachable to that audience.

The German dialect it used was a colonial dialect that already contained mixed features from multiple dialect area and was thus suitable for a wide audience.

Of course the emerging standard underwent development since then, and low literacy rates meant that few people actually spoke and wrote it.

[DiogenesKynikos]

> The origins of Standarddeutsch trace back to Martin Luther's bible translation that exposed a huge audience to a very important text, which was most importantly also written to be approachable to that audience.

If you want to go this route, then you could also say that the origins of Standard Chinese date back hundreds of years, to the language spoken by the imperial bureaucracy, or to massively popular works written in vernacular Chinese, like the Dream of the Red Chamber (late 1700s). There are always ancient antecedents that you can trace, but they become less and less directly related to the development of the modern language.

Yes, the Luther Bible was an important influence on the development of a standard literary German, but if you want to trace the development of a standardized spoken dialect of German, you have to go to the 19th Century and the development of Bühnendeutsch ("stage German"), which because of its use in theater had to have a standard pronunciation.

[samus]

Those vernacular versions of written Chinese always existed, but they had very little prestige compared to the Classical Chinese (文言文) mainly used by the imperial bureaucracy, which was based on literature from the Han dynasty and earlier. Elegant and concise, but it required dedicated education, which was tested in the imperial examinations, and starkly differed from the vernacular versions in both grammar and vocabulary. Modern Written Chinese was standardised only after the fall of the Qing dynasty by the successive governments. Quite younger again than Bühnendeutsch, and so recent that spoken Mandarin has not yet managed to supplant the other languages of China. German has only managed to do so in the big cities, where people at times often don't speak nor understand the dialects of the surrounding rural areas anymore.