In Steiner's teaching, dialect grows from feeling and will and stays close to the subconscious genius of language, while standard language rests on thought.
Dialect and Standard Language in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's pedagogical-linguistic teaching, set out in The Renewal of Education (GA 301, lecture of 4 May 1920 at Basel), that the dialect a child brings to school is formed out of feeling and willing and stays intimate with the subconscious genius of language, while standard language rests on thinking and abstraction. Because the dialect carries the child's natural, rule-governed instinct for language, Steiner held that grammar should awaken what the child already knows unconsciously, not impose finished rules from outside. The teacher works from dialect to build sentence and word out of felt activity, then uses standard language to awaken an inner feeling for style. Waldorf language teaching since 1919 rests on this polarity of the sculptural willing pole and the thinking pole.
Dialect and Standard Language name the two poles of a child's relationship to speech in Rudolf Steiner's language pedagogy. Dialect, learned through imitation before the change of teeth, is steeped in feeling and willing and keeps an intimate, sculptural bond with language. Standard language is thought-based and abstract. Steiner taught that good grammar instruction awakens the logic already living unconsciously in dialect rather than drilling rules.
In Steiner's Own Words
We certainly cannot overlook the fact that the intimate relationship that children who speak in dialect have to their languages exists because the dialect as such, in its words and sentences, has been formed out of a much more intense feeling and willing than standard language, which is based more upon thinking or upon a thinking derived primarily from feeling. In any event, emotion is much less present in standard language when a child learns standard language originally than it is in dialect. The same is also true in regard to the will impulse.
What it Means Today
For most of the twentieth century, schools treated dialect as broken speech to be corrected, and standard language as the only "logical" form. Steiner had argued the reverse in Basel in 1920: dialect is the more intimately rule-governed of the two, because the child built it from feeling and will, while standard language is the later, thought-based abstraction. Academic linguistics reached the same conclusion fifty years later. William Labov, in "The Logic of Nonstandard English" (in Language in the Inner City, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), studied African American Vernacular English in Harlem and Philadelphia and showed it to be a fully formed system with its own consistent grammar, every bit as capable of logical thought as the standard. Labov named the opposing view the "deficit model" and dismantled it on the evidence. His finding lands precisely where Steiner placed the teacher's task: not to replace the child's first speech, but to draw out the logic already living in it.
This is where the practice becomes concrete. A Waldorf teacher, following GA 301, begins a grammar lesson by having a dialect-speaking child say a simple sentence, then builds the rule from the felt activity inside it before naming any part of speech. Thalira synthesis: Steiner's dialect pole and Labov's verbal vernacular describe the same buried competence, but Steiner adds a developmental clock that Labov does not, the change of teeth, after which the sculptural willing of dialect yields to the musical pole and the window for awakening that competence narrows. Grammar, in this view, is recollection, not instruction.
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