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How have schools mass literacy travel and broadcasting affected local dialects?

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Thematic map of Europe displaying the distribution of Germanic languages, with different colors indicating regions where English, German, Netherlandic (Dutch), Frisian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese are spoken. Striped areas mark regions where bilingualism is common, and language regions cover countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and parts of surrounding countries. — Dialect Distribution of the Germanic languages in Europe.

Mass literacy, universal education, mass travel, and broadcasting have acted as powerful unifying forces that generally diminish local dialectal differences.12

In modern times, these factors contribute to the replacement of unique, localized dialectal traits with those of a standard language. As populations become more mobile and communication becomes easier, the isolation that once fostered the development of distinct, small-scale dialects is reduced. Consequently, these forces encourage the emergence of broader regional and social dialects rather than the strictly localized varieties of the past.12

While these trends lead to the disappearance of many dialects spoken by smaller groups, they also prevent dialect divisions from widening into entirely separate languages, as was the case with the historical emergence of the Romance languages from Latin. Today, the influence of these unifying factors is so significant that it has created an urgency among researchers to document and study these vanishing linguistic varieties before they perish unrecorded.2