We were lucky, in the silver lining sense, to have had expansionist neighbours. In the nineteenth century, the french said we didn't speak "real" french. In the twentieth, both the germans and the italians said we didn't speak "real" german or "real" italian.

In response (our dialects having had an army) where before those countries had been taken as arbitrating the prestige forms of their languages, there's been a revival of local dialect. We don't have an "RP": politicians in 2020 will of course use a prestige register in speech, but don't bother to hide their dialects.

(Written language has an orthography, taught in school. But most people I know treat SMS/chat as an oral, not literate, form. In german this results in idiosyncratic spelling, in french, "langage SMS")