We should borrow Martin Luther's secret

Martin Luther's 1534 Bible

Martin Luther (1483 - 1546) was a German priest and professor of theology who initiated the Protestant Reformation. His translation of the Bible into the language of the people (instead of Latin) made it more accessible, causing a tremendous impact on the church and on German culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language.

His secret?

Luther had to compromise between the many different “Germans” that filled the German lands in those days, hundreds of years before there was a single German state,  Ruth Sanders, a professor of German Studies at Miami University in Ohio, writes in her new book, German: Biography of a Language. Luther borrowed an emerging standard used by the Holy Roman Empire, “chancellery German”, as a base with some currency in different regions.

From a review in The Economist:

Luther’s genius was to infuse his translation with the words he heard on the street in his bit of Saxony, in east-central Germany. He obsessively asked friends and fellow scholars which dialectal words would be most widely understood. The common touch was so successful that a Catholic opponent complained that “even tailors and shoemakers…read it with great eagerness.” It was the bestseller of the century and remains the most popular German translation. Rarely has a single man had such a mark on a language. The German of Luther’s Bible was nobody’s native language in his day. Today it is so universal that it threatens Germany’s once-vibrant dialects with death by standardisation.

How much proof do we need before we start using the words and phrases most people use?