A variety is said to be autonomous if it has an independent cultural status. This may occur if the variety is structurally different from all others, a situation Heinz Kloss called abstand.
Thus language isolates such as Basque are necessarily autonomous. Where several closely related varieties are found together, a standard language is autonomous because it has its own orthography, dictionaries, grammar books and literature. In the terminology of Heinz Kloss, these are the attributes of ausbau, or the elaboration of a language to serve as a literary standard.
Heteronomous varieties may become dependent on a different standard as a result of social or political changes.
For example, the Scanian dialects spoken at the southern tip of Sweden, were considered dialects of Danish when the area was part of the kingdom of Denmark. A few decades after the area was transferred to Sweden, these varieties were generally regarded as dialects of Swedish, although the dialects themselves had not changed.
Examples of languages that have previously been considered to be autonomous but are now sometimes considered heteronomous are Occitan, sometimes considered a dialect of French; Low German, occasionally considered to be a dialect of German; and Scots with regard to Standard English, though the German linguist Heinz Kloss considered Scots a Halbsprache ('half language') in terms of an abstand and ausbau languages framework due to its prestigious literary conventions as, for example, described in the 1921 Manual of Modern Scots.
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