The Danish government, for political reasons, wished to halt this language shift from Danish to German. After the First War of Schleswig, in 1851, the government issued the Slesvig Language Rescripts, ordering the school language to be Danish in areas that the peasantry spoke Danish and even in an area stretching further south, into the Low German speaking area. Church language would alternate between Danish and German. Standard Danish had never been widely used in South Slesvig even where the populace spoke a Danish dialect. The dominant official language was German, and the measures of the government had quite the adverse effect, reinforcing anti-Danish sentiment. A pattern emerged, with the poorest in rural areas sticking to South Jutlandic, the wealthier peasants speaking Low German as the "lingua franca" and the educated townsmen speaking High German.