Dealing with German dialects

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Josquin
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby Josquin » Mon Jul 16, 2018 6:54 am

I agree with Iversen that this is still pretty mild dialect, but at least it comes close to what I would call "hardcore" dialect.

However, what Iversen interprets as an /r/, I'd rather describe as a diphthong including an /a/. The vocalization of /r/ is a pretty recent phenomenon in German, and especially in Southern dialects it is still realized as an alveolar trill, so an /r/ would sound pretty different in this dialect.

But otherwise, yeah, very Austrian! I especially liked the word "gö(l)b" for "gelb". Sometimes, you have to think for a second what a word means, but mostly it's all very comprehensible, at least when you're used to Austrian German.

However, I'll never forget the old man I met as a child in Tyrol. I couldn't understand a word he was saying, but I guess the kinds of him are all disappearing.
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Oró, sé do bheatha abhaile! Anois ar theacht an tsamhraidh.

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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby Josquin » Mon Jul 16, 2018 7:26 am

As we're sharing samples of our favourite dialects now, I thought I'd show you these two examples of Suerlänner Platt ("Sauerländer Platt"):

First, the Lord's Prayer in Suerlänner Platt. This is pretty mild dialect although spoken by an elderly man:



And then a woman telling little stories ("Dönekes") in Suerlänner Platt. This is what I'd call "hardcore" dialect, but see for yourselves! ;)

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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby Chung » Mon Jul 23, 2018 7:54 pm

If anyone is still interested, I recommend the following items on German dialects (especially if you're already comfortable with using standard German).

1) Useful Notes / German Dialects - this is an interesting summary on German dialects and describes some of the characteristics of the main groups but also where they can be encountered in German movies and TV (in as much as it's possible - see my note earlier that an actor/character using full dialect without subtitles is rare because it would make things incomprehensible to a goodly amount of the audience).

2) Grüezi, Moin, Servus!: Wie wir wo sprechen - this is a fun paperback that doesn't require a background in linguistics to take in. It covers about a 100 common concepts/objects and describes the ways that they're "translated" in the Germanosphere. Each "translation" comes with an isogloss map showing where a certain form is used or is typical. For example it has a picture of a cook flipping a pan with a pancake and describes it as "thin layer of batter made of flour, eggs, milk and salt that's fried on a pan" (either Pfannkuchen or Eierkuchen "crêpe, pancake" are acceptable as standard in Germany). It then shows how it's translated in the German-speaking world complete with an isogloss map showing among other "translations" that it's known as Palatschinke in eastern Austria including Vienna while in much of the former East Germany including Berlin it's called Eierkuchen since Pfannkuchen there refer to a certain kind of jelly donut known as Berliner or Krapfen to most other Germans, not a pancake. I didn't buy this book, but did browse through a good part of it while killing time at an outlet of Thalia.

3) dtv-Atlas: Deutsche Sprache - this is a little like a more technical and beefed-up version of "Grüezi, Moin, Servus!: Wie wir wo sprechen" above, and goes into a level of detail that's useful to a linguist or anyone interested in the evolution of German from antiquity when there was just a Proto-Germanic daughter of Proto-Indo-European. The second half of the book deals with dialectal characteristics complete with isogloss maps not just of certain lexical items, but also of several phonological and morphological features of German dialects (e.g. it has a map showing the dialectal correspondances of intervocalic -d- of standard German as found in Bruder "brother"). I got a second-hand copy of this a few days ago, and am already enjoying it while reading it on my daily commute, despite its technical writing style sometimes taxing my abilities in German (it helps though that I'm familiar with some aspects of the history of German).

Both books are fairly cheap (about €10), and it's possible to find a "dtv-Atlas: Deutsche Sprache" used on Amazon Marketplace for just a few dollars, pounds or Euros.

---

If an outsider were serious about learning something about a German dialect independently, there is some serious reference material available (e.g. Wörterbuch deutscher Dialekte: Eine Sammlung von Mundartwörtern aus 10 Dialektgebieten, Plattdeutsche Grammatik: Formen und Funktionen, Das Radio Tirol-Wörterbuch der Tiroler Mundarten) and even a few respectable-looking textbooks (e.g. Schweizerdeutsch in 30 Tagen, Platt - dat Lehrbook: Ein Sprachkurs für Erwachsene) in addition to somewhat light-hearted phrasebooks (e.g. Langenscheidt Schwäbisch für Anfänger - Der humorvolle Sprachführer für Schwäbisch-Fans, Langenscheidt Lilliput Berlinerisch). If you run a search on Amazon.de or similar using one of the names of the dialects (e.g. "Hessisch", "Sächsisch", "Badisch", "Platt", "Tirolerisch"), you'll find a few goodies, although most seem to be books rather than audio, and so you might need to look on YouTube for audio.

Dialektatlas on Deutsche Welle also describes the dialects of Germany with a few audio samples if you're just curious about dialects.
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby William Camden » Tue Jul 24, 2018 12:10 pm

Iversen wrote:I have own some of the Kauderwelsch booklets that relate to German dialects and others that treat fullblown foreign languages. My main objection to the dialect booklets is that they rely on curiosities and folklore to a larger extent than the books that describe foreign languages. The latter actually resemble the Assimil booklets in French to such a degree that I suspect there is some kind of connection between the two series.

Also Langenscheidt Lilliput dictionaries exist for some German dialects, Bairisch, Kölsch etc. I have rarely encountered dialect in Germany but I have encountered it in Austria.
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby lichtrausch » Sat Feb 04, 2023 8:07 pm

A new past tense in Swiss German?

SRF: Die Chefin sagt: «Mir händ das am letschte Meeting besproche gha.» In der Küche zetern die Kinder: «I ha scho gescht abtröchnet gha!» Was hat dieses «gha» hier verloren, das gerade pandemisch zu werden scheint?

Marc-Oliver Ubl: Im Verlaufe der letzten Jahre ist tatsächlich eine Frequenz-Zunahme dieser Form zu beobachten. Das sogenannte «Doppel-Perfekt» findet sich vor allem in der Mündlichkeit oder in mündlichen Kontexten, etwa in Internetforen.

Die Form selbst ist jedoch nicht neu. Erste Belege für das Doppel-Perfekt finden sich seit dem späten 14. Jahrhundert. Insbesondere im oberdeutschen Sprachraum, zu dem auch das Schweizerdeutsche gehört. [...]

Als Sündenböcke für solche Veränderungen gelten das expansive Englisch oder der Druck des «Deutschdeutschen». Wer ist schuld an diesem Move Richtung Doppel-Perfekt?

Hier scheint es umgekehrt: Das Oberdeutsche beeinflusst andere Regionen. Es wäre spannend zu untersuchen, warum auch im norddeutschen Sprachgebiet Formen wie das Doppel-Perfekt Fuss fassen, obwohl Präteritum und Plusquamperfekt erhalten geblieben sind.

Bemerkenswert ist, dass soziale Faktoren für das Doppel-Perfekt nicht relevant scheinen. Auch das Englische hat damit nichts zu tun.
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby Le Baron » Sat Feb 04, 2023 8:24 pm

Ah well, at least English influence isn't getting the blame this time. I didn't know Swiss German only has one past tense. Or 'had' I should say.
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby Iversen » Sat Feb 04, 2023 8:29 pm

This gha thing is actually quite interesting. I have read that the synthetic past tense is being systematically replaced by the analytic perfect in Swiss German, but I had actually not noticed this new tendency -. maybe because the gha still mainly is used in colloquial speech and not written down. The nearest thing would be when a forerunner for 'to do' popped up in Ancient Saxon some 1500 years ago (or even earlier), and in Low German "dae" is still mainly used for emphasis, but then it went with the Anglosaxon warriors to Britain, and now it is used all over Modern English as part of the regular grammar. Maybe the "gha" will simply become the way the past tense is constructed in Swiss German..
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby Kraut » Sat Feb 04, 2023 8:51 pm

There is only one tense for the past in the southern German dialects: the perfect. If I remember correctly the linguistic frontier in Germany is roughly defined by the river Main.

We cannot say "Ich ging nach Hause". "Ging" does not exist in my dialect, I must say "I beh hoim ganga."

More on doppeltes Perfekt:

https://sprachekulturkommunikation.com/ ... s-perfekt/

Beispiele

Die folgenden Beispielsätze enthalten jeweils das doppelte Perfekt zur Intensivierung / Verstärkung einer Aussage. Sehr häufig werden auch Partikeln oder Adverbien verwendet, die ebenfalls dazu dienen, um eine Aussage zu intensivieren.

Ich habe den Kunden doch schon längst darüber informiert gehabt!
Sie hat es mir gesagt gehabt! Und ich habe es vergessen …
Ich rege mich darüber so sehr auf, weil ich es euch doch gesagt gehabt habe. Doch ihr habt mir ja nicht geglaubt!


If "doppeltes Perfect" expresses what the standard past tense does, there must be another tense preceding the doppeltes Perfekt in time. And indeed there is doppeltes Plusquamperfekt.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppeltes_Plusquamperfekt
----------------------------------
added:

https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/zwiebelfi ... 95317.html
Das Ultra-Perfekt
Die gut informierte Hausfrau von heute weiß: Herkömmliche Vergangenheitsformen sind wie herkömmliche Waschmittel. Sie wirken nicht immer zufrieden stellend und hinterlassen bisweilen graue Streifen. Daher gibt es das Ultra-Perfekt mit verbesserter Formel: Die noch vollendetere Vergangenheit der vollendeten Vergangenheit.

Last edited by Kraut on Sun Feb 05, 2023 12:54 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby Iversen » Sat Feb 04, 2023 9:15 pm

If the Germans spoke their dialects some more in public (and to tourists) I would have noticed the lack of simple preterits from river Main and down much earlier.
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby Doitsujin » Sun Feb 05, 2023 7:14 am

Kraut wrote:There is only one tense for the past in the southern German dialects: the perfect. If I remember correctly the linguistic frontier in Germany is roughly defined by the river Main.
We cannot say "Ich ging nach Hause". "Ging" does not exist in my dialect, I must say "I beh hoim ganga."
This usage isn't limited to Southern Germany. There are lots of articles lamenting the loss of the preterite (Präteritumsschwund) everywhere in Germany.
For example: Der langsame Tod des Präteritums. Apparently, this isn't a new phenomenon at all.
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