Dealing with German dialects

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Josquin
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby Josquin » Sat Jul 14, 2018 4:25 pm

aokoye wrote:Also if you don't think there's a specific dialect of English spoken in New York City then I don't know what to say other than to point you towards some links. It's also not the dialect of English that typically gets used in national media in the US but that's an aside.

No, that is exactly what I was saying... :roll: And also, that's the reason why I said New York or Chicago or whatever comes next to GA...

But, yeah, we clearly don't seem to understand each other's arguments, so let's end it here.
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby aokoye » Sat Jul 14, 2018 4:37 pm

Josquin wrote:But, yeah, we clearly don't seem to understand each other's arguments, so let's end it here.

I want a hand shaking smilie as to say "let's shake on that" but alas BBCode has let me down ;)
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby Saim » Sun Jul 15, 2018 6:44 am

Josquin wrote:What people call "German dialects" these days aren't the real, hardcore dialects anymore. Mostly, they consist of Standard German with a regional accent and some regional vocabulary. The "real" dialects have gone extinct for the greatest part. There are some people that still can speak Plattdeutsch, Moselfränkisch, Schwäbisch, Bairisch, Wienerisch, Tirolerisch, or Schwizerdütsch, but those are mostly elderly people. Well, in Southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, there's still more dialect than in the north, but that doesn't need to concern us right now.


Don't practically all German-speaking Swiss speak "dialect" (i.e. a variety of Alemannic rather than of Standard German)?

My understanding was that the situation is something like this:

central, northern Germany: traditional vernaculars are severely endangered
Austria, southern Germany: traditional vernaculars are still present but endangered
Switzerland: traditional vernaculars are the dominant form of vernacular speech
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby Josquin » Sun Jul 15, 2018 11:01 am

Saim wrote:Don't practically all German-speaking Swiss speak "dialect" (i.e. a variety of Alemannic rather than of Standard German)?

My understanding was that the situation is something like this:

central, northern Germany: traditional vernaculars are severely endangered
Austria, southern Germany: traditional vernaculars are still present but endangered
Switzerland: traditional vernaculars are the dominant form of vernacular speech

Yes, I think that's a more accurate representation of the current situation. I just didn't want to go into too much detail. But, yeah, you're right.
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby kulaputra » Sun Jul 15, 2018 1:06 pm

I think a lot of this arguing is due to terminological issues.

In standard linguistics, dialects of a language are mutually intelligible.

For various historical and cultural reasons, in Germany and in German linguistics in general, the various West Germanic languages with the exception of English, Scots, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, and sometimes Yiddish are considered dialects, even when they lack mutual intelligibility.
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby Systematiker » Sun Jul 15, 2018 1:43 pm

For what it’s worth (and to the extent I’m willing to get into it between services this morning), when I’ve spoken about schwäbisch or bairisch above (or elsewhere)I mean the actual thing, what Josquin is calling “hard-core”, and which I learned from mostly older (but still some younger, even some younger than I) folks, primarily in rural or from rural areas. It’s probably not sustainable as community language, even in the smallest villages I was in, but in a preservation sense with the groups that work with the languages for heritage and such they’re still around and in some cases working on minority language recognition.

Regionally influenced Hochdeutsch is another thing entirely, as has been noted.
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby Josquin » Sun Jul 15, 2018 3:44 pm

kulaputra wrote:For various historical and cultural reasons, in Germany and in German linguistics in general, the various West Germanic languages with the exception of English, Scots, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, and sometimes Yiddish are considered dialects, even when they lack mutual intelligibility.

For what it's worth, Plattdeutsch (Low German) is considered to be a language in its own right by linguists, as it is derived from Old Saxon rather than from Old High German. But, yeah, due to historical and cultural reasons, it's regarded as a dialect of High German by most people these days, even if that's not entirely true.
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby Iversen » Sun Jul 15, 2018 4:15 pm

It is hard do come up with a definiton of dialects that doesn't also apply to languages.

Intercomprehensibility is an elastic notion, which depends as much on what your own language is and how accostumed you are to dealing with other ways of speaking. We can probably agree that languages should be less intercomprehensible than dialects, but there are so called 'dialects' which are harder to understand by speakers of the supposed standard language than officially recognized neighbour languages - especially if spoken by old persons with bad teeth. Linguists speak about linguistic continua, where A understands B, and B understands C, but A doesn't understand C. And if it weren't for migrations and wars and politics and mass media and other nasty calamities the world would probably be covered by such continua. Or in other words: If B didn't exist, then A and C would probably be seens as speakers of different languages. But what if both A and C get under the cultural wings of B? It is in that situation that their speech variants will tend to gravitate towards the speech patterns of B.

In the golden age of Low German (up to around 1500) it was obvious that it differed from the German speech variants further South. As Josquin mentions it has NEVER been a variant of High German (as defined by the second Germanic soundshift) - on the contrary it developed independently from Old Saxon, and Platt is far from being the only dialect which actually has had an independent existence along the supposed mother tongue - the idea that dialects have split of from the one and true mother language is in most cases plainly wrong. But then things started to happen which undermined Platt and most other German dialects: Luther wrote his Bible, the Hansa league lost influence and ... well, Low German speakers who needed to deal with people in other parts of Germany adapted their speech in order to be understood. However most ordinary farmers, peat diggers and fishers continued to speak their old dialect until they got radio and television, whereupon there was a phase were you could hear anything from hardcore oldfashioned Platt to something that sounded almost like HIgh German, just with an added "moin".

And it is in this situation that I take the hard stance that the soft soup in the middle simply isn't the same thing as good old hardcore Platt with all the bells and whistles of a true language or dialect. Sometimes it is nearer Platt, sometimes nearer High German, but as time goes by and the media do their thing the tendency is that people drop the characteristics of Platt and end up with something that really just is High German with a slight varnish.

The situation may be different in Switzerland, but then I would just wish that the Swiss had been less secretive about their local dialects during my visits there.

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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby aokoye » Sun Jul 15, 2018 4:30 pm

For what it's worth, here's an example of one of the dialects that I was spoken to in when I was last in Austria


edit: to expand on this a bit. So the people who spoke to me in that dialect were in their 60s, probably (which is to say, my mom's age)? The friend whose parents I was staying with can't code switch into it because her mom refused to speak it to her at home until she was 16 or 17 which is similar to my mom and her not speaking AAVE at home. She can understand it but can't speak it herself (which is analogous to my relationship with the type of AAVE my mom code switches into).
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Re: Dealing with German dialects

Postby Iversen » Sun Jul 15, 2018 10:54 pm

Renate Hofer's speech is closer to what I would call dialect than anything I have been presented with during my stays in Austria. I have probably eavesdropped on people who came close, but as far as I remember not during my latest stay, and definitely not when people spoke directly to me (which is a bad omen for my German pronunciation and ability to adapt quickly to the local lingo). Luckily frau Hofer speaks very slowly and clearly. If she had spoken faster and with a sloppy articulation I might have been in trouble.

When presented like this it was however fairly easy to accomodate to the phonological side of her speech. Some vowels sounded as if you had insert an r after them ("Sommerlercht", "Fliehrn", "Surcht") and many were also different in other ways ("griehrn", "erwocht", "ich freih mir jo sou"). Besides there were the usual diminutives on -rl, .... but all in all this speech variant was on a level where it just took me a few minutes to tune in to it -and I'm not even a native speaker of German. So I would say dialect, yes, but not as extreme as you might have expected. And as suggested by Aokoye the percentage of young Austrians who can speak like this is probably fairly limited.

Btw. I'm not well versed in the Swiss dialects, but it seems to me that the tendency to make rising diphtongs is one of the most characteristic things about the Southern dialects in general. And that makes me think that there may be some kind of Sprachbund with the Romantsch dialect bundle, where at least some dialects also are full of diphtongs - even though they belong to the Romance language family. It also reminds me of one key difference between Dutch and Afrikaans: the Dutch diphtongs tend to go 'downwards' (i.e. towards smaller mouth openings), whereas the diphtongs in Afrikaans often go 'upwards' as if they ended with an r.
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