German questions

[Raphael]

Thank you for your comments, everyone!

Maybe it is cheating a bit, because one could consider it a dialect of Dutch, more than German, but how about Kleever platt?

Hm, I wouldn't say that that sounds really foreign to me except a bit Dutch.

[WeepingElf]

Thank you for your comments, everyone!

Maybe it is cheating a bit, because one could consider it a dialect of Dutch, more than German, but how about Kleever platt?

Hm, I wouldn't say that that sounds really foreign to me except a bit Dutch.

To me, it sounds more like "standard" Low German than like Dutch, though some resemblance to Dutch is recognizable. (And indeed, Klever Platt is classified as "Low Franconian", together with most varieties of Dutch.)

[Raphael]

To me, it sounds more like "standard" Low German than like Dutch, though some resemblance to Dutch is recognizable.

I might be less familiar with "standard" Low German than you - I heard it from time to time when I was growing up, and my grandparents used some individual words and expressions from it, but I was never fluent.

[jal]

Maybe it is cheating a bit, because one could consider it a dialect of Dutch, more than German, but how about Kleever platt?

To me this sounds like a dialect of Dutch, probably Brabantian or North Limburgian. It sounds less German even than some Dutch Dialects in the Achterhoek and Twente. In that story there are many phrases that are wholesale standard Dutch, though the pronunciation is clearly non-standard (though regional Dutch).

Checking on Wikipedia, Kleverlandish overlaps with the Dutch region I thought it would be from.



JAL

[Raholeun]

There are many examples of spoken Klever Platt that I expect to be much easier to parse for speakers of Standard Dutch, than for speakers of High German. This is quite a cute example.

[WeepingElf]

To me, it sounds more like "standard" Low German than like Dutch, though some resemblance to Dutch is recognizable.

I might be less familiar with "standard" Low German than you - I heard it from time to time when I was growing up, and my grandparents used some individual words and expressions from it, but I was never fluent.

I know it only from the media - my grandparents spoke a Low German dialect that was quite different from that; for starters, it had changed the long vowels into horizontal diphthongs, as in the sentence Muin Hius is kloen, nich greot 'my house is small, not big' (the oe in the example is not ö but an /oe/ diphthong). I don't know where your grandparents lived and what dialects they spoke, of course, but the place where you live now is deep within North Low Saxon, i.e. "standard" Low German, territory.

[Travis B.]

Stuff like this makes me sad, thinking that the only really strong dialects are Upper German dialects...

[Raphael]

Stuff like this makes me sad, thinking that the only really strong dialects are Upper German dialects...

The story is probably something like this: It used to be that the different regions of Germany all had their different, very differently sounding dialects. Then, at some point, it was more or less announced that in the future, people should all use Standard German instead. And then, we in the North of Germany were the only ones who were dumb enough to fall for that...

That's simplifying it, though. From what I've heard, there's more recently been a fair amount of dialect levelling in the South, too.

[jal]

This is quite a cute example.

Heh, yeah, that also just sounds like dialectical Dutch, and even with my terrible hearing and the somewhat dubious quality of the recording, I can make out quite some stretches.


JAL

[Raholeun]

Stuff like this makes me sad, thinking that the only really strong dialects are Upper German dialects...

Kleverlands has a strong, but increasingly niche dialectal scene. My impression is that it is not commonly spoken, but generally understood and very much celebrated during events such as Karneval.

[Raholeun]

Contrary to what JAL might have thought, my home dialect is not Flemish, but falls squarely within the area marked as Kleverlands speaking, albeit the Dutch variety.

[hwhatting]

Would you be able to spot someone from the Alsace speaking German? I've been there on holiday a decade or so ago and many people spoke German, though I'm not sure if they all did so natively.

The only place in Alsace I've been is Strasbourg, which is mostly French-speaking. The people speaking German there either had a French accent (i.e., native French speakers with German as a learnt foreign language) or an accent that was vaguely Southern, but not as extreme as people on the Badische side of the Rhine sometimes have.

Maybe it is cheating a bit, because one could consider it a dialect of Dutch, more than German, but how about Kleever platt?

Let me know if you got the clue of the story in the linked video:

I got most of it, but I grew up near the Dutch border and speak some Dutch. The accent, though, sounds more Rheinisch than Dutch to me, and not exotic at all.

The story is probably something like this: It used to be that the different regions of Germany all had their different, very differently sounding dialects. Then, at some point, it was more or less announced that in the future, people should all use Standard German instead. And then, we in the North of Germany were the only ones who were dumb enough to fall for that...

Cute story. What I read is that the reason is that Low German was generally farther from the Standard, so people were more aware that they spoke dialect, and that there were less intermediate registers, so people had to choose consciously between speaking dialect and Standard, with the dialect losing out. In the South, the dialects were closer to the Standard, and there were more intermediare registers, allowing people to avoid hard choices - depending on the listener, they could choose a register nearer or farther from the Standard. I'm not sure about that explanation either - the far Southern dialects are quite distant from the Standard as well.

[Travis B.]

The story is probably something like this: It used to be that the different regions of Germany all had their different, very differently sounding dialects. Then, at some point, it was more or less announced that in the future, people should all use Standard German instead. And then, we in the North of Germany were the only ones who were dumb enough to fall for that...

Cute story. What I read is that the reason is that Low German was generally farther from the Standard, so people were more aware that they spoke dialect, and that there were less intermediate registers, so people had to choose consciously between speaking dialect and Standard, with the dialect losing out. In the South, the dialects were closer to the Standard, and there were more intermediare registers, allowing people to avoid hard choices - depending on the listener, they could choose a register nearer or farther from the Standard. I'm not sure about that explanation either - the far Southern dialects are quite distant from the Standard as well.

I have heard things similar to what you said about Low German and Upper German vis-à-vis Standard German and dialect leveling.

[Travis B.]

That said, in the South (particularly Switzerland and Austria), from what I have read there is the concept of Schriftdeutsch, where spoken Standard German is primarily limited to particularly formal contexts and Standard German for the most part is a written rather than spoken language.

[hwhatting]

That said, in the South (particularly Switzerland and Austria), from what I have read there is the concept of Schriftdeutsch, where spoken Standard German is primarily limited to particularly formal contexts and Standard German for the most part is a written rather than spoken language.

That's also what I've read; the exception in those two countries seems to be Vienna, where there is a colloquial mesolect that is nearer to the Standard, similar to the situation in big cities in Southern Germany.
An additional factor is that many Austrians and German-speaking Swiss regularly speak Standard German in business dealings with Germans and with German tourists.

[jal]

Contrary to what JAL might have thought, my home dialect is not Flemish, but falls squarely within the area marked as Kleverlands speaking, albeit the Dutch variety.

Not sure why I gave you that idea, as I didn't think that at all :).


JAL

[WeepingElf]

There are many examples of spoken Klever Platt that I expect to be much easier to parse for speakers of Standard Dutch, than for speakers of High German. This is quite a cute example.

The point is that the main isogloss bundle between "Dutch" and "Low German" does not follow the political boundary - it runs further west in the north and further east in the south. Klever Platt is to the west of this isogloss bundle.

[Travis B.]

This is less a German question but a German-loans-in-English question, but one thing I have noticed is that German initial ⟨z⟩ is commonly loaned into English here as /z/ but German medial and final ⟨z⟩ (e.g. Nazi, Mozart, countless other German names) is typically loaned into English here as /ts/, making this not a simple matter of pure spelling pronunciation. Any idea why this is so?

[Creyeditor]

Maybe English does not like initial /ts/?

[Travis B.]

Maybe English does not like initial /ts/?

It doesn't -- but why not loan it as /s/ then? For instance, Japanese tsunami is commonly pronounced with initial /s/ here.