German language

Gary C.

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Would it be accurate to say,that any citizen of Germany could speak Hochdeutsch,because it is 'standard'-but that many Hochdeutsch speakers would find it difficult or impossible to understand Plattdeutsch?
 
Not everybody can speak Hochdeutsch fluently in Germany. Some elderly people are more comfortable with the local dialect. In families dialects are still preferred in many areas. Plattdeutsch is not a single variety of German but various dialects of the North. Those in the North-West are closer to Dutch or Frisian. There are also many difficult or uninteligible dialects in the south, and even more in Switzerland. Speaking standard Hochdeutsch does not help understanding Wurttemberg dialects more than knowing Dutch.
 
Hmm...I would have guessed that everyone could understand Hochdeutsch,as it has 'official' status.Wouldn't it be the language that is broadcast on newscasts and regular TV shows,or is a lot of that also done in local dialects?

How much mutual intelligibility would there be between Dutch and places like Niedersachsen?

Also,would it be true to say that North German dialects were more important in the historical era than at the present,like in the time of the Hanseatic League,because of the wealth and power of the traders?
 
German dialects are so many and can be traced through middle Europe like a map.
As Maciamo has mentioned, the North-West is closer to Dutch or Frisian - it is also interesting to note that there are words in the platt vocabulary that are the same in Danish.
If you speak German and are intersted in dialects and such, I can highly recommend listening to Johannes Waders LP, Hannes Wader: Plattdeutsche Lieder. An excellent work! (y)
 
I'll look for it on ebay.
Thanks for the tip.
 
Hi,

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I am not German speaker. I don't know the today proportions of uses of dialects and standard.
IMO practising Hoch Deutsche is a better way to understand Southern dialects than practising Dutch or Platt Deutsche.
My impression (after having heard people of diverse parts of the netherlands (soldiers) in Brittany and the already diverse aspects they had, and also on comparisons of words prounciations between the North Plain dialects) is that as a whole the differences between dialects of Platt Deutsche are less marked than the ones between southern dialects, even (maybe due to the mountainous geography of southern Germanic lands. It's enough to hear the Elsassisch dialects and their phonetic variety to understand that, left aside the Upper Hoch Deutsche dialects of Switzerland and Austrian Bayerische dialects. Just a personal impression.
 
I am not German speaker. I don't know the today proportions of uses of dialects and standard.
IMO practising Hoch Deutsche is a better way to understand Southern dialects than practising Dutch or Platt Deutsche.
My impression (after having heard people of diverse parts of the netherlands (soldiers) in Brittany and the already diverse aspects they had, and also on comparisons of words prounciations between the North Plain dialects) is that as a whole the differences between dialects of Platt Deutsche are less marked than the ones between southern dialects, even (maybe due to the mountainous geography of southern Germanic lands. It's enough to hear the Elsassisch dialects and their phonetic variety to understand that, left aside the Upper Hoch Deutsche dialects of Switzerland and Austrian Bayerische dialects. Just a personal impression.

We have the similar impression :)
 
Hmm...I would have guessed that everyone could understand Hochdeutsch,as it has 'official' status.Wouldn't it be the language that is broadcast on newscasts and regular TV shows,or is a lot of that also done in local dialects?

You have to differentiate between the active and passive vocabulary or word pool. Like I can read or understand practically every text in English, even scientific and higher literature, but my active vocabulary is way smaller than that. Similarly, there is a difference between understanding someone talking or talking fluently, as you might guess.
Older, less intelligent and less educated people have still, in many areas, troubles with speaking truly fluently and on a high level in the high level language. Funnily, the situation has largely reverted from where the High German Standardsprache came from, simply because Plattdeutsch is largely dead. The original Plattdeutsch was more similar to Dutch, which, like the name suggests (Dutch = Deutsch) is just a German dialect which branched off to an own language, largely because they made it their written language. Contrary, the Plattdeutsch zone had to reinvent itself and is now largely defined by a harder pronunciation and some additional vocabularly, whereas the basic vocabularly and grammatic is, for most regions at least, much closer to Standard German.

In areas in which High German dialects were spoken, this kind of reinvention and adaptation to the Standardsprache never happened, because these dialects were always fairly close to it. So you have now the funny situation that in the areas from which the Standardsprache of German came, you have quite often more, stronger and more widespread dialects, than in the zones which spoke a completely different dialect before, like in the Plattdeutsch North.

The Allemannic South West with Swiss German is another extreme, because it developed such a strong regional dialect, that if making it a written language too, it would have been not as different but fairly close to Dutch-Flemish in its distance from Standard German. But that never happened. Here too, the well educated people often speak a very clear cut high German, if they want, because its almost a second language for them. For someone from Bavaria, much of Austria, Thuringia or the Rheinland, the difference is still big, but by far not as big between the dialectal Umgangssprache and the Standardsprache. But of course, in the past, in some remote villages, people oftentimes spoke some unintelligible jabbering at times, especially if it was a really small and isolated village, because the smaller the number of the illiterate speakers, the quicker and easier a language gets stunted.
Its amazing how quickly many terms can get lost. I mean not just changed, but simply got lost. People have no expression for the matter any more.
 
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