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Differences between German dialects

  Tags: Dialect | German
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1qaz2wsx
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 Message 1 of 11
07 October 2010 at 8:48am | IP Logged 
How many German dialects are there and what are their differences?I have been told that a Bavarian 'r' is pronounced more like a Spalish or a Greek 'r'.Not like standard German 'r' which is closer to the French one.

Edited by 1qaz2wsx on 07 October 2010 at 8:54am

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William Camden
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 Message 2 of 11
07 October 2010 at 1:13pm | IP Logged 
Look up "German dialects" in Wikipedia. There is a lot of useful information there.
There are two major dialect areas - High German and Low German. Dialects are tending to be eroded by standard versions of German but I would say there are still dozens of dialects, many not comprehensible to speakers of standard German alone.
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Emme
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 Message 3 of 11
07 October 2010 at 6:13pm | IP Logged 
1qaz2wsx wrote:
How many German dialects are there and what are their differences?[...]


Deutsche Welle has a nice website called Dialektatlas that deals exactly with these questions.

The site lists 20 dialects:
Alemannisch
Allgäuerisch
Bairisch
Berlinerisch
Fränkisch
Hamburgerisch
Hessisch
Kölsch
Mecklenburgisch
Moselfränkisch
Niederrheinisch
Ostfriesisch
Pfälzisch
Ruhrpottsprache
Saarländisch
Sächsisch
Saterfriesisch
Schwäbisch
Thüringisch
Westfälisch

Each dialect is introduced with an audio sample (titled ‘Feature zum Dialekt’), a short dictionary with dialectal words and their standard German translation, and other articles about the region’s ‘Landeskunde’.
The site is completely in German, but I don’t know if you speak it. I hope you do and that you will find the website useful!

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Bao
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 Message 4 of 11
08 October 2010 at 2:55am | IP Logged 
Low German dialects on the border the Belgium and the Netherlands are very close to the Dutch and Flemish dialects on the other side, which means that people growing up there find it easier to understand Dutch than, for example, Bavarian.

Schwäbisch (and as a part of it Allgäuerisch) is a group of dialects in the region where Alemannic dialects meet Bavarian and Franconian dialects. (There are many other Alemannic dialects, most of them in Switzerland.)

The differences between dialects are usually vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar. I grew up speaking colloquial Standard German with the odd regional word thrown in, and I find it amazing to listen to people who can more or less freely switch between their dialect and the standard language.
I will never forget when one of my acquaintances suddenly said
"Mer hän gsi" (we've been) - that was the first time I realized that Alemannic uses different grammatical structures from Standard German. ("Wir sind gewesen" - we use the other auxilary sein and the regular participle of sein was lost and replaced with the participle of wesen which, in turn, was lost as a full verb)
Some dialects (like Bavarian and Saxonian dialects) tend to diphtonigize long vowels, whereas other dialects (Low Saxionian and Alemannic for example) tend to use monophtongs even where the standard languages has diphtongs.
Ripuarisch (for example Kölsch) even has a simple tonal/pitch accent system.

Edited by Bao on 09 October 2010 at 12:29am

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Doitsujin
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 Message 5 of 11
08 October 2010 at 10:40am | IP Logged 
Bao wrote:
Low German dialects on the border the Belgium and the Netherlands are very close to the Dutch and Flemish dialects on the other side, which means that people growing up there find it easier to understand Dutch than, for example, Bavarian.

I spent a couple of years in Northern Germany as a child and learned to understand "Plattdeutsch" (Low German), which made learning Dutch a breeze. Unfortunately, I cannot speak "Plattdeutsch". I was therefore quite impressed when I saw Iversens's Plattdeutsch video on Youtube, which is quite good.
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William Camden
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 Message 6 of 11
08 October 2010 at 1:22pm | IP Logged 
Emme wrote:
1qaz2wsx wrote:
How many German dialects are there and what are their differences?[...]


Deutsche Welle has a nice website called Dialektatlas that deals exactly with these questions.

The site lists 20 dialects:
Alemannisch
Allgäuerisch
Bairisch
Berlinerisch
Fränkisch
Hamburgerisch
Hessisch
Kölsch
Mecklenburgisch
Moselfränkisch
Niederrheinisch
Ostfriesisch
Pfälzisch
Ruhrpottsprache
Saarländisch
Sächsisch
Saterfriesisch
Schwäbisch
Thüringisch
Westfälisch

Each dialect is introduced with an audio sample (titled ‘Feature zum Dialekt’), a short dictionary with dialectal words and their standard German translation, and other articles about the region’s ‘Landeskunde’.
The site is completely in German, but I don’t know if you speak it. I hope you do and that you will find the website useful!


Discussion of German dialects does not just involve Germany itself. Bairisch or Austro-Bavarian includes much of Bavaria in Germany, but also most of the German dialects spoken in Austria and South Tyrol. Most German Swiss dialects are forms of Alemannic, Luxembourgish is a language in its own right but can also be regarded as an offshoot of Moselle Franconian, while some of the dialects spoken in the east of the Netherlands are Low Saxon (Low German). Although endangered, there are also remnants of German dialects in central and eastern Europe.

Edited by William Camden on 09 October 2010 at 3:45pm

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Liface
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 Message 7 of 11
08 October 2010 at 7:17pm | IP Logged 
This may also help, tangentially related:
http://www.philhist.uni-augsburg.de/lehrstuehle/germanistik/ sprachwissenschaft/ada

Talks about the differences in the German language using plots on the map to represent survey results.


By the way:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,,12472,00.html

Am I crazy to think that the narrator here has a Swiss accent?

Edited by Liface on 08 October 2010 at 7:21pm

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Bao
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 Message 8 of 11
09 October 2010 at 12:27am | IP Logged 
Liface wrote:
By the way:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,,12472,00.html

Am I crazy to think that the narrator here has a Swiss accent?

The narrator sounds to me like he's speaking a High Alemannic dialect - Lake Constance, Basel, that area. With some overregional 'Swiss German broadcaster accent' on top of that? (Maybe somebody else here can place that better?) The documentary itself is about Freiburg in Germany (home, sweet home) which is the southernmost part of the Low Alemannic area. Ich als Eigschmeckte -Zugezogene- kann's natürlich nicht sprechen - erm, schwätze.

Edited by Bao on 11 October 2010 at 4:20pm



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