As we delved into language and community with the bit on Germans and English in one of my last contributions, this time I take thee, dearest fellow-gumbooteer and interested, keen reader of this blog (hi, parents of John Horn!) into the linguistic quagmire that is Germany: Welcome to German dialects!

In contrast to nations derived from colonies like the US or Canada, Germany has not just accents, it has actual dialects – varieties of the common High Language or Standard Language that are far older, than that very concept itself (okay, I know there’s stuff like Pennsylvania Dutch, but that’s more like an island of German…). They usually stem from the West Germanic or other Indo-European root-languages. Hence, one could argue, some German dialects are still closer to the tongues spoken by German tribes when the Roman empire stretched to the banks of the Rhine than to today’s standard variety of German (which by the way, is just the variety spoken in and around Hannover).

Solingen's "Kottens": Small, rather workshop-like cutlery factories, running on water power. High German wasn't heard in them until the early 20th century.

Unfortunately, most regional dialects have almost died out, because late in the 19th century it was accepted doctrine in Wilhelminian society that dialects are not the spearhead of progress. In the 20th century, the battle gathered momentum: In fact, my great-grandma went to great pains that my mum ought NOT to speak our dialect (Solinger Platt, as it is called) lest it hinder her from getting a better position later on in life (mum was basically raised by Oma Selma, who died around 1955 when my mum was 12 years old). And Oma Selma spoke nothing but Platt (she never mastered High German, according to my mum).

The result is, that my sis and me (born in ’71 and ’78) are able to understand our dialect, but we aren’t fluent in it. We can sort of make up a conversation, but a real expert will know that we may be from in and around Solingen, yet that we normally speak High German in our everyday lives. Platt is funny too, because it’s closer to Dutch and English than High German. In Platt “Zieh Dich an, beeil Dich” (Standard-German for “Hurry, get your clothes on”) means “Trek Dich ens aan, mak fueran” (note the vocabulary differences – would you’ve thought it’s the same language?). Now that’s a sentence I sometimes heard from gran when I was in danger of being late for school…

Not known was a lover of dialects: The last German emperor, Wilhelm II.

So, the dialects were deliberately sentenced to extinction because of political will (and to a certain extent necessity, because a worker from my region wouldn’t have been able to understand someone living in Bavaria, a hundred years ago), and now, a good hundred years later, people have realized what they’ve lost: A piece of truly community-forging regional identity.

In fact, when I first visited a friend in Thuringia in the East, in Weimar, around ’98, was the first time that I really noticed that the “Standard German” that me and my buddies speak isn’t so Standard after all. Five minutes after getting out of the car and into the first beer, all the easterners remarked that “we all sounded like Carsten (the guy we were visiting)” and that we all had “a Rhenish sing-song intonation”. They keep telling me the same everytime I go to Hessia, too.

Yet there are people who keep the dialects alive. Here in Solingen, there are groups who stage plays in it (either adaption of known stuff or pieces by their own playwrights, one famous example being Heidi Theunissen – whenever her new plays are on, the municipal theatre here is sold out!), and there are even some active poets. And our daily newspaper here in Solingen, for which I worked as an editor and reporter up to 2006, even features a daily column in Solinger Platt.

Once you enter the world of dialects, you encounter serious nerds anywhere in Germany – they all love their dialects and they all do a lot about it. For once I gotta hand it to Bavaria: There, they even teach their dialects still in school. I don’t think we’ll ever get there again here in the West. I’ll leave you with a line from Trent Reznor: “My words just echo off these walls…”

Oh, and one more thing. Two vids that allow you direct comparison between Standard German and “Plattduetsch”, the dialect spoken in the North. You all surely know the English original…