this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
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Would Bavarian be classified as “low German”? IIRC, the “low” refers to it coming from lowland regions, of which Bavaria is not one.
Bavarian is definitely not low German, it's in fact "Upper German" which is a group of dialects of "High German". People tend to confuse "High German" with "Standard German" but Standard German is the Language that's taught in school while High German is a huge family of dialects.
A lot of people seem to get their ideas of what “low” and “high” mean about a language from fantasy novels, and assume that High ~~Elven~~ German would be an ultra-formal, long-windedly prescriptivist variant with extra grammatical cases for encoding degrees of polite deference, whereas Low German would be a guttural argot originally spoken by mercenaries, prostitutes and thieves, and used these days mostly to buy bubatz and döner kebabs.
That's especially funny as the sociolect used to buy döner is actually a High German variant (as immigrants coming to Germany will usually learn Standard German in their language courses and mix that with their mother tounge). All the Bubatz I've bought in my wild youth, I've gotten from Thomases and Michaels who were speaking perfectly good Standard German.