this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
87 points (95.8% liked)
Linguistics Humor
1253 readers
2 users here now
Do you like languages and linguistics ? Here is for having fun about it
For serious linguistics content: [email protected]
Rules:
- 1- Stay on Topic
Post about linguistics or language humor & memes - 2- No Racism/Violence
- 3- No Public Shaming No shaming someone that could be identifiable or recognizable
- 4- Avoid spam and duplicates
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
So, what is the correct meaning of "low" and "high"?
Low German is/was spoken in the northern lowlands near the sea, High German is/was spoken in the more mountainous regions in the south. This map shows quite well where the two languages are spoken, even though I think it's more a coincidence than causation that the language border matches the topological border.
Nowadays things have changed of cause, as Standard German is spoken in all of Germany, at least in official contexts. But in colloquial conversations and especially in the rural areas the difference persists.
Ah, so low and high refer to geography.