A language is a dialect with a fleet and an army.
Albert Einstein
(I know he didn't say it but it's already attributed to many people so why not him)
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
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It was actually said by Albert Einsteins biggest enemy, Adolf Hitler
He wanted to get rid of all languages by destroying all armies, but failed
He wanted to undo the tower of babel. Most misunderstood person in recent history
Moin, Plattdüütsch is nich dat sülbige as Düütsch.
They are different languages even though they share some vocabulary due to their historical and geographical proximity. But until a few years ago it was usual for kids in rural Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony to grow up with Plattdüütsch as their mother tounge and only learn (High) German in school. I'm not sure if this is still the case as the number of monolingual Low German speakers has declined due to higher mobility in society and information.
Just because it's spoken in Germany it's not the same as German. You could get the same weird diagram by grouping French and English together as "Canadian".
Plattduutsch and Gronings/Drents (dialects from the northern Netherlands) are basically so compatible that as long as nobody is writing, the speakers can just understand eachothers.
Similar with Bavarian. I know a few people who are incapable of speaking high German. The ISO and UNESCO even classify Bavarian as its own language (although that is debatable).
High German and Bavarian are actually more different than for example Danish and Norwegian and Czech and Slovak.
If you jumble a sensible diagram it's gonna look weird, I guess
I guess the point is that the modern groupings we apply are inherently jumbled. Here's a cleaner diagram, ~~but the containers still can't be drawn in a neat way:~~
Anglic is not German though. Nor is Frisian, Dutch or Low German. Don't confuse German with Germanic (which is an even bigger family of languages containing also Swedish etc.). Only the right half of your Diagram is actually German.
The split happened during the second Germanic consonant shift in the 6th-8th century, where the speakers south of the Benrath line shifted their k' to ch's and their t's to ts's. In English it's make and what, in Dutch and Low German maken and wat**, whereas in Standard German it's machen and was** and in Bavarian macha and wos. Only Languages that made that shift are considered German.
That doesn't necessarily mean that, for example, English and Low German are more similar than Low German and Luxembourgish. The whole area is part of the Continental West Germanic continuum and the closer you are geographically to someone the more likely you can understand each other. I the past it was much more usual to match and mix these languages to your needing. It was more important to be able to speak with the people from the neighbouring village than someone at the other end of the Holy Roman Empire, so someone speaking a German dialect in Cologne would be much more likely to understand someone speaking Düsseldorfer Platt (A Low German dialect) than someone from Graz even though they were both speaking "German".
My diagram is just an attempt at a neater version of OPs. The only languages in the containers are the colored ones. Draw.io doesn't let you stop ungrouped nodes from overlapping containers.
The only languages in the containers are the colored ones. Draw.io doesn't let you stop ungrouped nodes from overlapping containers.
Ah, I see, that explains a lot. You could make your version of the diagram even more "neat" by moving the Ingvaeonic part all the way to the right and switching "Central Germanic > Others" and Luxembourgish around, so all the green boxes would be right next to eachother.
That's true! Updated.
Neat 😀
I can understand parts of low german, my grandparents spoke it. There's some initiatives trying to keep the language alive, but I think it'll be dead in the next 50 years.
Sorry I refuse to speak German unless I am very high
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.
For me typically "High" means mountains and "Low" means lowlands. It fits well enough for German.
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.
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.