Southern Low German: Difference between revisions

 

German is not a purely linguistic term, but also a political one. From the state of Low German today can be seen that High German is a real danger to Low German. Reading a Standard German text in Low German means translating. Had North Germans become Dutch or something of their own, the language would survive and not be understood by most South Germans at all. Southern Germans tend to have much greater regionalism, although culturally speaking they have less to fear from Germany in terms of a decline in their own regional culture. The most prominent Low German feature of German is its pronunciation, which has been considered exemplary since the 19th century - until the 18th century, the Central German Saxon pronunciation was considered exemplary. There are also many cases in the vocabulary where Low German words are preferred to High German, such as "Treppe" ("stairs") instead of [TERM?] or "zu Hause" ("at home") instead of "daheim". Compulsory schooling was introduced for the general population in Prussia in the 18th century. Meißen Kanzleideutsch was the school language, which is also an important source of the New High German standard German. The previous colloquial language is hardly written down, as it was mostly simply spoken by illiterate people.

 

Missingsch (still) ekes out at most a niche existence in everyday conversation in Hanover. In such surveys, people regularly describe themselves as dialect speakers who at best speak the dialect superficially. Secondly, there are numerous areas in Germany where respondents are not sure what is meant by "dialect". It sounds strange, but this ambiguity is also often found in newspaper articles and even in statements by linguists. In large parts of Lower Saxony, Brandenburg and partly in Westphalia, written Low German was abandoned much earlier. When Low German was abandoned in the population centers of Lower Saxony (Hanover, Braunschweig, etc.) in favor of High German, rural areas (East Friesland, Kleve, parts of Westphalia) leaned towards the written standard of the Netherlands a long time (simply because High German was alien to them). Low German was only officially by then used in the Netherlands. For a long time, High German and Low German competed in rural areas for the favor of the schools in Northern Germany, which only finally switched to High German as a result of increasing centralization in the 19th century. In the cities, High German was the only school and educational language. There was never a "Low German standard language" at any time, but there were more or less closely related dialects. There was a supra-regional compensatory language, as we find it today in Germany and to some extent among the younger generation in Austria, i.e. a language that is based on the same grammar, the same vocabulary and increasingly on a leveled accent in most larger cities more than a hundred years due to the lack of electronic media and low mobility. Dialect was spoken everywhere, in educated circles at most a dialect-colored written German. In northern Germany, unlike in southern and central Germany, the standardization of the written language made considerable progress. As early as 1550, one can speak of a uniform written language used nationwide Dutch (Nederdytsch or Nederduytsch), which was widespread in both the "Low Franconian" and "Low Saxon" areas. This written language became more and more the "spoken standard" in the urban bourgeoisie, apart from the sometimes very different pronunciation. The local dialects survived in the rural population, which was not or hardly literate, although in the urban areas an adjustment to the written compensatory language took place very quickly. With traders, scholars and travelers it is not surprising that the craftsmen also took part in this development together that a common lingua franca was established, which was soon understood and cultivated everywhere. The close trade network of the northern German cities did the rest. The name of the common Low German language used at that time remained in the Netherlands until the end of the 19th century and occasionally beyond.