"Germany is a country" - Delusional Cosplayers
6 months ago by PugJesus to c/historymemes
germany has about 4-5 truly difficult dialects I'd say. (being an native speaker) I could understand every dialect after being immersed for a couple of hours except for bavarian tho 😅
there are a lot more local accents and dialects but Sächsisch, Pfälzerisch & Bayrisch are the ones that are really difficult to understand even for german natives from other areas. Hessisch partially as well. These are all bound to their local areas.
I'm speaking Hochdeutsch ("plain german" which should be the german y'all are learning in school) but there is also Plattdeutsch (spoken mostly in the north) which is it's own language that is on it's way to extinction.
ich bin mir auch ziemlich sicher, dass du kein platt oder allemannisch (aka "schweizerisch") verstehst. Und ich behaupte mal, heute haben wir sehr viel weniger deutsche dialekte als noch vor 200 jahren.
Many german dialects are as you say, sometimes unintelligible with each other. However they are of the type where if you spend 1-2 weeks immersed in it you will very quickly start to understand it. Same thing happens in English. I heard an anecdote of someone who watched the Scottish series "Lemmy's show" for the first time and could barely understand anything they were saying. But as they reached the end of the first season they had very little trouble. Intrigued I did the same and had the same experience (great show btw).
I'm not native speaker of German but I had such an experience. I learnt standard German in school as a foreign language. Last year I visited the Austrian family of my partner. The first day I could barely understand anything they were saying but after 2 weeks I could comprehend most of it. So where do we really draw the lines of a language? If you can comprehend it with less than one week of training is it really a language? I would say no. If yes then I would say some English dialects ought to be classified as languages (as I know some do, calling it the scots language).
It comes down to language structure and how similar they are. For example it’s easier for me to understand Dutch than Danish. Luxembourgish (recently recognized as separate language) to me is rural Hessian with some random French words thrown in - again easier than Dutch to me. For the German dialects you can use the same writing and it should be understood throughout Germany, Austria and most of Switzerland. Except for regionally used words like e.g. “leiwand” (Viennese for good/perfect). Another exception is if the writer is from Cologne - nobody understands their language.
As someone who understands Kölsch/Platt somewhat and usually speaks quite typical Standarddeutsch the rural bavarians as well as people with a very strong northern dialect are in casual speech almost as hard to understand as the dutch in Limburg.
The only reason why we have clear, hard borders in the modern world is because we have the tech to precisely measure distance and can talk about/handle them quickly/efficiently at a larger scale.
The real delusion in this story is that German is a language.
Now let's talk about Dutch.
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Well, countries are all more or less delusions, yet made more or less real by the authority of states.
The real delusion in this story is that German is a language. From what I've heard, take three Germans from different regions, all speaking their mother tongue and they'll have just as much trouble understanding each other as three Spaniards from diverse parts of Spain†. But while the Spaniards will be well aware that one of them is speaking Galician, one Castellan and another Catalonian, each German is convinced that he's speaking German and that the others are speaking German in a weird way. Spaniards will likely speak Castellan, if not as their first then as their second language. Germans will all be familiar with a standard German but not really identify it as a distinct language from their own. Same story in Italy.
†: Assuming none of the Spaniards in the example are Basque.
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