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Summary. The continental West Germanic dialect continuum roughly encompasses the territory of modern-day Germany, Austria, the German-speaking part of Switzerland, the Netherlands, the northern half of Belgium (Flanders), Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and South Tyrol, in northern Italy.
- Overview
- German
- History
- Characteristics of modern Standard German
German is spoken throughout a large area in central Europe, where it is the national language of Germany and of Austria and one of the three official languages of Switzerland (the others are French and Italian, and Romansh has a special status). From this homeland it has been carried by emigration to many other parts of the world; there are German-speaking communities in North and South America, South Africa, and Australia.
As a written language German is quite uniform, differing in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland no more than written English does in the United States and the British Commonwealth. As a spoken language, however, German exists in far more varieties than English. At one extreme is Standard German (Hochsprache), based on the written form of the language and used in radio, television, public lectures, the theatre, schools, and universities. It is relatively uniform, although speakers often reveal regional accents. At the other extreme are the local dialects, which differ from village to village. Between these two extremes there is a continuous scale of speech forms; in cities these forms are often close to the standard language and are called Colloquial German (Umgangssprache).
German is spoken throughout a large area in central Europe, where it is the national language of Germany and of Austria and one of the three official languages of Switzerland (the others are French and Italian, and Romansh has a special status). From this homeland it has been carried by emigration to many other parts of the world; there are German-speaking communities in North and South America, South Africa, and Australia.
As a written language German is quite uniform, differing in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland no more than written English does in the United States and the British Commonwealth. As a spoken language, however, German exists in far more varieties than English. At one extreme is Standard German (Hochsprache), based on the written form of the language and used in radio, television, public lectures, the theatre, schools, and universities. It is relatively uniform, although speakers often reveal regional accents. At the other extreme are the local dialects, which differ from village to village. Between these two extremes there is a continuous scale of speech forms; in cities these forms are often close to the standard language and are called Colloquial German (Umgangssprache).
From the point of view of the modern local dialects, the territory within which German and Dutch are spoken is a single speech area. It is possible to travel from Austria, northern Italy, and much of Switzerland into Germany, eastern France (Alsace and part of Lorraine), Luxembourg, northern Belgium, and the Netherlands without encountering a village where the local speech is suddenly different. The only sharp breaks occur when one enters the French-speaking parts of France and Belgium or the Frisian-speaking parts of the Netherlands and Germany.
The most striking dialect differences within this large area are those that divide Dutch–Low German in the lowlands of the north from High German in the highlands of the south. When the Germanic tribes migrated into southern Germany during the early centuries ad, their speech had the voiceless stops p, t, and k in much the same distribution as in modern English. Then, probably during the 6th century, there occurred a change customarily called the High German consonant shift. At the beginning of words and when doubled, p, t, and k came to be pronounced as affricates; after a vowel they came to be pronounced as long fricatives. See table for a comparison of modern results with related English words.
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These changes occurred in the south of the German speech area and then spread north, some extending farther than others. The situation at the end of the 19th century was as indicated in the figure. Line 2, maken/machen, is generally chosen as the boundary between Low German and High German, because it is typical for the shift of p, t, and k after vowels to ff, ss, and ch, respectively (hopen/hoffen, bīten/beissen, maken/machen), and of t and tt to z and tz, respectively (ten/zehn, sitten/sitzen). The shift of ik ‘I’ to ich is indicated by line 1, which shows that the shift of k to ch after a vowel in this particular word spread unusually far. Line 3, which indicates the shift of Dorp ‘village’ to Dorf (compare archaic English thorp), shows that shifted p after r and l did not spread as far north as the shifted p, t, and k after a vowel. And line 4, indicating the shift of dat ‘that’ to das, shows that the shift of t to s after a vowel spread still less far north in this word (and in a few others: it/es ‘it,’ wat/was ‘what’). The striking way in which these lines fan out in the west (in the area along the Rhine River) has led to their being referred to as the Rhenish fan.
The shift of p when doubled or at the beginning of a word occurred in a much smaller area. Line 5, showing the shift of Appel ‘apple’ to Apfel, lies wholly within the High German speech area and is customarily used to subdivide it into Middle German (Appel) and Upper German (Apfel) areas. Line 6, which indicates the shift of Pund ‘pound’ to Pfund, follows much the same course as does line 5 in the west, but it then runs north to join the maken/machen line; it is customarily used to distinguish West Middle German (Appel, Pund) from East Middle German (Appel, Fund—the latter being more common than Upper German Pfund).
German has the following consonants, given here in phonetic symbols because the spelling often varies: stops, p, b, t, d, k, g; fricatives, f, v, ç∼x; sibilants, s, z, š, ž; nasals, m, n, ŋ; liquids, l, r; glides, h, j. German ç∼x, spelled ch, is the voiceless velar fricative x after a, ā, o, ō, u, ū, and au but is the voiceless palatal fricative ç in other phonetic environments. The German sound ž occurs only in loanwords from other languages.
In the orthography, German w always indicates a v sound symbolized /v/; German v spells an f sound in native words but a v sound in loanwords. German sp and st spell the sounds sp and st in most positions, but they spell šp /shp/ and št /sht/ at the beginnings of words or word stems. In other positions the š (sh) sound is spelled sch—e.g., Schiff ‘ship.’ German z always indicates /ts/. The spelling tz marks a preceding vowel as short, and the spelling z marks it as long.
Voiced b, d, g, v, and z do not occur at the ends of words, at the ends of parts of compound words, before suffixes beginning with a consonant, or before endings in s or t. In these positions they are replaced in pronunciation (though not in spelling) by the corresponding voiceless consonants, namely /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, and /s/. For example, the g in Tage ‘days’ is pronounced as English g, and the g in Tag ‘day’ is pronounced as English k.
The German vowel system is detailed phonetically in the table. Though the spelling does not always indicate the difference between short and long vowels, the following devices are used more or less consistently: (1) A vowel is always short if followed by a double consonant letter—e.g., still ‘still,’ wenn ‘if,’ Rasse ‘race,’ offen ‘open,’ Hütte ‘hut’—in contrast to the long vowels of Stil ‘style,’ wen ‘whom,’ Glas ‘glass,’ Ofen ‘oven,’ Hüte ‘hats.’ (2) A vowel is always long if followed by an (unpronounced) h—e.g., ihnen ‘to them,’ stehlen ‘to steal,’ Kahn ‘barge,’ wohnen ‘to dwell,’ Ruhm ‘fame’—in contrast to the short vowels of innen ‘inside,’ stellen ‘to place,’ kann ‘can,’ Wonne ‘bliss,’ dumm ‘dumb.’ (3) A vowel is always long if written double—e.g., Beet ‘(flower) bed,’ Staat ‘state,’ Boot ‘boat’—in contrast to the short vowels of Bett ‘bed (for sleeping),’ Stadt ‘city,’ Gott ‘god’; ie counts as the doubled spelling of i—e.g., long i (ī) in Miete ‘rent’ but short i (i) in Mitte ‘middle.’ (4) A vowel (except unstressed e) is always long when it stands at the end of a word.
The “plain” vowels—a, o, u, ā, ō, ū, au—often alternate with the “umlaut” vowels—e, ö, ü, ē, ȫ, ṻ, oi, respectively—as in the following examples with plain vowels in the singular but umlauted vowels in the plural: Gast ‘guest,’ Gäste; Gott ‘god,’ Götter; Mutter ‘mother,’ Mütter. As these examples show, the vowel sounds e, ē, and oi are spelled ä, ä, and äu when they are the umlaut of a, ā, and au sounds. Gast–Gäste, Vater–Väter, Braut–Bräute. Otherwise they are generally spelled e, eh, or ee (beten ‘to pray,’ geht ‘goes,’ Beet ‘[flower] bed’), and eu (Leute ‘people’).
The sound /ai/ is generally spelled ei: Seite ‘side,’ nein ‘no,’ though in a few words ai: Saite ‘string (of an instrument),’ Kaiser ‘emperor.’ The schwa sound, /ə/, pronounced as the unstressed a in English sofa, is spelled e: beginnen/bəgínən/ ‘to begin,’ geredet/gərēdət/ ‘spoken.’
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Key dialects include West Low German, spoken in the Netherlands and northwestern Germany, and East Low German, primarily found in northeastern Germany and parts of Poland. These dialects exhibit considerable variation in vocabulary, pronunciation, and syntax, reflecting the diverse cultural and historical influences on the regions where they ...
Continental West Germanic continuum. Historically, the Dutch, Frisian, Low Saxon and High German dialects formed a canonical dialect continuum, which has been gradually falling apart since the Late Middle Ages due to the pressures of modern education, standard languages, migration and weakening knowledge of the dialects.
Local varieties in the West Germanic dialect continuum are oriented towards either Standard Dutch or Standard German depending on which side of the border they are spoken. Another occasionally used criterion for discriminating dialects from languages is the sociolinguistic notion of linguistic authority. According to this definition, two ...
Jul 27, 2018 · The Germanic word for dialect, Mundart, emphasizes the "word of mouth" quality of a dialect (Mund = mouth). Linguists may disagree on a precise definition of just what a dialect is, but anyone who has heard the Plattdeutsch spoken in the north or the Bairisch spoken in the south knows what a dialect is.
In West Germanic, tone accent contrasts can be found in dialects spoken in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. The West Germanic tone accent area does not coincide with any of the traditional West Germanic dialect areas but covers Ripuarian, Moselle Franconian and Limburgian dialects.
