Re:The use of Plattdeutsch and od High German dialects today

Hi J�rgen
I agree with allot of things you wrote about the Plattdeutsch.
My ancestors come from
Sachsen, Mecklenburg, Pommern, Brandenburg and Hamburg.
I was born in Brandenburg put raised by a grandmother from Pomerania in the Lower -Saxony.
I still rember allot of songs and poems.
I still can remember as a girl , each village had there own "Slang".
They called it Platt.
It was no Plattdeutsch it was a mixture of there own language for that area I guess they lived in. The older people would speak High German but as soon they
wanted to say some thing, that may not every one should hear, they changed to the Platt.

I think we need to make a different between the Plattdeutsch from the northern part of Germany and the Platt some people speak in some villages thru out Germany. I think a lot of Platt is a slang from the German language.
Many may not agree with me. But that is the way I feel.

I speak now German with a Southern American accent, and English with a
Southern American and German accent.
What a mess.
Greetings from Arkansas
Katharina

Hi Katharina,

oh, yes, now I really do understand what you mean by "Platt": the (central
an upper German) dialect you remember from your youth in the villages!

So you're partly right: Even some dialect speakers in Germany call their
local slang "Platt". This is correct. But the word "Platt" for dialect is
only used among some Central German dialects. The upper German dialects
don't use this word for their slang.

But: You have to distinguish "Platt" as the shortening of "Plattdeutsch" and
"Platt" as the German word for "dialect", a word which comes from the Greek
language.

So the real Plattdeutsch in fact is a *language* as well as High German is.
Both have the same origin in the dialects of the Western Germanic tribes.
These tribes were classified as "Nordseegermanen" (the later Frisians,
Saxons, Angles, Jutes), "Weser-Rhein-Germanen" (the later Franks, Hessians)
and "Elbgermanen" (the later Lombards, southern Thuringians -> Franconians,
Bavarians, Alemannians).

Exactly the area where the North Sea Germanic tribes settled for centuries
is what until today shows the distribution of Plattdeutsch (Westfalen,
Niedersachsen, Bremen, Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein / Westphalia, Lower
Saxony, B., H., S-H).

The area of the "Weser-Rhine tribes" is the current Central Germany
(Nordrhein, Pfalz, Saarland, Hessen / Nordrhine area, Palatinate, Saarland,
Hesse, Thuringia), and the "Elbe tribes" migrated south and settled in
Franconia, Bavaria, Austria, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Switzerland an the Alsace,
that's all Upper Germany.

Around 800 A.D. already existed a clear segregation between Old Low German
and Old High German (consisting of Central and Upper German dialects).
Later, in the so-called "2. Germanische Lautverschiebung" (2nd Germanic
phonetical change) this segregation became one big step clearer; then
followed the Middle High German period from 1150 A.D. until about 1500 A.D..
Already since about 1200 A.D. the Middle Low Frankish took its first steps
to develop to a language, the current Dutch.

Then, starting about in the Reformation time, followed the New High German
period which still lasts on.

Greetings / Viele Gr��e,

J�rgen

And Mecklenburg ......

Klaus

Klaus Cook wrote:

But that I guess was because of immigration, that the majority of the
immigrating Germans of the 12th century were speaking low German? Before
1100, only Slavic languages were spoken in Mecklenburg?

Another question: I have several places read that the main reason for
high German becoming the common written language of all German states
(while in the 14th to early 15th century it could look like low German
was more dominating) was that Luther translated the Bible to high
German. However, during my vacation in Mecklenburg this summer, I saw in
many churches (grave stones, apitaphiums etc.) sentences from the Bible
in Plattdeutch, mainly from the 16th and early 17th century. So it
looked that there also existed printed versions of the Bible in
Plattdeutch quite early after Luther?

Per B. Lilje
Oslo, Norway