German dialect usage without post-WW-II expulsions

What am I to say? I'm a mid-1980s born guy from an otherwise unremarkable city in northern Württemberg which is less known for losing a medieval inner city in WW2 raids than for its place in the traffic news on the radio as its next to an autobahn interjunction (A 6, Heilbronn direction Pilsen, between Nuremberg-South and Nuremberg-East, jam of 10 kilometers after accident).

I, mostly, speak pure Standard German to a point that people ask me if I really descended there, even in aforementioned town (Is this your son? Why doesn't he speak Swabian?). True, I learned to read and write when I was four and had been a TV addict and I was very happy when we got cable television when I was five. Everything in Hochdeutsch (literally High German, actually Standard German). But also our newspapers, only in Hochdeutsch. Elementary teachers disliked that I watched that much TV instead of doing my homework, but they didn't object my way to speak. Schooling is also done in Hochdeutsch. And most of my classmates also spoke Hochdeutsch. Having your family and your more than ripe-aged neighbors speaking dialects, but having the rest of the world, your classmates and your sexy but irresponsive elementary love speaking Hochdeutsch, the dialect becomes incredibly unsexy in your mind...

Wait a minute, my classmates? Where did they come from? Upper class academic children, some 3rd-generation guest worker children (now people with migration background, I dislike PC), an Austrian boy with alpine-looking clothes, one or another Saxonian girl coming to the golden West with their parents, later other "Spätaussiedler" (Transylvanian Germans, Poland Germans, Russian Germans etc.), a lady of Hungarian parents and with an Austrian passport, a half-African-American girl with a lone German mother, a GDR-Algerian hybrid born in the West before the fall of the wall, a half-Ghanese girl with a Danish boyfriend...


People nowadays complain the progressing death of dialects in Germany, especially our Southerners complain greatly though their dialects survived best.

Who's to blame for Germany's perceived dialectocide? Mass media? Increasing mobility? Thande? Or is it the millions of East Germans after World War II who had to move to what remained of Germany? Their native dialects became of course moribund because the base was lost due to expulsion, but the receiving regions changed their dialects too. There are rumours that major cities in Germany had quite distinguishable dialects in any neighborhood, but that this has been minced up by the chaos of the war. Cologne and Francfort of course, Hamburg maybe as well, ethnically cleansed Breslau (now Wroclaw) also had neighborhood dialects. Munich retained its Bavarian city dialect, but there are complaints that it got entirely extinct among the youngest generation. Don't ask me if the dies for Standard German or a general Bavarian regiolect, maybe both. Berlinerisch is said to be still very vivid, a Low German dialect that transformed into Central German, but it's been a melting pot for centuries and therefore continiously adapting. The French Hugenottes, the Silesians, the West German peaceniks who deserted from draft to demilitarized Berlin. The so-called "Berlin time expressions" with are structurally similar to Czech conventions are actually found in virtually all of South and East Germany (unless you know German, ignore the link).


What do you think would German dialect usage be like without the population transfers after World War II? Which situation would we have today, without population transfers, but with the maybe inevitable consequences of mass media influence?

What about similar scenarios in other countries with comparable fates? Did e.g. Smyrnian Greeks have a lethal effect on Athenian and Salonikian dialects?
 
What about similar scenarios in other countries with comparable fates? Did e.g. Smyrnian Greeks have a lethal effect on Athenian and Salonikian dialects?
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Well, I do know that when the Pontic Greeks landed in Thessaloniki and Athens, no one knew what these Pontians were talking about (since the dialect diverged so much from the koiné that is the basis of most Modern Greek dialects (with the exception of Tsakonian). The Smyrna didn't differ (IIRC) too much from the rest of the koiné, but it differed enough that there would some significant barriers to communication (had not the genre of music called rempetika developed). Even then, the Thessaloniki dialect differs enough from the koiné and the Athenian dialect was displaced from its home around the 19th century, to be replaced by Standard Modern Greek.
 
What am I to say? I'm a mid-1980s born guy from an otherwise unremarkable city in northern Württemberg which is less known for losing a medieval inner city in WW2 raids than for its place in the traffic news on the radio as its next to an autobahn interjunction (A 6, Heilbronn direction Pilsen, between Nuremberg-South and Nuremberg-East, jam of 10 kilometers after accident).

I, mostly, speak pure Standard German to a point that people ask me if I really descended there, even in aforementioned town (Is this your son? Why doesn't he speak Swabian?). True, I learned to read and write when I was four and had been a TV addict and I was very happy when we got cable television when I was five. Everything in Hochdeutsch (literally High German, actually Standard German). But also our newspapers, only in Hochdeutsch. Elementary teachers disliked that I watched that much TV instead of doing my homework, but they didn't object my way to speak. Schooling is also done in Hochdeutsch. And most of my classmates also spoke Hochdeutsch. Having your family and your more than ripe-aged neighbors speaking dialects, but having the rest of the world, your classmates and your sexy but irresponsive elementary love speaking Hochdeutsch, the dialect becomes incredibly unsexy in your mind...

Wait a minute, my classmates? Where did they come from? Upper class academic children, some 3rd-generation guest worker children (now people with migration background, I dislike PC), an Austrian boy with alpine-looking clothes, one or another Saxonian girl coming to the golden West with their parents, later other "Spätaussiedler" (Transylvanian Germans, Poland Germans, Russian Germans etc.), a lady of Hungarian parents and with an Austrian passport, a half-African-American girl with a lone German mother, a GDR-Algerian hybrid born in the West before the fall of the wall, a half-Ghanese girl with a Danish boyfriend...


People nowadays complain the progressing death of dialects in Germany, especially our Southerners complain greatly though their dialects survived best.

Who's to blame for Germany's perceived dialectocide? Mass media? Increasing mobility? Thande? Or is it the millions of East Germans after World War II who had to move to what remained of Germany? Their native dialects became of course moribund because the base was lost due to expulsion, but the receiving regions changed their dialects too. There are rumours that major cities in Germany had quite distinguishable dialects in any neighborhood, but that this has been minced up by the chaos of the war. Cologne and Francfort of course, Hamburg maybe as well, ethnically cleansed Breslau (now Wroclaw) also had neighborhood dialects. Munich retained its Bavarian city dialect, but there are complaints that it got entirely extinct among the youngest generation. Don't ask me if the dies for Standard German or a general Bavarian regiolect, maybe both. Berlinerisch is said to be still very vivid, a Low German dialect that transformed into Central German, but it's been a melting pot for centuries and therefore continiously adapting. The French Hugenottes, the Silesians, the West German peaceniks who deserted from draft to demilitarized Berlin. The so-called "Berlin time expressions" with are structurally similar to Czech conventions are actually found in virtually all of South and East Germany (unless you know German, ignore the link).


What do you think would German dialect usage be like without the population transfers after World War II? Which situation would we have today, without population transfers, but with the maybe inevitable consequences of mass media influence?

What about similar scenarios in other countries with comparable fates? Did e.g. Smyrnian Greeks have a lethal effect on Athenian and Salonikian dialects?

Interesting post! This isn't an answer to your question (as I don't speak standart German, let alone its dialects), but I once heard that in some parts of Italy dialects are used as a way to distinguish local residents (whose ancestors have been in a region for generations) from newlly arrived imigrants from other Italian regions or from abroad. As the new-commers and their kids only speak "standart Italian" (or whatever it is called), those who want to emphazise that they have been in the place for a much longer time than them speak in the regional dialect. This keeps the regional dialects alive, even if in not the best of ways. The dialects adquires a sort of aristocratic air (as it distinguishes long-standiong residents from immigrants), instead of being the second-class tongue spoken by the old and by the uneducated peasants.

No idea if anything of this is true or not. But if it is, might not something like this happen in Germany in the future, as it is also a country whose relatively late unification as a nation-state made regional dialects divert much more than ithose of countries unified much earlier???
 
but I once heard that in some parts of Italy dialects are used as a way to distinguish local residents (whose ancestors have been in a region for generations) from newlly arrived imigrants from other Italian regions or from abroad.

Isn't that also true, to some degree, with Spanish, i.e. one could tell which part of Latin America or Spain one comes from just by dialect?
 

Valdemar II

Banned
In Copenhagens there's several different dialects, from the rich in the Wiskey Belt to the Workers in the West Area, to the different cityblock dialects of the inner city*. I guess many bigger German cities would keep their dialects if they didn't receive so many refugees. Interesting fact one of the reason the Danish minority (and the wish to get annexed by Denmark) in South Schleswig exploded (from 12000 to +100000**) after the war was to avoid East German and Volkdeutsche resettlement.

*Somewhat indangered.

**falled again in the postwar and stabilised at around 50000.
 
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Isn't that also true, to some degree, with Spanish, i.e. one could tell which part of Latin America or Spain one comes from just by dialect?

Well, in the Americas one can know where one is from just by the way he speaks. Those who have visited a lot of countries can pinpoint the country and even the region within a country where one comes from. But I think that difference between, let's say, Colombian and Argentinian Spanish, though very significant (in pronunciation, accent, expressions or vocabulary) aren't that great as the ones that exists beween Sicilian and Venetian dialects (which I was told were mutually unintelligible). That's why I don't know if Argentinian or Colombian Spanish are considered "dialects".

Spain may be different, as there you've got Asturian and other languages(?)/dialects(?) closely related to Castilian, but yet different (structuraly differently).

Still, at least here in Buenos Aires, dialect isn't used to distinguish locals from foreigners. Or maybe it is, but only in the first generation. Kids of Peruvian or Bolivian immigrants learn pretty soon to speak like a Rioplatense. Thus, language isn't a barrier. In Italy (if what I heard was true), that wouldn't happened, as the kids of immigrants would learn "Standart Italian", not the local dialect (which is something passed down from parents to children). Thus, even those born in a region wouldn't know the local dialect if their parents were immigrants (if TV and classes are in Italian, and everybody understands Italian, why bother?). So, language might still work as a sort of social barrier that keeps immigrants apart...

Disclaim: All this sounds interesting, but is pure speculation. I don't know if it's true.
 
In Norwegian one can also tell from what part of the country you are from, and from what part of the city in Oslo at lest. As for German, I had standard German as a third language in lower secondary school, and got some help from the family. Now I have 3 fluent German speakers in my close family, my father who speaks Swiss German, his mother who speaks hear native German, she was born and raised in Kattowitz in Oberschlesien. My other grandmother speaks the old Praha German/Austrian dialect. When I in my great cunning got some help from all off them on a paper my teacher had great difficulty in understanding it.
 
I'd like to know what our other fellow Germans have to say...

Well Dr. No, off the top of my head, I'd say you're raising an interesting point. Specifically, I personally have been wondering for quite some time what Silesian and East Prussian dialects sounded like - I don't even know that! :eek:

As for who is to blame, I'm pondering that radio and in particular television is probably to be blamed for the dialect extinction/demise. I mean, even the regional TV stations (BR, HR, SWR, WDR, etc.) make their programs in Hochdeutsch, as do most radio stations - just something I noticed as I was thinking about it.

Also, something I noticed is that immigrants (even in the 3rd generation) virtually never adopt local dialects - they either retain the accent of their country of origin, or Hochdeutsch.

So, in essence, I don't think how things would run differently without the explusions. Maybe we'd have a "Schlesischer Rundfunk" today, and "Radio und Television Königsberg", though... :D
 
Ironically, a victory of Hitler might've lead to a similar result - if his crazy plan to settle millions of Germans (and maybe Dutch, Scandinavians and others too) in the east had worked, it would lead to a mingling and mixing, and not too much later, these people wouldn't speak any dialect at all.
 
Originally posted by Emperor Qianlong
Also, something I noticed is that immigrants (even in the 3rd generation) virtually never adopt local dialects - they either retain the accent of their country of origin, or Hochdeutsch.

I beg to differ. I got several friends who are quite speaking the local dialect (well, maybe not 100% but still well enough to idetify the region where they grew up)
Although admittedly about half of them are rather 5th or 6th generation, not 3rd or 2nd (yet, even those exist)
 
IIRC, informal Belgian Dutch is becoming slightly more like the Antwerpian dialect due to most tv-series being based there. Belgian Dutch already was becoming more different from the Hollandocentric Dutch Dutch language anyway.

(Do not confuse Flemish with Belgian Dutch when it comes to languages. The Flemish language is mainly found in Flanders, the two most western provinces of the Flemish Region that is also named Flanders, which is more Hollandic in nature than the Brabantian Antwerpian)
 
I'd still think dialects will be struggling. And there would still be a lot of population movement- people heading to certain cities for jobs and whatnot.
Just look to the UK. Our dialects are suffering greatly and being watered down heavily but we never had all that.
Its the mass media which is most to blaim.
 
On the other hand, I feel like a revival of lower German dialects or at least some words and phrases. Haven't been to Hamburg for quite a while, but there were some Plattdeutsch radio shows, music playing in the pub and teenagers using those words. The Plattdeutsch language, of course, hasn't been used, but it seemed like many people, especially young ones, wish to have some sort of "local identification" back and they found it in a language that seemed to be almost dead.
 
I'd still think dialects will be struggling. And there would still be a lot of population movement- people heading to certain cities for jobs and whatnot.
Just look to the UK. Our dialects are suffering greatly and being watered down heavily but we never had all that.
Its the mass media which is most to blaim.

I don't know, the 'royal us' is still alive in Yorkshire (as in "Is us tea ready yet?")!
 
In a world where everyone has TV and people move around their nation to find work, dialects have no place. I have a friend who is currently in Aachen; he said that everyone there speaks Hochdeutsch expect for some old people who, according to him, sound like they're Dutch.
 
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