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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?
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