| 3.1 German Dialects |
The German language has many dialects like for example the Aleman, Bavarian, Swabian, Swiss German or the Saxonian. And how do the differenct dialects sound? You might ask. We'll give you some examples. Listen to the same poem recited in different dialects. It's by a German poet Matthias Claudius (1740 - 1815).
Seht ihr den Mond dort stehen?
Er ist nur halb zu sehen
und ist doch rund und schön.
So geht´s mit vielen Sachen,
die wir getrost verlachen,
weil unsere Augen sie nicht sehen.
Do you see the moon up there
you only see half of it
b ut it is round and beautiful
this is like with many other things
at which we laugh
because our eyes can't see them.
| Let's listen to the different dialects |
| Ahora vamos a escuchar cómo suena este poema en los diferentes dialectos. |
| standard German | |
| Swabian German | |
| Saxonian German | |
| upper Bavarian German | |
| Swiss German | |
| Plattdeutsch* | |
* Plattdeutsch is actually not a dialect but a language in its own right. Plattdeutsch is so different from standard German that you can't call it a dialect any more. It is spoken in areas
in Northern Germany.
| With different accents it sounds like this |
| French accent |
|
| English accent |
Note: For a German the poem is most beautiful in standard
German. The dialects and their own coloration is so
strong that the even the rhyme is lost. In other circumstances
a dialect can be very beautiful. This what we are going
to present is standard German (= Hochdeutsch). We'd
rather not discuss the differences of the dialects and
the standard German. But it general you can say that
standard German is accepted as the normative. Depending
where you mind land in Germany and have first contacts
with "native inhabitants" it might sound quite
different to that what we present here. But you can
be assured that you will be understood and usually people
do know Hochdeutsch. Anyway the same happens when looking
at all the different countries that have English as
the official language. There are some places in the language where words are different,
but in general people are able to communicate and that's
the most important.
| contact privacy statement imprint |
