![]() My parents were of Mennonite descent, started a family in Canada, and primarily spoke Low German at home until my siblings and I began schooling in English. That seems to help.)Īs a native Low German speaker, I would like to add that even with some informal education in High German, I have a hard time following it. I switch dialects without thinking about it. I grew up near the Belgium border in the Netherlands, with family living in Limburg and Noord-Holland. (Personally I can understand most German dialects quite easily, but it seems very hard for Germans that grew up just using High German. To me it seems that people who are accustomed to hearing various dialects have less trouble understanding a foreign language that has dialect variants too. In either case it helps if you come from a region in Germany or the Netherlands that already has multiple dialects spoken in the area. I understand that most German speakers can follow Low German about just as easily. (Unless the speaker talks quickly and/or uses certain dialects.) ![]() Until the 11th and 12th centuries AD, English (Old English or 'Anglo-Saxon') would have been similar enough to the continental Germanic languages to be close to them on this continuum, but today it's very different.įrom a practical perspective it is a language, but it's quite similar to both Dutch and German.Īs for understanding it: As someone who is Dutch with a decent grip on German I can usually understand Low German without too much trouble. Low German remains a sort of "in-between" language somewhere between Standard German and (old) Dutch.Īs for whether or not Low German is a separate language: Linguists generally consider all Germanic languages from English to the High German dialects spoken in Switzerland, Austria and southern Germany (including Dutch, Frisian, Low German, and Standard German) to be part of a 'West Germanic dialect continuum' which includes many of the languages in the West Germanic subfamily of the broader Germanic group of languages (which also includes, among others, the Scandinavian and other 'North Germanic' languages). The variants that evolved outside Europe picked up additional foreign elements, but also remained closer to the original old-German roots, mainly due to isolation of the people speaking it. It picked up influences from English, Dutch and Frisian too, albeit less then Dutch did. Amish) and other German minorities that immigrated because of social, religious and/or econimical pressure in the Heimat. ![]() Low German also got exported to the USA, Canada and Brazil with the Mennonites (e.g. In Germany High German (Hochdeutsch) became today's Standard German, but Low German still survives as day to day language for many people in northern Germany. In the Netherlands eventually Dutch went its own way, with influences from English and Frisian and (to a lesser extent) French. Originally there were 3 general geographically separated forms of German: Low German spoken in (roughly) northern and western Germany and the Netherlands, named for the flat lowlands of these areas, Central German and High German spoken in south and east Germany, named for the more mountainous nature of the areas where they were spoken. Low German (Niederdeutsch or Plattdeutsch) is an old form of German that survived the move to a more standardized generic German (Hochdeutsch).
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