And “mush” has been adopted into (at least London) English as a way of addressing another man, usually with some hostility. If someone says "Listen, mush…"you’d better listen.
I just wanted to say,. thanks for all the replies. It’s helping.
I’m pretty good with English accents, but I wish I had such a fluency in other languages so I could hear their accents. I’m fascinated by the concept of someone speaking, say, German with a Southern American accent, or a French accent. I’ll never be able to hear it, of course, but I wish I could.
Here is a humorous video from one of my favorite youtubers Trixie (DontTrustTheRabbit) demonstrating 12 different German dialects. She’s really quite good at it. Can you hear the differences?
And here’s a classic sketch from Peter Frankenfeld reading the weather forecast in the dialects of the regions/cities he’s pointing at.
In the 1980s we hosted a German exchange student who had come to America from Hamburg. I asked him this question once, and he laughed and said, “There is no ‘high German’ and ‘low German.’ There is only German and Bavarian.” He drew out the second syllable of Bavarian comically (Ba-VAAAAH-rian.)
He was a little bit mischievous (by German standards) and may have been making a joke.
Must’ve been a joke, because that’s objectively untrue. I live smack dab in the middle of Germany, and only casually counting I get at least seven different major dialects spoken in a 100 km radius around here. And that’s only really major dialects. Where I live, in a mountainous region, virtually every valley/village differs a bit in accent and vocabulary.
I come from a Mennonite background. I can state without reservation that the vast majority of Mennonites who emigrated to North America in the late 1800s and early 1900s were farmers. And, depending on their point of origin, they spoke either low or high German.
My ancestors originally came from Switzerland and spoke what we called ‘Schweizer Deutsch’ (Swiss German), which I believe is a dialect of high German. As has been mentioned, other groups spoke ‘Plattdeutsch’ (low German); these folks originally came from NW Germany or the Netherlands. So the German speakers in my home community spoke high German; the German speakers in the Mennonite community 20 miles away spoke low German.
Both of these dialects are dying out, at least around my home town.
I don’t think the second sentence really works as a paraphrasing of the first one. The first sentence isn’t referring to geography at all. The point is, whether you’re in Edinburgh or whether you’re in Caithness, you will encounter people speaking broad Scots such that outsiders might not be able to understand, and you will encounter people speaking standard Scots English. And as Schnitte described above with regard to Germany, people will vary the degree of dialect/standardness according to who they are speaking to.
As it happens, I think the standard Scots English will be very similar in Caithness and Edinburgh, but the broad Scots dialect in each place will be quite different. The accents are completely different.
Although I do champion the Scots language, I’m not sure the low/high German analogy works that well; I don’t think the differences in grammar between a broad Scots dialect and standard English are as great as the differences between different German dialects, even ones which are both eg high German. It also seems to me that people higher up social and educational scales are more likely to use dialect in Germany than they would anywhere in Britain.
Apologies if I’ve misinterpreted your point, Septimus.
Not so much, at least not the way you describe. There are regional TV stations which produce TV shows using their dialect just to make a point and to preserve “linguistic diversity”. Sometimes one of these shows will even be successful nationally - even though in those cases, the “dialect” spoken on the show is often watered down to make it intelligible to audiences from other parts of the country; it would be more Standard German with some local pronunciation flavour thrown in rather than authentic dialect.
But these are cases where the use of dialect is part of the concept of the show. Newsreaders on a serious and reputable nationwide news programme would be expected to speak Standard German.
Hochdeutsch is often used to describe Standarddeutsch, aka “official” German. Which did not so much arise in the mountains, but from codifying German used in literature etc. The highland Germans are disambiguated with “Hochdeutsche Mundarten” in that case.
When I spent a lot of time in Germany, I could easily tell if someone was from Swabia, Bayern or Austria, I could also easily track Kölsch and Plattdeutsch. Speech identified origin for those with a broad accent.
Thank you!
In the girl’s video, I can hear some of the differences by reading the words and how I “expect” them to sound. But two comments: she is way too fast! No time to digest if you aren’t a German speaker. And she should really be saying (nearly, at least) the same thing in each dialect, so people like me can learn the differences.
The weather guy was just too subtle for me.
I read that when they finally allowed Hogan’s Heroes on German TV, each character had a different accent to emphasize their character. Like Inglourious Basterds, I wish I could experience that as it was meant.
What I was told was that the main characteristic that separates low from high German is that in the latter certain stops changed to fricatives or affricates (a stop-fricative) in certain phonetic contexts. As an example, I word that started out like pepper changed to Pfeffer, the first consonant an affricate and the second a fricative. Similarly a word like fut changed to fuss, book to Buch and so on. The change went even further for Swiss in which the words for cheese and cook are Kchase and kchochen. Of course, these are hardly the only differences only the ones that characterize whether a German dialect or a Germanic language is low or high. English, Dutch, Frisian, low German are low and high German and Swiss are high.
Incidentally a native German colleague of mine spent a year in Zurich and it took that year before he could understand Swiss.