Should German count as only one language?

[minionofmidas]

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Switzerland and Austria have no navies, hence their (highly, in the Swiss case) divergent dialects do not count as languages. The Netherlands have a navy as well as an army, so even though their dialect is about as distant as the Swiss (clearly related, but not actually intelligible - indeed I'd say the three, with German, are about equidistant from each other) it counts as a separate language.

A person from Berlin certainly doesn't understand a lot when he hears a Swiss speaker for the first time.

A person from anywhere in Germany outside southern Baden understands almost everything when he hears a Swiss speaker for the first time. Then, a quarter of an hour into the conversation, he is made to comprehend that what he's been hearing so far is not Swiss German at all, but High German with a strong Swiss German accent, or what passes for High German in Switzerland.

[minionofmidas]

Every language has its dialects sure, but what they speak in Switzerland is a whole different thing from how one speaks in Berlin.

You clearly don't know about Italian dialects.

At least Italians get recognized for their seperate languages on their wikipedia articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardinian_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friulan_language
German merely gets attention to the fact that there are "dialects." Even with my limited knowledge of German, I'm calling bs on that.

No idea about the two I snipped, but Friulan is definitely a language, Sardinian is a language (or at least a highly divergent dialect cluster), and Sicilian and Venetian have old literary traditions and a history of administrative use before being replaced with Italian. That's not true of any German "dialects" except Low German.

[minionofmidas]

Isch bleib heut [or heit] dehaam, weil isch krank geworde bin gestern.

Sounds wrong without some filler word before "krank". Of course, hessian orthography is not something that any sort of standard exists on. "ei" in bleib and weil could probably be rendered as "a" instead. Americans would strenuously deny the existence of an r in "geworde". etc. Thank God the sentence has no [ʒ]... there's really no way to render it in German orthography and Hessian is chock full of it.

Oh, and the final b of bleib might slur into a w, with the following h lost. We take purely phonetic voiced/voiceless contrasts to a new level.

[minionofmidas]

Fellow German posters, try to translate these 2 dialect-sentences into Standard-German:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I'll give you one tip:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

This is a brutal example of why our dialect could be its own language ...

Well, the second sentence is easy. Schau dir an, wie das bei den Weibern ankommt.

The first though.... uh. What?

[minionofmidas]

'Brussels - Charleroi' is great. Like having... oh... how about 'Cardiff - Rhondda', except that you could never build an airport up there. 'Leeds - Barnsley', perhaps?

Nothing will ever beat "Frankfurt-Hahn". It's actually closer to Luxembourg.

[minionofmidas]

And now in English:

"Two years ago on Christmas Day, out of boredom, after taking a shower I quickly colored my armpit hair on both sides green. Let's see how this works out with the ladies."

Häsch das würkli gmacht?

(Have you really done that?)

LOL. no.

Pics or it did actually happen.

[minionofmidas]

While we're complaining about airport distances, London's Stansted is quite a distance out as well.

Stansted is on the far outer edge of the contiguous London metro, the only place a major airport has any business whatsoever being.

[minionofmidas]

I find a major airport in the middle of a city pretty damn inconvenient, thank you very much.

[minionofmidas]

Oh, quality of life, city planning, property values, the works.

[minionofmidas]

You didn't? Then you didn't go into the right direction from the airport. EastSouthEast, in this case.
Anyways, Berlin's a much more closely knit metro than London (for obvious historical reasons), no one's thinking about ever enlarging Tegel again, and the airport they're actually enlarging and trying to make into the main airport is further out. (Heathrow, of course, being the London airport where an issue exists. And being much closer in than Stansted, within Greater London, but also within a basically suburban part of it. Munich Airport, of course, is a similar distance from the city as Stansted, in a smaller though just as huge-interrupted-hard-to-define metro area. This is as it should be.)
Have a look around. Most major American airports have a splotch of suburban slum next door. I can't look into development histories, but I'd wager a bet most of them weren't laid out to be... at least not any laid out before the airport itself was built. It's pretty hard on homeowners if the place's worth halves. Especially if you've got a mortgage on it.

[minionofmidas]

I am heartened by the fact that not only are our European posters not ashamed to admit that they have a dialect but openly boast about theirs and discuss it publically.  I wonder if dialect-shame is a concept unique to the US

I wonder if teaching kids that how they speak at home is "wrong" is a concept unique to the US...

God, no.

[minionofmidas]

People speaking fully-formed dialect  are usually what you'd term the traditional working class, especially rural working class.

I mean, I know men who come from villages around Butzbach or Bad Nauheim, commute to work in Vilbel, are only in their fourties, and who couldn't order a sandwich unassisted anywhere north of Frankenberg or south of Mannheim. But anybody from Frankfurt or Vilbel of whom you could say that is a farmer past the age of retirement.

[minionofmidas]

Egad, I accidentally edited my post instead of self-quoting. So the original is lost but here's the editted version reposted to the bottom of the thread.

People speaking fully-formed dialect  are usually what you'd term the traditional working class, especially rural working class.

I mean, I know men who come from villages around Butzbach or Bad Nauheim, commute to work in Vilbel, are only in their fourties, and who couldn't order a sandwich unassisted anywhere north of Frankenberg or south of Mannheim. But anybody from Frankfurt or Vilbel of whom you could say that is a farmer past the age of retirement.
[/quote]

[minionofmidas]

Arnold Stadler on the dialect he learned as a kid (born near Meßkirch in 1954. Well, born in Meßkirch but that's just because he was born in hospital rather than at home.)

In the beginning I was just matter, child matter, called die War. The word is not identical to German Ware [ware, merchandise] but dates back to proto-German and means the born (compare English to bear), ie all of a woman's live births. The word was preserved that long basically only in Schwackenreute, beyond the forest. But now it was retiring from circulation as we didn't understand it anymore, just like die Weiber [women] and other old words. Instead we were once again supposed to say Mädels, a nazi word, that had crept into standard language a second time via televison.
One day someone came back from the city and said "ich war" [I was]. And thus a false, superficial past tense had been introduced to us on top of everything else. Until then, that direction had been called "xai", Chinese as that may sound, "xai" - "ge-sein" rendered into standard orthography [ugh... "a-be"? "sein" is "to be", the infinitive form] , which meant anything not entirely lost to memory: I bi xai - "I am been".

[minionofmidas]

What is the status of foreign language education in Europe? Is it normal for so many Europeans as we have on this forum to be fluent in English? In the US you are not expected to begin learning foreign language until age 11 or 12 and then it is only required for two to four years, and as a result most Americans do not speak a foreign language unless they have made a special effort or are in a peculiar circumstance.

You're still not legally required to start learning a foreign language before the age of 10 here... though opportunities to do so have certainly been proliferated since my time... and it's still technically possible to avoid that language being English.
But you'll be starting a second foreign language two years later. And you'll be doing at least one of them until the day you finish school.
Third foreign language education, though, once the norm if you wanted to go on to university, is much in decay.