Should German count as only one language?

[memphis]

From my limited experience, no. Every language has its dialects sure, but what they speak in Switzerland is a whole different thing from how one speaks in Berlin. Plenty of German experts around. Fill me in.

[ZuWo]

Linguistically speaking, there are good reasons to regard German varieties like Swiss German and other varieties spoken in the German-speaking world as separate languages. Luxemburgish, for example, is considered a language in its own right even though it shares many similarities with dialects spoken in the west of Germany. A person from Berlin certainly doesn't understand a lot when he hears a Swiss speaker for the first time.

The answer to the question whether a certain variety is a language or a dialect is often political. Luxemburg, for instance, decided to grant its dialects the status of an official language. In Switzerland, however, there is a stable diglossic situation; High German is used in closely defined domains (e.g. education, certain television programs, Parliament), while Swiss German is used by nearly everyone in the German-speaking part in everyday life. The official language here is High German.

So, to cut a long story short: It's difficult to answer this question in a straightforward way. You can say "German" is only one language - that would be a political definition - or you can count clearly distinct varieties as separate languages.

[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.

[Antonio the Sixth]

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.

[fezzyfestoon]

The Austrian German I learned was serviceable when I went to Munich, but I'm sure they knew instantly that I was both American and learning Austrian German.

[Franzl]

The Austrian German I learned was serviceable when I went to Munich, but I'm sure they knew instantly that I was both American and learning Austrian German.

Yes that'd certainly be detectable. Austrian (except perhaps those from Vorarlberg) always works in Germany, for the most part.

[memphis]

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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligurian_(Romance_language)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piedmontese_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.

[Middle-aged Europe]

Of the Austrian dialects, Viennese is the most hilarious. Everybody sounds like a snobbish gay.

[Bunwahaha [still dunno why, but well, so be it]]

Ah well, when I was in trouble in Ober Bayern with my German, I spoke English.

Well, ok, I was in a family in which the Herr was lawyer in München, and the Frau was...hmm...a kind of crazy-slightly Peter Pan-kind of jewel or clothes creator who was about 10-20 years younger than him, she was nice though. Not really the kind of 'Grüss Got' people hidden in the mountains then. They once took me to some of those totally hidden though, to which you can only access by a road that seems to have 20% of inclination and which seems to be about 1m large, and on which you wonder how the f**k it would happen if an other car comes in the other sens, especially when you're in a big Mercedes that might be twice larger than the road (still didn't found out how it could happen, especially since it's like that on about several kilometers). And then you can find nice 'Grüss Got' farmers at the top of it, don't remember for which kind of food it was, but I'm not sure those speak exactly the same language, they seemed to understand each other though.

Ah France has a lot of dialects too (I don't mean regional languages, but patois), but I think most French speakers in France, Belgium, Switzerland, or African countries can understand each other without much problems. Hmm, for Québequois, once you pass the obstacle of the over big accent ^^, it would be quite accessible too, but as I said in the other thread, sometimes they can be quite different.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

Well, it's nothing if compared to Arabic.

[memphis]

Well, it's nothing if compared to Arabic.

While we're playing that game, we may as well point out Chinese.

[Ban my account ffs!]

The fact that most Austrians I met the first time thought I was German says a lot about the strength of dialects.  Then when I was in Germany, they laughed at me because I used a lot of Austrian words and idioms and spoke with a sort of American/Austrian hybrid accent... they especially noticed it when I said the word interesting... or Österreich.. the native word for Austria.

But Austrian German is very much a dialect and not a separate language.  While it took me a while to get used to it, it's not even as difficult as it is for Americans to understand someone with a strong Scottish brogue.  At least in my experience.

I lucked out though because my friends came from all over... Vorarlberg, Vienna, Tyrol, South Tyrol, Carinthia, and especially Upper Austria... and also from eastern Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, and Stuttgart... so I had to learn to understand a variety of dialects.

But when my friends from South Tyrol would converse with, say, someone from Upper Austria.. they used the same words for the most part.. just had slightly different accents.

However, most of the Germans would speak completely understandable Hochdeutsch.

I knew two brothers from Upper Austria and one of them went to school in Salzburg, the other in Munich and only after a year at university, the brother in Munich had pretty much switched over to speaking high German except for the word "nicht", which he still pronounced "net".  His brother that stayed in Austria spoke with a full Upper Austrian dialect.

So I don't know what to make of that.  If the guy in Munich had treated the language there like a foreign language, you'd think he'd speak high German there and then come home and speak in his normal Austrian German... but his dialect and accent actually changed... like if an American were to move to Scotland and live there for years.. he'd probably have an obvious bit of a Scottish accent when he returned to America.

[Tender Branson]

I knew two brothers from Upper Austria and one of them went to school in Salzburg, the other in Munich and only after a year at university, the brother in Munich had pretty much switched over to speaking high German except for the word "nicht", which he still pronounced "net".  His brother that stayed in Austria spoke with a full Upper Austrian dialect.

So I don't know what to make of that.  If the guy in Munich had treated the language there like a foreign language, you'd think he'd speak high German there and then come home and speak in his normal Austrian German... but his dialect and accent actually changed... like if an American were to move to Scotland and live there for years.. he'd probably have an obvious bit of a Scottish accent when he returned to America.

I know what you mean. A good friend of mine since middle school is now studying medicine in Vienna (already for 5 years now) and when he comes back into town during the summer or during christmas holidays and we go for a drink or playing pool, he has adopted (very slightly) this Vienna dialect. Of course in university you only talk standard-German, so it's normal that your dialect at home changes a bit. I like to correct him once he uses something very Viennese in our discussions. But once he starts saying Uber-Viennese things like "Ur-leiwand" or "hoggn" for work, I'll probably punch him in his face to remind him where he's from ...

[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.

[ZuWo]

So let's compare different German dialects with concrete examples. I made up the following Standard High German sentence and would like to have it translated into different German varieties. Maybe some other German-speaking users will help me and write how the sentence sounds in their dialect. The sentence just serves the purpose of comparing some varieties - don't look too much at the content.

The English translation of the following sentence is something like "I'm staying at home today because I got sick yesterday."

Standard High German: Ich bleibe heute zu Hause, weil ich gestern krank wurde.
Swiss German: Ich blib hüt dihei, wil ich geschter chrank worde bi.

[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.

[Gustaf]

A friend's uncle was a politician in Austria. He had to have an interpreter in certain places to communicate with the locals when campaigning.

[Tender Branson]

A friend's uncle was a politician in Austria. He had to have an interpreter in certain places to communicate with the locals when campaigning.

Lol, what ?

Was the guy from Vienna and wanted to campaign in Vorarlberg ?

Because I don't see how anyone from the other 8 states would beed an interpreter in these states other than maybe Vorarlberg.

Unless the uncle was a foreigner and not capable of the Austrian-German ...

[Tender Branson]

So let's compare different German dialects with concrete examples. I made up the following Standard High German sentence and would like to have it translated into different German varieties. Maybe some other German-speaking users will help me and write how the sentence sounds in their dialect. The sentence just serves the purpose of comparing some varieties - don't look too much at the content.

The English translation of the following sentence is something like "I'm staying at home today because I got sick yesterday."

Standard High German: Ich bleibe heute zu Hause, weil ich gestern krank wurde.
Swiss German: Ich blib hüt dihei, wil ich geschter chrank worde bi.

Zell am See German:

I bleib heit dahoam, waö I gestan kronch woan bi.

[Tender Branson]

Dictionary I found:

English-Pinzgauerisch-German



PS: Pinzgau is the name of the Zell am See district.

[LBJer]

As has already been noted on this thread, the question of what's a "language" as opposed to a "dialect" of a language doesn't have a clear, objective answer.  Many people make the distinction based on mutual intelligibility--if people speaking and/or writing can understand each other, then there's one language, if they can't, there isn't.  But even mutual intelligibility has problems.  What if speakers of one thing and speakers of another can understand 50% of each other's speech?  Do they speak the same language or not?  Obviously the speech of the two groups isn't "mutually intelligible" in the sense that, say, Standard American and Standard British English are.  But neither are they mutually unintelligible in the sense that English and Japanese are.  So the definition of mutual intelligibility itself is arbitrary--how much comprehension in necessary for two forms of speech to qualify as a language? 

I think that politics and objective linguistic differences both play a role in whether something is considered a language or a dialect, although the former is usually more important.

I voted yes to German being one language for two reasons.  One is that it's not clear what is meant by "German."  Some people use the word to refer only to Standard German, and that's a reasonable definition.  Secondly, it's true that the regional varieties of German (for example, Swabian) usually aren't mutually intelligible with each other, as far as I know.  But at the same time, most of them form part of a "dialect continuum" where speakers of neighboring dialects can understand each other well, but speakers of far apart dialects cannot.  It would therefore be unclear where to draw the line between many of these dialects in order to divide them into separate languages.  And this continuum doesn't extend, except for certain border areas, into non-Germanic neighbors like France or Italy.  The dialects can therefore be considered one big continuum of "German" even if many of the individual speakers wouldn't be able to understand each other--and of course, virtually everyone in Germany speaks Standard German today anyway, so this is not the case.

[Gustaf]

A friend's uncle was a politician in Austria. He had to have an interpreter in certain places to communicate with the locals when campaigning.

Lol, what ?

Was the guy from Vienna and wanted to campaign in Vorarlberg ?

Because I don't see how anyone from the other 8 states would beed an interpreter in these states other than maybe Vorarlberg.

Unless the uncle was a foreigner and not capable of the Austrian-German ...

No, he's an Austrian. I think he was from Vienna. I couldn't tell you where the interpreter was needed though - it was somewhere.

[memphis]

Gus, while you're here I may as well turn the table on you. I've heard the argument that Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish should be classified as one Scandinavian language. Fair or no? And I don't buy the requisite literary precedent argument for the defintion of a language. Most languages in the world have little to no extant literature.

[Insula Dei]

Aren't all dialects difficult to understand when you're not used to them? I speak Dutch with a Flemish accent (well, a Limburg accent to be exact, which is different yet from a mainstream Flemish one, though not as different as it would have been if I was born in Dutch Limburg), yet I don't understand much from anyone who speaks the dialect of West-Flanders.

[Gustaf]

Gus, while you're here I may as well turn the table on you. I've heard the argument that Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish should be classified as one Scandinavian language. Fair or no? And I don't buy the requisite literary precedent argument for the defintion of a language. Most languages in the world have little to no extant literature.

Well...it's more or less fair. Swedes, Danes and Norwegians can pretty much understand each other if they try.

I think the intrinsic differences are certainly a lot smaller than within German or Chinese, to give examples that have been discussed here.

Of course, since they have different countries they do have different written languages and so on.