Butjer

The Lindener Butjer by the sculptor Ulrike Enders, set up in Linden in 1990

The word Butjer (also Buttjer or Buttje ) has a Low German origin and describes energetic little children who have a lot of fun playing and romping outside in the wild. As a rule, this refers to little boys.

This paraphrase is often used in Northern Germany, in Bremen as Bremer Butjer .

The inhabitants of Hanover used to use the abusive term butjer for uninvited guests from the suburbs of the city at the time who came “from buten rin” (from outside). The residents of Linden , in particular , took the term as an honorary term and some of them still proudly call themselves Butjer to this day , to emphasize that they are not Hanoverians, but Linden people.

The origin of the term is unclear. It can be related to the Low German “butt” or the Dutch “bot”, which used to mean naughty, coarse or unpolished. "Een buuten Keerl" is said to have been a rough guy. In Groningen these days butje stands for a stupid person; the word may have been taken over from Germany and spread to the Netherlands through the student environment.

The modified spelling Buttjer refers to East Frisian fishermen who in the past used wooden sledges, the so-called Kreiern, to go into the Wadden Sea during the ebb to check their pots .

Web links

Wiktionary: Butjer  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans-Jörg Hennecke: Lindener Butjer. In: linden-entdecke.de. Lebendiges Linden e. V., accessed on January 27, 2016 . 
2. ↑ Blog: Reinhard Goltz, Auf ein (Platt-) Wort (2007) . Taken into his book Moin, moin. More Low German word stories, Hamburg 2015.