Danzig German
Danzig German is part of the north-east German dialects that were spoken in Danzig and are still occasionally spoken by expellees . Danzig German is part of the Low Prussian language that was spoken in the region before the Germans fled and were expelled from Poland during and after the Second World War and after the end of the Second World War. Well-known speakers are Günter Grass and Klaus Kinski .
history
In the 12th century, in the area of what is now the Long Market in Gdansk, near a Prussian settlement, a German merchant settlement was established which established linguistic contact between Slavic , the Baltic and Germanic languages. The settlement attracted further German settlers, especially from Lower Saxony , Westphalia and Hanover , whose Low German language became the dominant language. Subject to the Teutonic Order , the city grew into a German city with Magdeburg law .
As part of the Hanseatic League , the city developed a flat that also contained elements from Dutch, Russian, Polish and Kashubian. For example, pomuchel (cod) and kujel (wild boar) are borrowings from Polish .
The city's official communication used Low German until around 1563, while neighboring towns of Elbing and Braunsberg switched to High German as early as the middle of the 15th century. With the spread of High German through education, Danziger Platt was only spoken by a small part of the city's population. Nevertheless, towards the end of the 18th century, a literature of the Danziger Platt began to develop.
After the spread of High German, most of the city of Danziger spoke Missingsch , a Central German dialect as part of the neighboring Lower Prussian dialect .
Linguistic properties
Danzig Platt differs significantly from the North German Platt . While Platt has the pronunciations "maken" (to do), "slapen" (to sleep), "seggen" (to say), "vertellen", in Danzig Platt the pronunciations "moake", "schloape", "saje", "vertalle ".
Characteristic for Danziger Missingsch is the apocope of a final 'e' as in "Katz" (cat) or "Straß" (street), and the rounding of the umlauts "ü" and "ö" so that "tier" (door) instead High German door and "Sehne" (sons) is pronounced instead of sons . As in other Low German dialects , the first letter "g" is spirantized to "j" in Danzig Missingsch z. B. in "jelaufen" instead of "ran".
Typical for Danzig Missingsch is the use of the diminutive "-chen", e.g. B. "was-chen" ("what's going on?"). The gender of some words also differs characteristically, as many words that are masculine in High German and feminine in Danziger Missingisch, such as "die Weiz" and "die Tabak" or the use of the neuter instead of the High German masculine, such as "the month "and" the body ".
literature
- Viola Wilcken: Historical colloquial language between the reality of language and literary design: forms, functions and lines of development of the 'Missingsch' . 2015.