Dialects in Bavaria

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Upper German dialects

Over the centuries there have been major changes in the Bavarian territory from the Duchy of Baiern , which coincided with the Bavarian language area , to today's Free State of Bavaria . With the separation of Austria and Salzburg , the duchy lost most of the Bavarian-speaking area. While the remaining Bavarian territory until the founding of the Kingdom of Bavaria at the beginning of the 19th century was largely limited to the "Old Bavarian" language area in what is now Upper and Lower Bavaria and the Upper Palatinate , it was able to more than double its area by the Vienna Congress in 1815 . Baiern gained around a third of the Swabian dialect area. A large part of Hohenlohe and Tauber Franconia, with its East Franconian dialects, fell to Württemberg and Baden . In 1946 Bavaria lost the Palatinate to the newly founded state of Rhineland-Palatinate .

Bavarian

In the three "old Bavarian" districts of Upper Bavaria, Lower Bavaria and the Upper Palatinate, and in a part of today Upper Franconia belonging Fichtelgebirges (Kreis Wunsiedel) and in the eastern district of Bayreuth are Bavarian dialects spoken. Because of the territorial compactness of Old Bavaria , there were no very large differences in vocabulary and pronunciation. Across the Bavarian-Austrian language area, which extends from the Saxon upper Vogtland (Adorf - Bad Brambach area) to the Salurner Klause in South Tyrol and from the Arlberg Pass to Lake Neusiedl , three main delimitations run:

Northern Bavarian north of the Bayerisch Eisenstein - Regensburg - Ingolstadt - Neuburg an der Donau line to the confluence of the Lech and the Danube has retained most of the characteristics of Middle High German .

Middle Bavarian, which as a majority dialect is widely used by the media mostly based in Munich , stretches across a wide belt from Friedberg near Augsburg via Munich and Passau and in Austria via Salzburg , Linz and Vienna to Lake Neusiedl on the border with Hungary . Especially in the state capital and its surroundings, however, the use of Bavarian is sharply declining, especially within the younger generation.

South Bavarian is spoken today almost exclusively in Austria and South Tyrol , with the exception of the Werdenfelser Land around Garmisch-Partenkirchen , which is topographically inclined towards Tyrol , and in the southern Bavarian Inn Valley .

East Franconian

The East Franconian dialects spoken in Bavaria , hereinafter referred to as "Franconian", form the south-eastern branch of the Franconian dialects . From the Middle Ages to Napoleon's time, the territories of the former Franconian tribal duchy , similar to Swabian, split up very strongly. That is why there are a lot of small dialect rooms here, with some big differences. First of all, the demarcation: Compared to the Bavarian-Austrian area, the district boundary between Hof and Wunsiedel on the Fichtelgebirgskamm has been the dialect boundary to Upper Franconian since the Middle Ages . It then runs from the Ochsenkopf to the Bamberg barrier near Pegnitz in Upper Franconia. There begins a transitional area extending over Nuremberg to the Central Franconian district of Weißenburg (Dreistammesstein near Treuchtlingen ) and partly 40 km wide, in which the vocabulary is partly Franconian and partly Old Bavarian, but the pronunciation tends more towards Franconian. Around the Central Franconian Hesselberg , the Swabian influence cannot be ignored; the city of Dinkelsbühl still belongs to the Franconian-speaking area with slight Swabian influences.

In Baden-Württemberg , the Swabian-Franconian language border largely coincides with the southern border of the "Heilbronn - Franconia region" and takes on more and more Swabian features in Altwürttemberg, although the language has its vocabulary and grammatical peculiarities (e.g. diminutive ending -lich in the plural ) is still unmistakably Franconian. In addition, the language border shifts by approx. 1 km per year to the disadvantage of Franconian due to immigration. The only exception to this development is the Würzburg-oriented Main and Taubertal valleys.

West of Wertheim / Kreuzwertheim, the Spessart forms the dialect border to Hessian in Bavarian territory . In addition to the Miltenberg / Aschaffenburg ( Bavarian Lower Main ) area, Bad Brückenau also tends towards Hessian in Lower Franconia .

From Coburg where Itzgründisch dialect is spoken to grabfeldisch - hen bergischen language area in the Rhon skips Mainfränkische the border into südthüringische in area.

Swabian-Alemannic

The Swabian - Alemannic dialects include those in Alsace (excluding Weißenburg / Wissembourg and the "crooked Alsace"), German-speaking Switzerland, southern Baden to the Oos, core and southern Wuerttemberg, most of Bavarian Swabia , Vorarlberg and neighboring areas of Tyrol ( Lechtal and Ausserfern ), Upper Bavaria ( Lechrain ) and the Upper Italian Walser regions.

The Bavarian district of Swabia belongs almost entirely to this language area, which is defined as follows on Bavarian territory: including Dinkelsbühl eastwards over the Hesselberg area to the Hahnenkamm and the Dreistammesstein near Treuchtlingen . From there west from Monheim to Donauwörth and along the Lech to Augsburg and from there on in a transition fan between Lech, Ammersee and Ammergebirge to the south.

The internal demarcation between Swabian and Alemannic according to the sound shift i → airuns, coming from Isny im Allgäu , approximately south of Kempten to Bad Hindelang . The small Walsertal was settled from the Swiss Wallis and speaks Höchst Alemannic , while the Lindau area with its Lake Constance dialect has some linguistic similarities with the neighboring area of Vorarlberg .

In the rural areas of the Ries, Central and Upper Swabia as well as in the Allgäu , the dialects are still very much alive, albeit exposed to a creeping "Bavarianisation", which results from the orientation towards Munich and the deliberate demarcation from the Württemberg Swabia. In many areas, however, various actions, such as dialect exercises on the radio, are being used to counter this.

In the district capital Augsburg and in practically all other medium-sized and small towns in the region, a Swabian-tinged standard of German now predominates, especially in the younger generations. The old Bavarian element is becoming increasingly stronger in Augsburg, as the city and the surrounding area are increasingly part of the Munich catchment area.

Only the Neu-Ulm area , which historically partially belonged to the imperial city of Ulm , is in many areas completely intertwined with the neighboring region of Baden-Württemberg and linguistically tends towards it. The residents of Bavarian Swabia's third largest city are therefore usually mistaken for Württembergians in their district capital, Augsburg, if they speak dialect.

See also: Allgäu

Hessian and Thuringian-Upper Saxon

In the former Kurmainzische areas around Aschaffenburg ( Bavarian Lower Main ) west of the Spessart , Lower Mainland is spoken, a South Hessian dialect (the "old" dialect, which is almost only available in written form in Aschaffenburg, is similar due to the long affiliation to the Kurmainzian areas very much the Mainz dialect). In the southern district of Miltenberg , however, is called the the Südrheinfränkischen attributed Odenwäldisch . The Bad Brückenau region, which once belonged to the spiritual Fulda area, speaks East Hessian or a Fulda variation of the Rhöner Platt . A Thuringian dialect is traditionally spoken in the Ludwigsstadt area .

See also: Dialects in Hessen , Thuringian dialect

German-Bohemian and German-Moravian dialects

The German Bohemians and German Moravians (also Sudeten Germans ) are often referred to as the “fourth tribe of Bavaria” and brought their native dialects with them from today's Czech Republic. Only in closed "new settlements" with residents from the same region of origin (e.g. Neugablonz near Kaufbeuren / Allgäu) were these dialects passed on for one or two generations and are slowly disappearing. The expellees from Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia were a very inhomogeneous group who used the dialects of the neighboring linguistic regions of the German-speaking area, i.e. Bavarian , East Franconian - here in particular Erzgebirge and other mixed dialects based on East Franconian, Saxon and Silesian .

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ The different spellings go back to an order by Ludwig I of October 20, 1825. ( See article section: Bavarian and Bavaria .)
  2. ↑ In principle, however, an older Swabian class can be assumed, but the Dinkelsbühler dialect is constituted precisely by the dialectic interference between all three major Upper German dialect areas. For mixed phenomena and alternation of the three Upper German dialects in this area, cf. David Neu: One speaker - multiple dialects. Code mixing and code switching in the tridialectal area around Dinkelsbühl . University publications online from the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt , February 6, 2015, accessed on February 19, 2015.
  3. ↑ According to the latest studies, dynamic shift processes must be taken into account, so that especially with the transitional dialect around Dinkelsbühl no overly quick assignments to large dialect areas can be made, cf. David Neu: One speaker - multiple dialects. Code mixing and code switching in the tridialectal area around Dinkelsbühl . University publications online from the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt , February 6, 2015, accessed on February 19, 2015