Colonial dialect
Colonial dialects are those German dialects that have arisen through compensatory processes of different West Germanic or South Germanic languages in language areas that were previously not purely Germanic, but Slavic or Baltic-speaking. Such dialects are e.g. B. the middle German dialects Thuringian-Upper Saxon , Lusatian , Silesian , but also various East Low German dialects, such as East Holstein, Mecklenburg, East Pomeranian, Märkisch, Lower Prussian.
The colonial dialect of Thuringian-Upper Saxon had a significant influence on the later High German written language, which is now used as the umbrella language (official and school language) and the German dialects as standard German, except for Lower Franconian-Dutch in the Netherlands and Belgium , thanks to Luther's translation of the Bible (Dutch-speaking area) and the Swabian-Alemannic dialects in Switzerland , increasingly being displaced as a colloquial language.