10 Likes
Wouldn’t it be Austria, anyway?
edit: I guess the logic is weird. It depends on whether you are thinking that WW2 Germany included all of Austro-Hungary or if you are thinking about the Holy Roman Empire/German Confederation or what. Stupid counterfactual and weird thing to say.
3 Likes
No. German ultra-nationalists still believe that ALL german speaking areas should be under a single country of Germany…
8 Likes
But they also have a weird notion of what “German speaking” consists of, I guess. That Saechsch dialect with no dipthongs and practically all the consonants devoiced that they speak in Chemnitz where all those neonazis are, is hardly comprehendable as German, already.
German consists of a pretty large number of dialects.
3 Likes
Right, and the divisions are political rather than linguistic. There’s no reason why you would include Oesterreichisch, but not Dutch or even English but politics.
1 Like
Except that Dutch and English are much farther removed from German than Austrian German… which is called Austrian German. It’s a form of German, while English is not, despite coming from a Germanic language. So, no, it’s not just political. The two languages have moved further away from the original root language they shared with modern German dialects.
6 Likes
There’s a lot of speakers on either side of the Netherlands border who would disagree with you about whether what they were speaking was two completely different languages. The neonazis include Platt Deutsch in their rubric even though linguists pretty much all agree it is a separate language.
1 Like
My not-so-great understanding is that Dutch is a dialect of West German.
Ah, the Googles say it’s a “Low Franconian” dialect?
2 Likes
From what I gather the high incidence of German speakers among the ethnic Albanians in FYROM was mainly due to working overseas. Albanians for years had taken boats across to Italy for employment, but many also travelled up into Austria and Germany for work.
5 Likes
You specifically mentioned english as a German dialect, which it’s not. But hey… what do I know… 
Clearly I’m not needed here.
4 Likes
Since I has a long weekend and was too full to move, I started looking into those pockets of Germanic languages in Italy and Romania. I also found another map that showed large pockets along the Caspian sea.
The variant spoken around Asiago in Italy stems from persons who travelled from Bavaria. The dialect is not easily understood by speakers of Hoch Deutsch today, and has a lot of crossover with Italian, as one might expect.
The Romanian German community peaked at about 780,000 persons in 1939. Current figures are about 36,000. The German pockets were established by persons who were transplanted there by old aristocracy such as the Hapsburgs. There is still a german-language newspaper published in Romania. Main drivers for population crash were WW2 (rounded up and sent to Russian camps) and the post-WW2 expulsion of ethnic germans.
Do these persons consider themselves German? Probably not would be my guess (I am not an expert).
7 Likes
I think this shows how problematic it was to try and unite all “German” speakers into a single polity. It’s very widespread in usage in Europe and no one can really settle on what constitutes a “German” and what does not… is it just speaking a German dialect? Something more? More evidence that the nation-state is just a stupid idea that we can improve upon.
6 Likes
The split between German and English was so long ago that the languages are very distinct. Nobody would confuse the two.
I find that I can read everyday Dutch because i speak German but rely on context clues a lot. I wouldn’t call Dutch a german language. I sure as heck would struggle with a newspaper, as would most Germans in the Netherlands. By comparison Germans could easily travel to Austria or Switzerland and watch a documentary on knife-sharpening or whatever with no issues.
In the southeast of the Netherlands its not uncommon to see a blend of German and Dutch. For example, if you wanted a cup of something you could ask for “een Tasse”, where een is the indefinite article in Dutch but Tasse is German
6 Likes
Can confirm. Although it won’t be easy to find anybody speaking Zimbrisch in Asiago; the odds are much better in Lusern (Luserna).
Once spent an extended coffee break on a tour there, having an old lady tell me bits of her family history around WW I (her father was a Kaiserjäger in the Austrian army). Difficult to understand, and my Italian is pretty rudimentary, but we had help from a retired diplomat who used to work at the Italian embassy in East Berlin. A very interesting afternoon.
12 Likes
That and unlike the other borders we are talking about, the border between Britain and the rest of the Germanic continuum is not simply based on political happenstance but a hard geographical feature. The point of including it as possibly going in the category of “German language” or even “German people” is not that English is not clearly mutually unintelligible from other Germanic languages (even from Frisian) but that a neonazi German nationalist could still tell themselves a silly story where English speaking people “rightfully belong to Germany” if they wanted.
Neo-nazis will tell themselves whatever they want whenever it suits their narrative. I doubt that they’d be comfortable incorporating Yiddish though.
I’ve no desire for this topic to become a debate about what nazis think, thanks.
14 Likes
4 Likes
That’s wrong. Southern English can’t pronounce an “r” after an a or e. The word is “baahf”.
Rs are only regularly pronounced in Southern English when a word ends in a schwa. So “Afriker” is the correct pronunciation of Africa. Though some forego the first r to make it “Afiker”.
2 Likes
