sholio | I have a (rather vague) question for the German speakers on my f'list

I have a (rather vague) question for the German speakers on my f'list

Of which I know there are at least a couple of you!

There is a line in an original short story I'm writing that I'm having trouble with. My protagonist used to live in Germany and he's approached by a woman who is obviously, from her accent, a German immigrant. What I'm trying to figure out is how to describe her accent from his point of view -- I just need an adjective to indicate what sort of regional accent it sounds like to him, because I presume he'd be able to narrow it down quite a bit more than "Deutsch accent". I was kinda thinking she's from Silesia (as he is), but does it make any sense to say that someone has a Silesian accent if they are speaking English? (This is circa 1920s, btw, so Silesia was German when they lived there.)

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I have no idea about Silesian accents (part of my family is from Pommeria and the accent there is not very strong, but they have also lived here for decades now), especially when talking English, but there are some accents that even in the 1920s and in English should have been very noticable:

* Fränkisch/Frankonian
* Schwäbisch (no idea what that's called in English)
* Berlinerisch
* Nordisch/Friesisch (North Sea/Hamburg)

So I can't help specifically with Silesian, but someone from Germany can definitely distunguish between regions even if people are speaking English - if their accent is very thick in German.

Oh, and especially if they come from the same region and that region has a specific sccent- I can't because the accent in my region is not usually strong enough.

Thank you very much! That's very helpful. :D

It doesn't necessarily have to be Silesia ... actually, this suggests some interesting directions I could take this, if they didn't grow up together. Actually, it might work better that way. Thanks! :)

but does it make any sense to say that someone has a Silesian accent if they are speaking English?

I would say it depends on how strong her German accent is when she's speaking English. If it's a strong German accent and her German is a strong regional dialect (for example Bavarian), then he would probably recognize the dialect. This site (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/German_dialects) seems to have some useful information about German regional dialects.

Just wanted to add that a German native speaker will recognize a German regional dialect even when the person speaking German is an English native speaker with an English accent. (I once met an American woman who spoke fluently German and I heard traces of both Cologne and Hamburg in her otherwise American accent. When I asked her, because I found the combination of regional accents quite puzzling, it turned out her grandmother lived in Cologne and she had friends in Hamburg but she wasn't aware that her German reflected that.)

Yes, this. I also have to say that my colleague from somewhere near Leipzig speaking English sounds rather different from my colleague from Düsseldorf speaking English, even though they both don't have particularly pronounced accents.

Generally, it's pretty easy to tell if a heavy-accented hails from the East, West, North or South of the country. Perhaps that might be a way to go?

I learned my Italian in Northern Italy near Venice, and while my Italian is pretty good, native Italians always catch my regional accent - they know I didn't learn my Italian anywhere south of the Po River! And my ear is good enough that while I can't pinpoint cities, I can generally tell if Italians speaking English are from northern, central or southern Italy.

So I would guess your Germans can identify each other's place of origin even in English...

Yeah, I was actually thinking more or less this at first -- general compass directions -- but I wasn't sure if that was just my U.S.-centric mode of thinking, as that's how we tend to think of our regional accents in their broadest sense.

Ah, thank you very much! Very helpful link in particular. :)

Tricky question. Regional dialects are clearly distinguishable in German, but I don't know how much of that will still be noticable when the person is speaking English.

Half of my family came from East Prussia (which is relatively close to Silesia) and from what I can tell they didn't have a strong dialect. Obviously I wasn't around at the time they came to the West so it may have watered down over time. My grandma rolled the 'R', that was pretty much it. I'm Westphalian, our dialect isn't very discernable either, compared to Bavarian or Saxonian which are much stronger. (I have actual trouble understanding Bavarian, if the speaker isn't going for high German.)

It might be that they lack a strong accent because they switched languages from Platt to standard German, and it was more or less a foreign language, so only a few ticks also stick. My grandparents raised their children to speak standard and forbade any platt usage in their house and of course its use was also punished in school. And East Prussia the native dialect would have been Platt as well, but what kind of accent from that sticks through with standard German you learned in school might be very little. Anyway, that abrupt, relatively recent switch leads to the fairly "clean" standard German in formerly Low German regions, not watering down the dialects into Standard.

Right, I forgot about Platt since like you say nowadays it's merely a relic that survived only in a few expressions while people speak standard German. Same for Masematte, a regional dialect. But come to think of it, those may have been still prevalent in 1920, and they were both strong dialects. Do you know around which time the switch to standard German occurred? Wikipedia is vague on that.

I have no clue. I suspect it varied regionally, also class-specific. I mean, my maternal great-grandparents knew very little standard German, which I only know because my mother told me about my grandparents forbidding them to use platt, and thus they couldn't really talk to their grandchildren, so I assume my maternal grandparents were bi-lingual thanks to school mostly, and decided to raise their kids mono-lingual. OTOH my father's parents spoke standard at home (back when they were children already), though my father still understands Platt as well as Missingsch because many older people still spoke it when he was little in the 1930s.

I think the decline mostly coincides with compulsory schooling, respectively how successfully the law was enforced in the rural areas, because schools probably punished Platt with beatings (I know they did that to my grandparents), and once parents wanted something for their children besides being rural labor speaking it at home was seen as disadvantage for social advance and impeding with speaking "proper" German.

Oh, this is very interesting! I mean -- obviously it must have been awful for your grandparents, but I know very little about the history of the German language, and I had no idea that there was such strong pressure to speak standard German rather than regional dialects (especially the beatings in schools, wow, I didn't know there was anything like that).

Well, the thing is, there was no "German language" for the longest time, but a continuum of dialects and those included some that are in present day counted as separate languages such as Dutch. They are not often mutally intelligible, especially not in their "pure" forms (e.g. you are likely to understand dialects close to your own, but not the ones from far away, e.g. if I'm in Bavaria I need dialect speakers to switch to standard or I can't understand them). In present day many are toned down to regional accents, or regions go the way of code switching like Switzerland with two languages.

The dialects have significant grammar and vocabulary differences to Standard, for example Platt didn't go along with the second Germanic consonant shift (it has that in common with Dutch and English too, so where in most German dialects it will be "kochen" for "to cook" in Platt it will be "koken", it will be "dag" for "day" rather than "Tag", "eten" for "to eat" rather than "essen", "schipp" for "ship" rather than "Schiff", so even words that are the same don't sound the same. Then there is a huge number of words that are entirely different. It has fewer grammatial cases than standard German, i.e. it doesn't have different cases for direct and indirect objects, making the distinction which case to pick in the equivalent standard German sentence hard (apparently my great-grandmother constantly confused the two when she tried speaking standard), also while it has technically three grammatical genders, the article for male and female are the same ("de" rather than the standard "der" and "die" though a difference shows when a noun is used as object) and only the neuter is a distinct "dat" (standard "das"). The sentence structures are different too. I don't think you can teach written standard German while students talk in Platt, that would be like a classroom full of people talking Dutch, but trying to write it as German.

Platt used to have high pestige when it was the written language of the Hanse, and used for both legal texts and theological writings, but starting in the 16th and 17th centuries the written language became standard German, which started the decline. In present day it is counted as "minority language" and nominally protected under some European language charter or other, but it's kind of pointless now, because few children learn it at home in the regions where it used to be common.

This is really fascinating for me; thank you! (I'm a bit of a linguistics nerd -- I've never studied it at a college level beyond Linguistics 101, but I do find that kind of thing very interesting: the way that languages change over time, and the way that they're altered by political change as well.) I knew that there were several more or less mutually unintelligible dialects -- we've been to Switzerland, for example, and so I knew that Swiss German was different from the dialect that my husband learned in school. But I don't think I'd realized that there were that many dialects -- I knew about Swiss German, standard and "Low" (which is Platt?) -- or how much pressure there was on dialect speakers to learn the standard dialect (though it totally makes sense, of course).

Mutual intelligibility is an interesting thing, though ... apparently my husband's grandfather, while stationed in Italy during WWII, was able to communicate and even interrogate war prisoners using his knowledge of Latin (due to his classics education; he was a professor of philosophy and, um, some literature-related field, I forget what, and he was relatively fluent in Latin) -- despite not speaking a word of actual Italian!

There are obviously degrees to mutual intelligiblilty. And it is not surprising with the Romance languages. I think some linguist consider all Western Romance languages to be a dialect continuum, especially back when there were still more regional languages alive to bridge the national ones, so it is similar to the different German dialects. And of course you can get the gist of what someone is saying even if you just get every third word and some gestures.

What I had in mind for "mutual intelligiblilty" was holding a fluent conversation at normal speed without either having to switch their language, and not have any serious trouble. Like the way an American can talk with a Brit. Sure there are a couple of words that may be different, but overall if you know American or British English you will understand the other (at least the standard vesions), no matter the minor differences in vocabulary and pronounciation without either speaker making a conscious "switch". With German dialects that are far apart geographically it is not like that.

And yeah, Platt is the same as "Low German".

Silesia didn't have a very strong accent. My grandmother comes from there and she never had that much of a accent as, for example, a Bavarian. However, If her Polish is anything to go by when accents in other languages are concerned, than I'd recommend a stronger accentuation of the r and a shortening of most s sounds. But that's about it.

I'd suggest just to write that she had a german sounding accent, and specify her origin later on in the text. Most people may be able to identify when you refer to Bavarian, since it's well known around the world, but silesian accents may just be too specific to allow anyone to imagine something under it.

Yeah, I'd go more with, "Hmm, sounds East-German," (or South-German or whatever) than with a particular region. I for one can't tell if someone's from Bavaria or southern Baden-Wurttemberg.

On the other hand, you can definitely tell whether something is from Saxony/Thuringia or from Brandenburg/Berlin :)

I can work with that. I'm getting the general idea from the comments that some regions have very unique accents that would be quite noticeable and others would just give more of an impression of a general German accent. Plus, I imagine some people are just better at recognizing accents than others. Either way works for me in terms of the story, really; I just want to make sure that the main character's general impression of her accent (and the conclusions that he can draw from it) are accurate for a fluent German speaker. Thank you! :)

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I have a (rather vague) question for the German speakers on my f'list

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