Stand with gingerbread hearts in Munich: For a long time, the dialect was considered provincial. Cosmopolitanism and social advancement sounded High German.
Image: dpa
Dialects were frowned upon for decades. Today many want to keep them, some even think they are cool. Is that enough to keep them from disappearing?
WWHILE the world groans under the weight of bad things that can no longer be got rid of, such as microplastics, there are far too many valuable things that are disappearing, sometimes irretrievably: glaciers and church communities, Javan rhinos and people who wear overalls during their lunch break drink a beer. The same fate threatens the dialects. This even applies to Bavaria, the number one dialect country (as Markus Söder has probably said somewhere) – and unfortunately also to my environment as the Bavarian correspondent for this newspaper. I grew up with dialect in the Swabian part of Bavaria. But my wife comes from northern Hesse, and the children are growing up in Munich, where there are hardly any real dialect speakers anymore. They will never ask for “dem butter” at breakfast, never have a phrase of such beauty in their mouths as “Ka i au amaol a Oi aufmacha?”.
The fear of the dialect disappearing, behind which the fear of disappearing in general is hidden, can be scientifically substantiated. For example with Jonathan Harrington, Professor of Phonetics at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. Together with a dialect speaker in Altötting, he studied the language development of elementary school students for four years. Result: You continue to use the West Central Bavarian pronunciation. But some vowels are increasingly influenced by so-called Standard German. For example, while the adult dialect speakers in Altötting use the same vowel in “bes” (bad) and “besen”, the children say something between “bes” and “bad”, inevitably moving towards standard German. Such examples are endless.
