Palatine German dialects

Palatine German (Standard German: , endonym: ) is a group of Rhine Franconian dialects spoken in the Upper Rhine Valley, roughly in the area between Zweibrücken, Kaiserslautern, Alzey, Worms, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Mannheim, Odenwald, Heidelberg, Speyer, Landau, Wörth am Rhein and the border to Alsace and Lorraine, in France, but also beyond.

The English term Palatine refers to the Palatinate region (Template:Langx). Almost all traditional dialects of the Palatinate belong to the Palatine dialect group, but the Palatine speech area also extends to the west and east into neighboring regions (Saarland, Kurpfalz, southern Hesse). The main dialect divisions within Palatine German are (also called ) and (also called ).

The Pennsylvania Dutch language is descended primarily from the Palatine German that was spoken by Palatines who immigrated to North America from the 17th to the 19th centuries and maintained their native language. Danube Swabians in Croatia and Serbia also use many elements of Palatine German.

Characteristics

File:Palatine Fraktur Poem.jpg

A poem written in a literary form of Palatine, Fraktur script.

To the northwest, Palatine German is separated from Moselle Franconian by the das/dat-isogloss (Palatine German uses das or similar forms) and the absence of Rhenish pitch accent. To the southeast, it borders on South Franconian, separated by the Appel/Apfel-line (Palatine German: Appel). Within the greater Rhine Franconian dialect area, the traditional defining isoglosses are the northern fescht/fest-line that separates Palatine German (fescht) from the Hessian dialects (fest), and the southern Haus/Hus-line that separates Palatine German (Haus) from Lorraine Franconian (Hus).

Like other Rhine Franconian dialects, Palatine German has e-apocope (i.e. loss of earlier final -e), n-apocope (i.e. loss of earlier final n in the suffix -en) and /oː/ for earlier long a, e.g. Strooß/Strooße 'street'/'streets' (cf. Standard German Straße/Straßen). The major division of Palatine German into and is based on a bundle of distinguishing features, such as:

• lacks the suffix -en in the past participle of strong verbs (e.g. gebroch 'broken', geschripp 'written'). In , the suffix is retained as -e (with apocope of n, e.g. gebroche, geschriwwe).
• Loss of medial g in in words like frooe (cf. Standard German fragen). In , it is retained as a voiced velar fricative (frooche ).
• han/hun '(I) have' against hap/häp.

Samples

Template:Multiple issues Here are some words in Palatine German with their Standard German equivalents:

		Standard German	English equivalent
			mice
			lice
			potato
			mosquito
			trees
			legs
			stone
			his (possessive) / to be
			ours
			not
			against
			fish
			something
			work
			gate
			apple
			have
			pot (saucepan)

This sentence is pronounced in :

In , it would be the following:

In Standard German, the sentence would read:

In English, it means:

I have already told [it to] him, but he didn't believe me.

()

()

(Standard German)

Are you hungry too? (English)

Grammar

Grammatically, all Palatine dialects do not use the genitive case, which is replaced by the dative, with or without , and most dialects have no imperfect tense but only the perfect.

Notable speakers

• Helmut Kohl (German Chancellor 1982–1998)

See also

• Lorraine Franconian
• Riograndenser Hunsrückisch

References

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