Palatinate German

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Palatine German Pfälzisch^[1]
Spoken in:	Germany^[1]
Total speakers:	unknown^[1]
Language family:	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic High German West Middle German Rhenisch Fraconian Palatine German
Writing system:	Latin (German variant)^[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:
ISO 639-3:	`pfl`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Palatine German (Pfälzisch/Pälzisch or Pfaelzisch/Paelzisch) is a West Franconian dialect of German which is spoken in the Rhine Valley between the cities of Zweibrücken, Kaiserslautern, and Mannheim, and the border to the Alsace region (France) and the Rhine River. Pennsylvania German, or Pennsylvania Dutch is descended primarily from the Palatine German dialects spoken by Germans who immigrated to North America from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and who chose to maintain their native language. Danube Swabians in Croatia and Serbia also use many elements of it. Some examples of the differences between High German and Pfaelzisch are:

Pfälzisch	High German	English Equivalent
mais	mäuse	mice
lais	läuse	lice
Grumbeer	Kartoffel	potato
Schnoog(e)	Mücke	a fly
Bääm	Bäume	trees
Schdää	Stein	stone
soi	sein	his( possessive)
unser	unsere	ours
nit	nicht	not
Fusch	Fisch	fish
ebbes	etwas	something
Ärwett	Arbeit	work
Dor	Tor	gate
Abbel	Apfel	apple

An example of sentence pronunciation in Pfälzisch would be:

Isch habb's'm schunn verzehlt, awwer där hot mer's nit geglawt.

In standard German, the sentence would read as such:

Ich hab's ihm schon erzählt, aber er hats mir nicht geglaubt.

The English translation would be,

I already explained it to him, but he didn't believe me.

It's important to point out that pronunciation and grammar vary from region to region (even from town to town.) Palatine Germans often can tell the part of Palatinate or even the village where other speakers are from. Something all Palatine dialects have in common is that the genitive isn't used, same as the German imperfect.