A. The Low German Dialects
The Low German dialects, as we have seen, stand nearest to the English and Frisian languages, owing to the total absence of the consonantal shifting which characterizes High German, as well as to other peculiarities of sounds and inflections, e.g. the loss of the nasals m and n before the spirants f, s and p. Cf. Old Saxon fif (five), us (us), kup (cf. uncouth). The boundary-line between Low and High German, the so-called Benrather Linie, may roughly be indicated by the following place-names, on the understanding, however, that the Ripuarian dialect (see below) is to be classed with High German: Montjoie (French border-town), Eupen, Aachen, Benrath, Düsseldorf, north of Siegen, Cassel, Heiligenstadt, Harzgerode, to the Elbe south of Magdeburg; this river forms the boundary as far as Wittenberg, whence the line passes to Lübben on the Spree, Fürstenwald on the Oder and Birnbaum near the river Warthe. Beyond this point the Low Germans have Slavs as their neighbours. Compared with the conditions in the 13th century, it appears that Low German has lost ground; down to the 14th and 15th centuries several towns, such as Mansfeld, Eisleben, Merseburg, Halle, Dessau and Wittenberg, spoke Low German.
Low German falls into two divisions, a western division, namely, Low Franconian, the parent, as we have already said, of Flemish and Dutch, and an eastern division, Low Saxon (Plattdeutsch, or, as it is often simply called, Low German). The chief characteristic of the division is to be sought in the ending of the first and third person plural of the present indicative of verbs, this being in the former case -en, in the latter -et. Inasmuch as the south-eastern part of Low Franconian—inclusive of Gelderland and Cleves—shifts final k to ch (e.g. ich, mich, auch, -lich), it must obviously be separated from the rest, and in this respect be grouped with High German. Low Saxon is usually divided into Westphalian (to the west of the Weser) and Low Saxon proper, between Weser and Elbe. The south-eastern part of the latter has the verbal ending -en and further shows the peculiarity that the personal pronoun has the same form in the dative and accusative (mik, dick), whereas the remainder, as well as the Westphalian, has mi, di in the dative, and mi, di or mik, dik in the accusative. To these Low German dialects must also be added those spoken east of the Elbe on what was originally Slavonic territory; they have the ending -en in the first and third person plural of verbs.[8]
B. The High German Dialects
1. The Middle German Group.—This group, which comprises the dialects of the Middle Rhine, of Hesse, Thuringia, Upper Saxony (Meissen), Silesia and East Prussia to the east of the lower Vistula between Bischofswerder, Marienburg, Elbing, Wormditt and Wartenberg—a district originally colonized from Silesia—may be most conveniently divided into an East and a West Middle German group. A common characteristic of all these dialects is the diminutive suffix -chen, as compared with the Low German form -ken and the Upper German -lein (O.H.G. līn). East Middle German consists of Silesian, Upper Saxon and Thuringian,[9] together with the linguistic colony in East Prussia. While these dialects have shifted initial Germanic p to ph, or even to f (fert = Pferd), the West Middle German dialects (roughly speaking to the west of the watershed of Werra and Fulda) have retained it. If, following a convincing article in the Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum (37, 288 ff.) by F. Wrede, we class East and South Franconian—both together may be called High Franconian—with the Upper German dialects, there only remain in the West Middle German group:[10] (a) Middle Franconian and (b) Rhenish Franconian. The former of these,[11] which with its dat, wat, allet, &c. (cf. above) and its retention of the voiced spirant b (written v) represents a kind of transition dialect to Low German, is itself divided into (α) Ripuarian or Low Rhenish with Cologne and Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) as centres, and (β) Moselle Franconian[12] with Trier (Treves) as principal town. The latter is distinguished by the fact that in the Middle High German period it shifts Germanic -rp- and -rd-, which are retained in (a), to -rf- and -rt- (cf. werfen, hirtin with werpen, hirdin).[13] The Rhenish Franconian dialect is spoken in the Rhenish palatinate, in the northern part of Baden (Heidelberg), Hesse[14] and Nassau, and in the German-speaking part of Lorraine. A line drawn from Falkenberg at the French frontier to Siegen on the Lahn, touching the Rhine near Boppard, roughly indicates the division between Middle and Rhenish Franconian.
2. The Upper German Group.—The Upper German dialects, which played the most important part in the literature of the early periods, may be divided into (a) a Bavarian-Austrian group and (b) a High Franconian-Alemannic group. Of all the German dialects the Bavarian-Austrian has carried the soundshifting to its furthest extreme; here only do we find the labial voiced stop b written p in the middle of a word, viz. old Bavarian kāpamēs, old Alemannic kābamēs (“we gave”); here too, in the 12th century, we find the first traces of that broadening of ī, ū, iu (ü) to ei, au, eu, a change which, even at the present day, is still foreign to the greater part of the Alemannic dialects. Only in Bavarian do we still find the old pronominal dual forms es and enk (for ihr and euch). Finally, Bavarian forms diminutives in -el and -erl (Mädel, Mäderl), while the Franconian-Alemannic forms are -la and -le (Mädle). On the other hand, the pronunciation of -s as -sch, especially -st as -scht (cf. Last, Haspel, pronounced Lascht, Haschpel), may be mentioned as characteristic of the Alemannic, just as the fortis pronunciation of initial t is characteristic of High Franconian, while the other Franconian and Upper German dialects employ the lenis.
The Alemannic dialect which, roughly speaking, is separated from Bavarian by the Lech and borders on Italian territory in the south and on French in the west, is subdivided into: (a) Swabian, the dialect of the kingdom of Württemberg and the north-western part of Tirol (cf. H. Fischer, Geographie der schwäbischen Mundart, 1895); (b) High Alemannic (Swiss), including the German dialects of Switzerland, of the southern part of the Black Forest (the Basel-Breisgau dialect), and that of Vorarlberg; (c) Low Alemannic, comprising the dialects of Alsace and part of Baden (to the north of the Feldberg and south of Rastatt), also, at the present day, the town of Basel. Only Swabian has taken part in the change of i to ei, &c., mentioned above, while initial Germanic k has been shifted to ch (χ) only in High Alemannic (cf. chalt, chind, chorn, for kalt, kind, korn). The pronunciation of ū as ü, ü (Hüs for Haus) is peculiar to Alsatian.
The High Franconian dialects, that is to say, east and south (or south-Rhenish) Franconian, which are separated broadly speaking by the river Neckar, comprise the language spoken in a part of Baden, the dialects of the Main valley from Würzburg upwards to Bamberg, the dialect of Nuremberg and probably of the Vogtland (Plauen) and Egerland. During the older historical period the principal difference between East and South Franconian consisted in the fact that initial Germanic d was retained in the latter dialect, while East Franconian shifted it to t. Both, like Bavarian and Alemannic, shift initial German p to the affricate pf.
Finally, the Bavarian-Austrian dialect is spoken throughout the greater part of the kingdom of Bavaria (i.e. east of the Lech and a fine drawn from the point where the Lech joins the Danube to the sources of the rivers Elster and Mulde, this being the East Franconian border-line), in Austria, western Bohemia, and in the German linguistic “islands” embedded in Hungary, in Gottschee and the Sette and Tredici Communi (cf. above).[15]
The Old High German Period