LL-L "Language maintenance" 2007.03.17 (01) [D/E/German]

[Lowlands-L List]

Dank je voor de interessante vraag, Jacqueline. Het herinnert me aan de
situatie aan de Duitse kant van de grens.

Mensen op de bovenkant van de sociaal-economische "totempaal" gebruiken soms
het Nedersaksisch ("Platt"), vooral met "gewone" mensen (b.v. patiënten en
cliënten), misschien omdat zij het leuk vinden en het de indruk maakt dat
zij een voeling voor "de mensen van het land" hebben. In elk geval hebben
zij niets te verliezen; het kan hun reputatie slechts verbeteren.

Maar mensen van lagere sociaal-economische standen willen graag gloven dat
zij "upwardly mobile" zijn, en vooral willen die van de middenstand ook
bewijzen dat zij niet tot de laagste standen behoren, namelijk tot de
standen die "dialect" spreken.

Mijn indruk en theorie zijn gebaseerd op de veronderstelling dat de meeste
mensen nog geloven dat het gebruik van "dialect" me
L O W L A N D S - L - 17 March 2007 - Volume 01

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From: Jonny Meibohm <altkehdinger at freenet.de>
Subject: LL-L "Language maintenance" 2007.03.16 (01) [D/E/LS]

Beste Jacqueline,

Du schreyvst:

Everybody, whether "banker or boer" spoke both - some better than others.

Well- but who was/is the better one?

I`ve made the experience that everybody who was forced to learn the Standard
Language- no matter if it's Dutch or German- is just a poor speaker of
Nedersaksisch compared with those who never really came in too close contact
to the written, official languages.
This difference isn't just a phenomenon of today; I could watch this already
in my childhood: though the "better" educated people also spoke 'Platt' in
everyday's life it had lost the archaic originality and the special natural
syntax. Those aboriginal natives really spoke a different, 'foreign'
language- hardly to understand if you weren't prepared to meet one of those
fossils.

I admired them and fear them to have died out meanwhile. Perhaps one can
find just a handful of these individuals being close to the described
ability somewhere in the 'Outlands', e.g. on solitary farms or settlings,
miles away from any urban or semi-urban influences.
They are over eighty years old now and unable to hand down their skill to
any follower, so this language in fact doesn't exist any longer- no matter
what we and others are writing and discussing about LS.

It's my generation's term now to leave with the commemoration of the sound
of a dead language...

Allerbest

Jonny Meibohm

----------

From: Karl-Heinz Lorenz <Karl-Heinz.Lorenz at gmx.net>
Subject: LL-L "Language maintenance" 2007.03.15 (02) [D]

Ron schreef:

> Mensen op de bovenkant van de sociaal-economische "totempaal" gebruiken
> soms
> het Nedersaksisch ("Platt"), vooral met "gewone" mensen (b.v. patiënten
> en
> cliënten), misschien omdat zij het leuk vinden en het de indruk maakt dat
> zij een voeling voor "de mensen van het land" hebben. In elk geval hebben
> zij niets te verliezen; het kan hun reputatie slechts verbeteren.

Maybe on writing this you had Buddenbrooks in mind where this
sociolinguistic phenomenon found its way into literature:
...
- Großer Gott, du Tropf ! (rief der Konsul und vergaß platt zu sprechen vor
Indignation) Du redest ja lauter Unsinn …
- Je; Herr Kunsel, dat is nu allens so, as dat is. Öäwer Revolutschon mutt
sien, dat is tau gewiß. Revolutschon is öwerall, in Berlin und in Paris …
- Smoldt, wat wull Ji nu eentlich … … …
- Je, Herr Kunsel, ik seg man bloß: wi wull nu ne Republike, seg ik man bloß
…
- Öwer du Döskopp … Ji heww ja schon een !
- Je, Herr Kunsel, denn wull wi noch een.
...

from:
http://www.gesamtschule-suederelbe.de/plattdeutsch/buddb.htm

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language maintenance

Thanks, Jonny and Karl-Heinz, for your interesting words above.

Jonny, whilst you addressed our Jacqueline, I take the liberty of responding
to your lines. There is nothing to disagree with as far as your actual words
and the facts they describe are concerned.  But please allow me to let De
Düvel sien Afkaat (the devil's advocate) come out to play for a minute, as
he does once in a while.

Yes, even in your and my lifetimes we have witnessed enormous changes within
Low Saxon on the whole. Yes, those that you seem to consider genuine
speakers are fast fading away as we speak.  And, yes, many people that use
it as a second language now "fake it" and in numerous ways radically
Germanize the language they use, the most blatant way being the use of
German words "transposed" into LS phonology in place of genuine LS words
that these people happen not to be familiar with.  Examples are aplenty, and
we need not go into details.  But in between these aforementioned extremes
there are people that did grow up with the language used around them, also
those that spoke it in childhood and are now recapturing it after having
been deterred from using it for decades. And then there are those that never
stopped using it at least in private.  They, too, speak differently from
those "relics" you talked about, and there are several reasons for this,
including increased German influences, especially by way of "better" German
education.

Now -- and here's our Afkaat coming out of the woodwork -- is it justified
to say that only the "dinosaurs" or "relics" speak or spoke good or genuine
Low Saxon and everyone else does not?  You, I and other people in our
situation happen to have had real-life experiences with the sounds of a
fading and soon completely bygone age.  Those younger than us have not, just
as you and I have not had real-life brushes with the language as it was
spoken in the late, mid or early 19th century or in the first half of the
20th century, and this in the very places in which we happened to grow up.
Were any of the speakers of that era alive now and would listen to our
"relics" speak I am quite sure that at least some of them would be appalled
by what they hear, or they would not even know or believe that they are
dealing with the descendants of their own dialects.

Why is this?  Language changes. And it keeps on changing all the time.
Sometimes it does so gradually, almost without us noticing.  At other times
it does so in a hurry, taking giant steps and leaps.  It all depends on
historical events and on the socio-economic and cultural changes that come
with them.  This happened to German and Dutch as well.  However, there is a
"safety net" in the form of written standards that change less quickly, but
they can at best slow down the process. Don't be fooled! They can slow down
but not prevent change. (I believe that this is what our Sandy recently
alluded to.)  Non-standard German and Dutch dialects, too, have been
changing quite a bit, sometimes a whole lot even within a person's lifetime.
After all, they are more vulnerable on account of being perceived subsets of
the respective national languages.

Language constantly changes. And it does so for a variety of reasons,
usually for complex combinations of reasons.  Sometimes radical, traumatic
events provoke a leap in this development.

Old Saxon underwent enormous changes by way of Frankicization and
Latinization once Charlemagne the Frankish conqueror was done with its
speakers, and you can tell when you compare early Saxon texts with the
writings of the Hanseatic era.

Should we say that only Old English was genuine English, and that the
language took a nose-dive as a result of the French-language-dominated
Norman invasion, that the reestablishment and relearning of English among
Britain's people after the end of the occupation led to morphological,
lexical and syntactic "corruption" as seen in the writings of the likes of
Geoffrey Chaucer (never mind later rebels like Will Shakespeare), and that
it has been a constant downward spiral ever since?

"Nay," says our Afkaat, "that's just how the cookie ... uh ... biscuit ...
uh ... crampeht crumbles. Language changes reflect changes in the lives of
the people that use language. Get used to it!"  Our Afkaat may have a few
choice words about the topic of "purism" here, but I'm keeping him on a
short leash today.

In Northern Low Saxon of Germany, radical phonological changes have been
afoot lately. The "drawl" or "dragging tone" is now virtually a thing of the
past, in great part because people don't understand it and thus don't write
it.  And the spelling then influences the pronunciation of those that come
later, especially the pronunciation of those that learn LS as a second
language.  The same happened to the difference between /oo/ (e.g.,
oog'[?o:.G] 'eye') and /ou/ (
e.g., loog' [lo.UG] 'lye'), which has all but disappeared in the Lower Elbe
dialects. The now wide-spread orthographic non-distinction (including in the
Wikipedia!) between /ee/ and /ei/ and between /öö/ and /öü/ is bound to lead
to the disappearance of these distinction.  Yes, I do moan about it, because
it is preventable and something tells me that it makes the language
"poorer," that "beautiful" language-specific sounds are disappearing on
account of "ignorance" and "laziness."  So I struggle and wiggle a bit, snap
at certain whippersnappers' ankles once in a while, believing that the
"damage" caused by a handful of doers can be prevented by a handful of
doers.  While I have never been a true fatalist, I know that I would get
over it if "ignorance" and "laziness" win out at the end of the day, and I
would take solace in the awareness that "ignorance" and "laziness" have
always featured prominently in changes and even metamorphoses of languages
all the way back to the dawn of human language, and that this applies to
other types of changes as well, including politico-historic changes we
witness as we speak.  After all, all we really know is that it is this very
time that we really have, and our languages as they are now are parts of
this.

And Karl-Heinz, you provided a telling example, although I was not
consciously thinking of the Buddenbrooks:

Lower class: Öäwer Revolutschon mutt sien ...

Higher class: Öwer du Döskopp ...

Higher class: ... Ji heww ja schon een !

I'm not sure if Thomas Mann was linguistically really that insightful and
purposeful, but I would definitely not put it past him.

The first two examples may indicate a difference in pronunciation (probably
[œ:] versus [ø:], of which the latter is a sound shared with German).

The last example represents one of those "appalling" cases of even basic,
"small" words being substituted by German loans, in this case schon
for al 'already'.
Other examples found often these days are wer for wokeen (~ 'keen) 'who', wie
for wo (~ woans ~ wodennig) 'how', oft for faken 'often', and niemand for nüms
or keeneen 'nobody'.

For the sake of those that "missed out" on my "pearls of wisdom" on account
of not reading Dutch, let me add that I responded to our Jacquelines
question as to why it is that in her native neck of the woods upper-crust
representatives do use Low Saxon while the middle class does so to a lesser
extent.  My translation of my proposal following the "Dutch":

***
Dank je voor de interessante vraag, Jacqueline. Het herinnert me aan de
situatie aan de Duitse kant van de grens.

Mensen op de bovenkant van de sociaal-economische "totempaal" gebruiken soms
het Nedersaksisch ("Platt"), vooral met "gewone" mensen (b.v. patiënten en
cliënten), misschien omdat zij het leuk vinden en het de indruk maakt dat
zij een voeling voor "de mensen van het land" hebben. In elk geval hebben
zij niets te verliezen; het kan hun reputatie slechts verbeteren.

Maar mensen van lagere sociaal-economische standen willen graag gloven dat
zij "upwardly mobile" zijn, en vooral willen die van de middenstand ook
bewijzen dat zij niet tot de laagste standen behoren, namelijk tot de
standen die "dialect" spreken.

Mijn indruk en theorie zijn gebaseerd op de veronderstelling dat de meeste
mensen nog geloven dat het gebruik van "dialect" met minderwaardig onderwijs
wordt geassocieerd (en het woord "streektaal" is slechts een eufemisme voor
de weigering om een taal als een taal onder mensen van de vermoedelijk
zelfde etnische groep te zien) en dat slechts die mensen "dialect" gebruiken
waarvan de geleerdheid niet betwijfeld word, en het symbolische bewijs ervan
is hun superieure vaardigheid in de nationale standaardtaal.

***
Thank you for the interesting question, Jacqueline. It reminds me to the
situation on the German side of the border.

People at the upper end of the socio-economic "totem pole" sometimes use Low
Saxon ("Platt"), especially with "ordinary" people (e.g. patients and
clients), perhaps because they find it cool and it creates the impression
that they have a feel for and the right touch with the "people of the land."
Anyway, they have nothing to lose; it can only improve their reputation.

But people of lower socio-economic classes want to believe that they are
"upwardly mobile," and especially those of the middle class furthermore feel
obliged to prove that they do not belong to the lowest classes, namely to
the classes that speak "dialect."

My impression and theory are based on the assumption that most people still
believe that the use of "dialect" is associated with inferior education (and
the word "regional language" is merely a euphemism symptomatic of the
refusal to recognize a language as a language among people of the supposedly
same ethnic group) and that only those people choose to occasionally use
"dialect" whose learnedness is not in doubt, and the symbolic proof of this
is their superior proficiency in the national standard language.

***

Belatedly in my defense of responses to this, please let me add that I did
not claim that this actually applied to the situation in the Netherlands.
So it was not really to be answered with "right" or "wrong" but with "it
applies" or "it doesn't apply" to the situation in the Netherlands.

Anyway, thanks for all the interesting and informative responses so far.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
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