What Makes Each of the Germanic Languages Unique (English, German, Dutch, Swedish, and more!)
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- Опубліковано 1 тра 2024
- This video covers the unique traits of the Germanic languages, including English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Afrikaans, Yiddish, and more!
timestamps:
0:00 intro
1:00 Common Traits
4:43 English
9:15 Scots
10:57 Dutch
14:31 Afrikaans
16:25 Limburgish
17:59 Frisian
19:37 Standard German
24:07 Bavarian
25:18 Low German
27:17 Luxembourgish
29:32 Yiddish
31:39 North Germanic
32:15 Swedish
35:40 Danish
37:39 Norwegian
39:33 Icelandic
43:43 Faroese
46:10 Elfdalian
47:55 Gutnish
48:55 Old Norse
49:48 Gothic
50:42 Outro
if you think i'm going to sit and watch a 51 minute lingo lizard video about the germanic languages you're absolutely right.
lingolizard is worth 51 minutes of your life :)
@@mimimimimimimimimimi100%
I didn't even notice and just clicked bc I would've stayed through regardless 😭
Honestly when I firstly saw the video I thought it was shorter, like four to ten minutes smh. Then I saw your comment and I'm feeling weird about the fact I'm RELIEVED about it being almost an hour long.
@@mimimimimimimimimimi Not at all, this is wasting my life away, the amount of stuff that is wrong, is enormous. Never trust an American English Speaker to make things right when it comes to talking about the Germanic languages, unless they're a bloody professor in the subject and SPEAKS the languages.
Saying the Swedish sj sound is pronounced [x] or [ʃ] they should get punched in the face so hard their teeth form a picket fence in their asshole.
[ɧ] is distinct from all other consonants, it even has 3 varieties none of which even remotely sound like any other consonant.
He also got the Swedish Pitches wrong. And he forgot to mention the reason for why Elfdalian isn't recognized in Sweden as a language.
After all our government said, if we allow Elfdalian a minority status, that means we would have to teach it in school as a home language to our students.
And if we do that, the other unrecognized minority languages would beg for official status as well and we can't have that.
Gutnish isn't recognized, neither is Scanian or Bothnian, and all of them are CRITICALLY endangered.
“geld” in Dutch means money, not gold, “goud” is gold.
Leuke profielfoto!
@@skilxx__ Thanks!
@@Nielsly You're welcome!!
Like Gouda?
@@bobbygoestoabyss6624 Gouda is a place
I'm so glad that you included Elfdalian. This language is neglected by Swedish authorities. Whereas Romany, Yiddish, Sami (five dialects) and Finnish (two dialects) all have official status and are given specific rights in education and public administration, Elfdalian and other Swedish "dialects" get no support at all.
One remark: All the "Ovansiljan" parishes speak the same kind of language. That is the parishes of Älvdalen, Våmhus, Mora, Sollerön, Venjan and Orsa. Although Elfdalian is the most archaic one.
also very cool that he included gutnish, which may be even more frequently forgotten than elfdalian!
Swedeb neglects all minority languages in sweden. I speak another one that isnt official. All of your parishes you talk about do not speak the same language. They are all distinct and deserve recognition. Also elfdalian isnt just archaic. It has tons of innovation. And the other parishes also have tons of archaisms and innovations themselves. As do all languages in scandinavia
The work to preserve and elevate our minority languages simply doesn't have any meaningful funding or support, unfortunately. There is academic interest but that's it.
@@NaimHrustanovic even academic interest is lacking contemporarily. With elfdalian as the exception
@@clanDeCo I'm based in Luleå and there is a distinct academic presence in Sami and Meänkieli fields, linguistic or otherwise. But of course that's regional and not representative of the whole country or the subjects in general - the interest is still marginal.
I've always been fascinated by how different the languages are while still being pretty mutually intelligible.
Like, if you're reading some German, like on a menu or a sign, you can normally guess what it says, especially if you know the nuances of how spelling changes between English and German (T/D = Th, SS = T, etc.).
yep, it's not quite as mutually intellgiable as many latin languages probably are, but it's pretty damn close
Sorry, but the notion of mutual intelligibility is being stretched to ridiculous lengths here. Just because languages share a number of cognates in the core vocabulary, this doesn't mean speakers can talk with each other at all. "This is my hand" is not communication. The only area where this is true is Scandinavia, where Danes, Norwegians and Swedes can - with often great effort - communicate with each other in speech. In writing, however, the mutual intelligibility is greater.
u spilled ariana
@@tonyf9984 I agree :)
I'm not saying it's the case here but usually people who talk about English and German being mutually intelligible don't know any German. About 45% of all English words have a French origin, whereas only about 25% of English words have a Germanic origin but you don't often find people saying English and French are mutually intelligible
I'm glad you mentioned that Afrikaans was once written in Arabic
All of us language nerds know this.
But why?
@@kamelboufenchouche8289 It was the language of the Indonesian slaves, who were Muslim.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 Not all. New to me.
@@kamelboufenchouche8289 Because the nederlanders used malay slaves who learned the nederlands language incorrecrtly, to preserve islam among them the ottoman empire would send preachers who would learn the local slaves language and write it down in their own writing system. In time as contact with the Nederlands was broken most nederlanders in South Africa would also adopt the slaves variety of the language as most people they talked to spoke afrikaans, but they would then begin to write it in the latin alphabet as they always had written the nederlander language.
Great video! just one correction maybe, at 07:33 "Not found in other Germanic languages" in German you could say "Das ist meins" meaning "That is mine" so it definitely has independent possessive determiners.
Actually, Dutch does it as well, but always with a particle. "Mine": "het mijne"; "yours": "het jouwe" (informal, singular) or "het uwe" (formal, both singular and plural); "his": "het zijne"; "hers": "het hare"; "theirs": "het hunne". There is no such word for the informal second person plural.
It's also used in "Zijne Majesteit" and "Hare Majesteit": "His Majesty" and "Her Majesty", respectively. And "Zijne Koninklijke Hoogheid", "Zijne Excellentie", etc.
The Dutch term is "zelfstandig bezittelijk voornaamwoord", which literally translates to "independent possessive pronoun". Dutch, like German, has a separate word for "independent", although "onafhankelijk" exists as well. The "on-" prefix indicates a negation, like "un-" in German.
Dependent: afhankelijk, onzelfstandig (NL); abhängig, unselbständig (DE).
Independent: onafhankelijk, zelfstandig (NL); unabhängig, selbständig (DE).
German has "das meine", "das deine", etc. So I'm guessing that it's not limited to English.
austrian bavarian also does this, we say "meiniger/meinige/meiniges" for mine (male/female/neuter). this can be made into any combination like unsrige/deiniges/ihrige/euriger/etc.
All Germanic languages have Independent possessive determiners.
Den är min Swedish.
Den ær min Danish.
Hit aer myn Old English
Conclusion LingoLizard is stupid. And you should just know how much he butchered the North Branch languages. Bloody Americans.
"Meins" however is colloquial, similar to "selber". In proper written German, you wouldn't use those.
@@SeverityOneIn Dutch, one can also say 'Dat is (de) mijne' (That is mine).
Dutch teacher here (teacher of Dutch ;)): just wanted to say that I'm impressed with the research you did. Also: I couldn't find any mistake about my language! Geweldig! :)
Is that not the point of doing research
@@insising of course it is! (but you know UA-cam 😉)
Ek hoop ons regerings gaan eendag die kinders vertel oor die verskillende tale wat lyk op Nederlands. Soos Afrikaans, Pella-Nederlands etc.
I agree. Some pronunciations could be better, but at least it's not butchering it. This is much better than most non-Dutch-natives who even claim to be able to speak Dutch or sometimes even claim/imply to not have a bad accent
Hij zegt daarentegen wél dat altijd wordt uitgesproken als , wat niet klopt. Zie bijvoorbeeld 'chips' of 'logisch'.
It would be interesting to also include some varieties that might be separate languages according to some (such as Zeelandic, West Flemish, Kaaps, Wymysorys, Low Rhenish, Pennsylvania Dutch), and also the two extinct languages related to English - Yola and Fingallian
iznt fingallian barely attested?
@@artifactU people like to pretend fingallian doesn't exist
I didn’t want to work on the video for an extra 2 months 💀
@@LingoLizard I'm not saying that you had to include these, I just stated that it would be interesting because these languages/dialects are not talked about much
I particularly missed Frisian? Or was I just not paying attention?
Especially as it is a fellow ingvaeonic nasal spirant language...
Finland-Swedish is actually very different to Sweden-Swedish in pronunciation. We for example don't have a pitch accent, and we don't have the weird sch-kind of sound that they have in Sweden
You call us weird and we call YOU weird! (But we Sweden-Swedes love your weirdness!)
And meänkieli is interesting aswell. A pitch accent form of Finnish with more Swedish loanwords than standard Finnish.
Does that make it sound more like Danish? Isn't the guy that developed Linux a Swedish speaker from Finland?
@@BrandonLeeBrown Not really, no. Danish is very different. It's closer to Finnish in pronunciation, like in tone, rhythm and such. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is indeed a Finland-Swede
I speak both English & German, so my fascination with Germanic languages has been a thing for years, especially once I started getting into Old English & Old Norse during my senior year of HS. This was a great breakdown & it didn't even take a full hour; respect.
And given English's history, the fact that it preserves primitive phonemes that have vanished from most Germanic languages--including some that had vanished from the Italic languages by the time of Old Latin--is astonishing.
@@KororaPenguin This is why I'm really triggered when people genuinely try to argue that English isn't a Germanic language, when phonologically English is actually one of the most conservative Germanic languages. Retention of the eth/thorn, a lack of a consonant shift like that seen in High German, & regular transformation of certain consonant clusters (e.g. sk->sh) shows just how ancient/distinct English truly is. Acting like the language began in the late 11th century is one of the worst misconceptions perpetuated by academics of the last 150 years.
The ability to combine smaller words into compound words applies at least to all West-Germanic languages, not just to German and Dutch; the famous long words in German are not a grammatical feature but an orthographic convention. English has the same grammatical ability but just writes the compound with spaces or hyphens (initially).
Yes, we can do very long compound words in Swedish. Meromvärdesskatt as example, or moms as we usually say. Same as VAT value added tax.
I know some do this for comedic effect, like in “May I ask what-the-fuck-fucking-fuckingly-fuck happened???”. I know “soon-to-be-X” happens sometimes as well.
Richtig
Mr.Knowitall
@@ykalon Norwegian has minoritetsladningsbærerdiffusjonskoeffisientmålingsapparatur. It's an type of instrument used to measure the distance between particles.
this is such a interesting video! very well researched, I'm glas you shined a light in smaller dialects that are often sidelined
The Yola revival movement is headed by 2 guys, neither of which are Irish or have even been to Ireland. They estimate the strength of the revival by how many people are in their very inactive discord serve. They claim there's organisation in Ireland that have taught the language (the Yola farmstead) but yet if you ask the farmstead if this is true they will deny it (I have personally corresponded with them about this). Both 'founders' have also had many of their edits to the Yola Wikipedia page undone because they keep adding in baseless claims.
It really grinds my gears when I see people mentioning the 'movement' because it shows the damage really their little hoax has done. They're not even a movement, they're just two people who know how to game Wikipedia editing rules by adding in unfalsifiable claims because it's hard to prove a negative, that what they say happened did not happen. Don't fall for their disinfo
I’m a speaker of Icelandic and I often find many people are totally off base when they attempt to talk about anything related to the language, but this was fantastic. Always love sound break downs.
Ó hæ frændi
Ég er að læra íslensku, og ég hef skynjað það sama
😂😂😂 icelandic lengths whay you dont say that you speak broken danish or Norvegia 😂😂😂😂
@@user-wm3dp1wc3x Laugh it up all you want, but it's an undisputed fact that modern Icelandic is a lot closer to the common ancestor than Danish, Norwegian or Swedish.
So informative and comprehensive! Thank you for making this video and sharing it with us.
This is a wonderful resource. I love languages, and I'm definitely sharing this video with my friends, whether they like it or not!
Thank you for all your hard work! I would have loved it slower, but I know then the video would have been as long as LOTR. You made my day better thank you!
Great work man, I've really been getting into learning about the Germanic language family recently and this is perfect
Me when video posted 13 seconds ago
One hour for me
The massive effort you put into making this video is evident. I am not a linguistics person or even a languages person but I still found this fascinating. Great job!
This is such an impressive and ambitious project. You've done well
I thought it was a 15 minute video and didn't realise I was wrong until I looked at the length 20 minutes later
A fascinating overview of the Germanic languages. Thank you! I am an Australian English speaker who speaks, reads and writes German as a second language and am currently learning Swedish and Dutch as well as French, which was the preferred second language at high school in the 60's and 70's. Language fascinates me, particularly the origins of the English language and the correlations between the languages.
a 50 minute video from my favorite lizard, thank you for keeping my day entertained ❤
Great video, very informative!❤❤❤
The thing about the Swedish "sj" sound being a mix between a velar and post-alveolar sibilant fricative is just fascinatingly insane, because it clearly does not exhibit both qualities simultaneously in any dialects of Swedish I know, as a native speaker. It is true that it is realised as a postalveolar sibilant in some dialects, then usually contrasting with a corresponding affricate that would be the alvelo-palatal of standard Swedish, but that does not mean it has such a quality in standard Swedish. In "more standard" Swedish dialects, it is a lot more appropriate to call it a dorsal fricative, usually with some degree of labialisation, so it is essentially like the in certain conservative dialects of English. I like to use the sentence "Jag äter wheat" as a joking example of this, since the English word 'wheat' is close to homophonous with the Swedish word 'skit' in certain dialects.
This is of course a well-known technique for teaching this elusive sound to English speakers learning Swedish. Alternatively they can pretend they're Finnish ...
Det är det tunna sje-ljudet som är det ursprungliga. Jämför finlandssvenska, norska och hur man läser och sjunger om man vill låta högtidlig.
Yeah, in my experience the so-called /ɧ/ phoneme is realized either as [x], [ʂ] or possibly [ʃ ~ ɕ] depending on the speaker. Maybe there's someone out there that actually pronounces it [ɧ], but if so, I haven't met them. My sj-sound is the retroflex [ʂ] which contrasts perfectly fine with the standard tj-sound [ɕ]. I know that the tj-sound being an affricate occurs in Finland-Swedish, but I don't know any other dialect that does that off the top of my head.
@@TheLappin I do believe some far northern dialects also have it as an affricate, but my memory is vague in that regard.
Never thought about this, if any English speaker wants to learn how to approximate the pronunciation we can just refer to the "Stewie pronounces Cool Whip funny"-joke in family guy from now on 😂
Just discovered your channel - this video is really interesting! I would be interested in seeing a comparison like this with Romance languages
Q3-4 2024 or 2025.
Oh my, this is a huge video. It's really good
The amount of information per second...wowee. good stuff. Out of breath just listening...
A bit disappointing that Alemannic didn't get any coverage. It has some innovative grammatical features such as stressed/unstressed pronoun distinction ("i hilf ire" "i hilf re" "ich hilf re"), cross-serial dependencies ("i han kei Zit wil i ire d Wohnig helf iirichte") and verb reduplication ("i gaa go esse").
True. I'm swabian.
Yes, it's probably (together woth Plattdeutsch) the German dialect that is furthest from standard German. While people who just speak Standard German mostly understand for example Bavarian, they don't understand proper Alemannic.
Really well done keep it up
Speak Danish, German and English of the Germanic languages, and this is enough that I can also understand Norwegian and Swedish in both spoken and written forms with few issues. I can sorta read Icelandic and Dutch as well with some effort.
Dutch is a funny experience as a native Dane, it sounds to me like Danish but all the words are wrong, which is a confusing feeling until the brain adjusts and realizes it isn't Danish.
As a native of western Denmark I also understand Frisian very well, in fact it's probably even more mutually intelligible with my native Danish dialect than Norwegian or Swedish is.
I'm from east Jutland and I've actually mistaken spoken Dutch for Danish a couple of times abroad until I realize it is not, you know if you mainly heard spoken Spanish, Greek or whatever for several days and suddenly you hear a language that sounds alike your own, but with my knowledge of English (and Danish) I do understand some of it, short sentences and words here and there.
Icelandic? No, not so much.. I do however understand way more Faroes both written and spoken, full sentences and words here and there.
As a native German I mistake both Dutch and Danish for German when it is spoken. My brain always goes to this somehow blank and fried, fuzzy state at the same time haha I always think this is what having a stroke must be like
@@e.w.2712 The softer spoken German dialects also screws with me (as a Dane). When I hear "TV host German" I understand it straight away, but if I hear German tourists with soft dialects speak in the street my brain just crashes from trying to parse it as Danish.
In dutch "een" /ən/ (unstressed and the e vowel gets reduced) means a/an, and "één" /en/ (accents most commonly means the word is stressed) means 1,one.
Also where I live the "-en" is not reduced when its the infitive of a verb like in "maken"
And the reduction is informal
@@PauldeVrieze I'm struggling to think who doesn't reduce the "-en" in standard Dutch. Even the King does it.
OK, that's perhaps not the best example. 🙂
The an/one distinction is also in Danish: En for An, Een for One . Though the Een form was removed from the orthography in the 1980s, forcing the use of phrases like "One single" where the distinction is important .
@@johndododoe1411 And I refuse to comply. I still use "een" in writing to avoid ambiguity.
Small correction/elaboration upon the German section (from a German speaker): In modern German, the subjunctive mood is only used for a few common verbs, such as "sein" (to be), "haben" (to have), "können" (to be able to), and "mögen" (to like). For example, "Ich wäre" means "I would be", and "Ich möchte" means "I would like" (can be used in polite contexts, like English).
I love the extreme level of detail put into this video. It must have been an ordeal to make! I think you would make a great linguistics/foreign language teacher. Also, when you know the mechanics of the German consonant shifts, it makes it easier to read Dutch and to a lesser extent, other Germanic languages.
Epic work here! As a Luxembourger, I can confirm your data about Luxembourgish are correct.
What a great video. It's insane how much information there is with it being so long and densely packed! Gonna binge watch your channel after I'm done with this one.
One thing I found interesting was that you singled out Dutch and German at 4:30 for their compound words, but is English not the same in that regard? The only difference is in the orthography. But you can string together as many nominative nouns as you want, for example: public transportation system development project manager. I think they're called open compound words but syntactically they're the same as in German!
Lovely video! I'd like to point out that Elfdalian and other Dalecarlian varieties are usually not classified as East Scandinavian. Most researchers today consider them to be West Scandinavian, some even see them as divergent enough to form their own group, Central Scandinavian.
Not so sure about that; in most of the distinctions between West and East Scandinavian, Dalecarlian goes with the East. That's also what virtually every Scandinavian linguist I know of tends to say. Which linguists do you find saying it would be West Scandinavian?
I believe it's fairly agreed upon that the Dalecarlian varieties share many of the innovations of West Scandinavian, but not East Scandinavian - at the very least this is certainly true of the northwestmost lects, the Särna-Idre group.
Specific linguists? Kroonen is probably the most vocal proponent of reclassification. I believe Dahl stated it more cautiously, that the western features in Dalecarlian are obvious and may be inherited, or may have been more spread in Sweden before, and changed due to influence from the south but remained in Dalecarlia.
Obviously the most beautiful language family in the world
It's not a family, it's a branch of a family
Im sad you left out Swiss german from the german dialects part :(
Though not always used, people also often say that the Swiss dialects are called the group of highest alemanic languages and went through another shift of sounds (that I cant recall).
...so true, the alsacian dialect also is missing...
Hey ihr Alpenschwaben bleibt mal lieber leise sonst kommt irgendwann jemand das 33er Gold konfiszieren und dann kuckt ihr dumm wenn ihr nichtsmehr habt um eine tolle Rolex zu basteln.
Alle Almani ham se net mehr alle.
Highest alemannic being swiss german is literally mentioned in the video
@@binchamers Yea great it was mentioned, now can you tell me the specifics about said dialect?
This is a really good video. You cover ALL of the Germanic languages in one video but I think this can be improved by putting, say the North & West Germanic languages into separate videos. This would've made it possible for you to cover them slower (it was hard to keep up with you while trying to comprehend the material) and with examples of the things you described. Nevertheless, this is the most comprehensive language family video I've ever watched. Good job!!
Have you heard of Wymysorys (also known as Vilamovian or Wilamowicean in English and Wymysiöeryś natively)?
It's the last Germanic language spoken natively in Poland and only in one tiny village called Wilamowice (in Polish or Wymysoü in Wymysorys) and it is the number one most indangered Germanic language.
no, it’s not the last one... there is also Plautdietsch.
@@xiaofan3377
I googled Plautdietsch and it isn't spoken in Poland.
@@modmaker7617 well, it is native to Poland. not sure about whether people still speak it there
sorry about not making it clear
@@xiaofan3377
Google tells me otherwise.
German is spoken by the remaining native German inhabitants in Upper Silesia that weren't genocided.
I live at the Moselle river in Germany and my grandparent’s generation had to learn Standard German at school because at home they only spoke local dialect which is very different. It’s very similar to the Hunsrik German in Brasil.
The effort that went into making this video is just visible. Great video!
OH MY GOSH THIS IS THE LONGEST VIDEO LINGO LIZARD HAS EVER MADE IM SO HAPPY
Ein sehr interessante Video 👍🏻
5:45 where I’m from in Somerset we definitely have rhotic Rs; that also goes for Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall.
As a native Afrikaans speaker, I never really noticed just how easy Afrikaans grammar is until I started learning Dutch and German.
By far the most annoying thing about Afrikaans grammar is the adjective "inflection" you mentioned. It is related do the way Dutch inflects adjectives for gender but, of course, Afrikaans lost gender so all the adjectives kind of chose a side at random and stuck to it. Example:
English:
I am drinking warm milk. The milk is warm.
I am drinking cold milk. The milk is cold.
I am drinking warm water. The water is warm.
I am drinking cold water. The water is cold.
Dutch:
Ik drink warme melk. De melk is warm.
Ik drink koude melk. De melk is koud.
Ik drink warm water. Het water is warm.
Ik drink koud water. Het water is koud.
Afrikaans:
Ek drink warm melk. Die melk is warm.
Ek drink koue melk. Die melk is koud. (d conditionally drops between 2 vowels)
Ek drink warm water. Die water is warm.
Ek drink koue water. Die water is koud.
Thus, regard less of gender, "warm" stays "warm" and "koue" stays "koue" with no way of knowing if you need to "inflect" or not. So you kind of need to learn two forms of the same adjective as 2 separate words. Especially considering that it often isnt just as easy as adding "e" to the word as Afrikaans has many conditional sound changes from Dutch. Example the dropping of -Ct you mentioned:
English:
The glass is broken. The broken glass is mine.
Afrikaans:
Die glas is gebreek. Die gebreekte glas is myne.
The -e suffix means that the -Ct is no longer at the end of the word and the sound isnt dropped.
However, this is arguably far easier than remembering arbitrary gender for all nouns in my opinion.
Great video and thanks for including Afrikaans!
4:22 Thanks for including this word. Makes me proud to be a Dutch-speaker.
Belgian Dutch speakers and speakers from the Dutch provinces North Brabant and Limburg (not sure about Zeeland) can still differentiate between the three grammatical genders. The language developed differently in the south vs the north. Instead of “een stoel” we could say “ne stoel”, which indicates masculine gender, contrasting with “een tafel”, where “*ne tafel” is not possible, thus indicating female gender. “Ne” instead of “een” is lost in the North.
Or in a slightly more informative way: In Dutch the articles for the masculine and feminine gender became identical in the nominative case, and the case system was almost completely lost, Northern Dutch did what every school child would have done and kept the form of the nominative case, while Southern Dutch kept the form of the accusative case and thus that gender distinction.
You sound like a cunning linguist, love that
I was hoping you'd at least mention the Wymysorys (Vilamovian) language, a West Germanic language spoken by a couple dozen people in one Polish village. But I still really appreciate this video and learned a lot from it!
For Bavarian, the sound change "al" to "oi" is actually two different sound changes. You explained the "a" to "o", but there is a separate sound change from when a "l" comes after a vowel:
If the vowel is an unrounded monophthong, the vowel becomes rounded and the "l" disappears.
If the vowel is a rounded monophthong, the l turns into an "i" and forms a diphthong together with the vowel.
If the vowel is a diphthong, the "l" disappears and the vowel doesn't change.
Note that i observed this in Salzburg and Oberösterreich (upper Austria) and thus might be different depending on the region. (also in the same region, the r is also uvular)
the upper palatine dialect moves all vowels further back in the throat, towards ou, while lower bavarian shifts them towards 'e'. even though neither side would admit it, the salzburg dialect and upper bavarian are very similar, since upper bavarians see the center of their dialect in the berchtesgaden region, which is basically a suburb of salzburg.
you'd think the dialect's capital would be munich, but the (critically endangered) munich dialect is/was always its own thing. if you want to hear it, you can still find speeches by munich's former mayor, christian ude. as a politician, he tried to speak clearly, but he privately has a very strong dialect which is hard for him to hide.
Thank you for including Scots 💙
I think talking about Swiss German would've been worth it, since it's by far the most commonly spoken dialect of German.
English has been heavily influenced by the North Germanic languages particularly old Norse which makes it heavily Scandinavian in grammar, syntax and.vocabulary.
I'm sorry what?! How is that the most commonly spoken German dialect. Just from size I assume there are more people in Bavaria than the tiny fraction of German speaking Switzerland.
It is true that Bavaria has a larger population, but it is important to consider that a) not many Bavarians speak their actual dialect and b) those that do mostly don't use it in everyday life that much except in rural areas. They mostly speak standard German, though with a Bavarian accent. In Switzerland on the other hand, Swiss German is omnipresent in the German-speaking part and very much used.
Also, German (and with that Swiss German) speakers make up sixty percent of the Swiss population, so it's by no means a "tiny fraction".
@@keskonriks710 * 63% and many more as second language
Using the accusative for motion toward and another case for station, which you mentioned about Icelandic, is a common Indo-European phenomenon, found in Latin, Ancient (but not Modern, where the dative is desuet) Greek, several Slavic languages including Russian, and German.
I believe that in German it is only the article that indicates accusative or dative though, whereas in Icelandic it is the noun as well.
as a person from the very south east of austria i really appreciate you talking about bavarian dialects as well 😁
amazing video! loved to watch it! i just have one teeny tiny nitpick that i would like to point out, which is that elfdalian is actually most likely not descendant from old norse but is more likely descendant from a para-old norse. this is because elfdalian preserves some distinctions that old norse got rid of, such as the distinction between /w/ and /v/, nasals, and the fricative sound written as a "g" in the word "oga".
23:53 the (first) subjunctive in (Standard) German is used fairly often for *citation* in certain formal contexts (e.g. news reports), indicating that the speaker presents the claim from another entity (organisation, person etc.), without judging its validity.
Also, in German, they're called Konjunktiv 1 and 2.
6:50 Technically English does also have diareses for distinguishing between when vowels are two separate vowel sounds next to one another, and they can technically be used in any word (even non-loanwords) where this is the case - but in practice no one does except the New Yorker who kept it as part of their style guide.
Thanks for including my flag in the starting screen and mentioning my language in the first 17 seconds of the video. I love you now.
46:39 No, we have W's in our dialect in northern Sweden, f.ex. "kwi-inn" (very weird to spell since we dont have a written form of the dialect and I've never heard any other language use that vowel, swedish kvinna) meaning woman. It's called Bondska (westrobothnian) and mainly old people still speak it...
We also have W's in question words such as "Hwors & Hwo" meaning "where & what"
One thing not mentioned in the video: One of the most unique parts of Swedish (at least when compared with all other Germanic languages, and also with most European ones) is the large inventory of relationship words.
English has one word for grandmother, and German has Grossmutter - compare Grandmere in French and Babuska in russian. In contrast, Swedish has two different words, farmor and mormor - paternal and maternal grandmother, respectly. Swedish does *not* have a term for both those relationships.
For the people who are the children of your siblings, English has two words, niece and nephew. Swedish, in contrast, has 7 different relationship words for those relationships, all of which have differing definitions and none of those 7 are direct translations of the 2 English terms. And so on and so forth for many other relationship terms.
Interestingly, Latin has a lot of relationship terms that can be directly translated into Swedish, but have no perfect English translation. For example: Patruus = Farbror and Avunculus = Morbror, both sets of terms meaning Uncle in English. It seems possible that PIE had a large inventory of relationship words that were retained in its daughter language Latin, and that Swedish is very conservative in this regard since it has retained these words to this day.
The thing is, i don't think the terms in Swedish come from Proto Indo-European, they seem to be just word constructions from modern language, like combining father, mother, great, and brother. In Proto Indo-European, there were innovative words that were not clear combinations of existing words
Fun fact: unlike most Germanic languages (and contrary to popular belief), English's schwa (which I will be referring to as the mid central vowel from hereon out) CAN be stressed in GA, NZE, and SAE. In GA a stressed mid central vowel is usually interpreted in dictionaries as an open-mid back unrounded vowel, but this is not correct and dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster and Oxford English do not abide by this untrue rule. In NZE and SAE, a vowel shift occurred that has caused the near-close front unrounded vowel (i in words like sit) to shift into something that sounds very close to a mid central vowel, causing the sound made to be stressed in some words.
@techtato794 What does it mean for NZE/SAE/GA? Thanks for answering.
@@jonnhyoliveraravenaorellan1363 sorry I forgot to clarify. GA refers to General American English, NZE refers to New Zealand English, and SAE refers to South African English
@@TechTato06 Shouldn't then General American English be GAE instead of just GA?
@@jaimetakoff Usually people just say General American rather than General American English
@@TechTato06 Oh... thanks for explaining. But that feels incredibly US-centric to me
This video is incredible! As an English speaker I take for granted how complex our pronunciation really is. Like the L in "milk" like you said.
I am very pleased that Gotland/Gutnish was included.
I don't know what it is but I just love ogoneks. Years ago, inspired by Elfdalian, I made a Germanic conlang that maintained nasal vowels using ogoneks
49:23 Although the text (correctly) states that Old Norse was written with the younger futhark (16 runes), the picture to the left shows the older futhark (24 runes).
It is called ‘Elder Futhark’, not ‘Older Futhark’!
@@olafur2463 You mis-quoted him. He didn´t capitalize it.
Also, designations such as "Elder Futhark" and "Old Norse" are dumb. Futhark should be separated into First Futhark, Second Futhark and Futhorc. "Norrøn" and "Dansk Tunge" should be used as terms rather than "Old Norse".
This video was very cool. I am wondering if you could do a similar one avout the latin/romance languages!
Thank you for mentioning Limburgish!
Well done! Though, I have some comments....
Bokmål and Nynorsk are WRITTEN languages EXCLUSESIVELLY. We do NOT speak Bokmål or Nynorsk. We speak our dialects. Some people, like me, even write in our dialects when chatting or texting as it is how we speak.
Certain dialects do not understand eachother in Norwegian, though people tend to be able to speak the "standard" dialect of the region that most people are able to understand. Words and phrases of certain dialects tend to be native and generally unknown for those who live outside of those regions.
Dutch also has a strong distinction between V and W like english does
our V tends to sound pretty harsh and is often interpreted as an F by foreigners though,
because we tend to pass quite a bit of air, regardless, an F is still very distinct from a W, and if anything, it only serves to prove the point about distinction between W and V, right?
example: in a word like "vervelend" (annoying/boring), it sounds extremely effy, but i think it's down to word stress and quick succession that kind of forces that on dutch speakers, lest it sound slurred, it needs to have this strong attack to set apart the syllables at a certain level of talking speed, therefor it tends to harshess at native level speaking.
dutch pronunciation is a lot of tip of the tongue and front teeth raking stuff, and air passes so it has this bright harshness to it, that's why our S sounds hissy and oversaturated too (as well as our C that not resolves to K), we just pass air through our front upper teeth :D
i can almost always pick out a dutchman speaking english by the oversaturated S, sometimes it's a dane though, seems like they have that thingie too, so then it's down to the V/W sound :D
i can only think of the K, H and the G being in the back of the throat, the rest is all up front the way i speak dutch
(randstad/west area, where the guttural hard G/CH is used practically identical to how the scottish do,
ou can't really hear the difference between a single vowel or a double one as we don't stretch those,
and we speak quite fast and rhythmic, you can hardly hear a comma or a period in speech really )
The letters V and W are pronounced differently but W is pronounced [ʋ] not [w] like in English
@@user-kb8zv5ob2qi'm not a linguist, sadly i don't really know how to read phonemes that way :')
all i know is for a W in Dutch, we position the lip against the front teeth first, then rake the teeth across the lip (ro vice versa really the way your jaw opens), again making it brighter and harsher in sound because of the teeth involved, as is kind of the norm for Dutch :D
the English W mostly seems to use only the lips to do that movement from my observations.
@@user-kb8zv5ob2q Plenty of Dutch speakers have a bilabial w like in English. It is transcribed as [ β̞ ]. It is like [w], but without velarization.
I am American and studied Dutch in Belgium. The Belgium-Dutch W is completely different and the V tends to more English / French V but still has enough F sound to qualify as a Dutch V. In English the Dutch V is described as between English F and English V, but in varying degrees. The Belgian-Dutch W is nearly a full English W, with mouth formed to say an English V, while Dutch W is completely different from an English W and different from a German W. Then there are the Dutch W's that are combined with L or R, that sound like Dutch V's.
20:55 As can be seen in your correct phonetic transcriptions, since SHG is non-rhotic, "-a" is also a very common ending vowel, as the pronunciation of the "-er" ending.
Fascinating!
3:18 slight correction - word order is SVO but the text said "subject-object-verb"
So cool that Bavarian has /oɐ/ like my THOUGHT/CLOTH vowel. Makes me feel at home.
Btw the singular-plural vowel alternation is technically not IE ablaut but a different thing called umlaut that came later.
Fascinating. I’m a Brit now living in Zeeland, acutely aware of dialectal Dutch in my area.
This video is a wealth of information, delivered almost at too fast a pace to keep up with. I will certainly return to it and go slowly through.
Still not sure what ‘lenis’ refers to…
7:30 Plautdietsch also has them : dit es miene kat vs. dise kat es mient
Also, since you didn't cover it, here's some things that make Plautdietsch unique:
1: Palatals. Plautdietsch has turned velars (and also some instances of 'nd') palatal around front vowels, like brig /brɪj/ 'bridge', krek /çrɛc/ 'crutch', singen /zɪɲə/ 'to sing', händ /he̞ɲ/ 'hands'
2: The -ge suffix, which is kind of hard to explain, but basically indicates obvious or redundant information.
3. Our own great vowel shift, resulting in words like green /jrɔɪn/ 'green', wóter /vuta/ 'water', naat /nat/ 'net', rot /rœt/ 'red', shep /ʃɛp/ 'ship', rat /rɔt/ 'rat'
4. Not sure what to call this, but using the construction 'mie (es) -' (me (is) -) for involuntary states of being, ex: mie es meid 'me is tired', mie hungert 'me hungers', mie dät dat wei 'me does it hurt' etc.
5. Loss of coda /t/ after fricatives, leading to naaght /naɦ/ 'night', night /nɪç/ 'not', haaft /haf/ 'has 3sing', haast /has/ 'has 2sing'
Also, Low German languages are more closely related to Anglo-Frisian than High German
Some can actually count as many as 40 vowels in the danish language which makes it the language with the most vowels. Danish babies are also the last in Europe to being talking and have a smaller vocabulary, compared to other kids in Europe.
wow fantastic job
nice video. Just wondering. I had a hard time trying to find out where you are from. But the way you said Nynorsk made me think you may be from the Oslo area in Norway. Am I right? Especially how good you said the Ø and Y sounds made me think that you must be from Norway some place. But I may of course be wrong. And thank you for an interesting topic.
The moment when bavarian is mentioned and swiss german not.
I want to mention that Swiss German is hard to understand for Standard German speakers
Note that in many Belgian Dutch regiolects, the -en is generally not reduced to /ə:/, if anything people tend to drop the e and pronounce it more like /n/, /ʔn/ or /ən/. Basically we drop the e, not the n although Dutch teachers does insist we should use the e in any case or else.
Still, for nearly everyone in Antwerp, Flemish Brabant and Limburg, -en is pronounced [ə].
Danish "soft D" is really thorn, with various words historically drifted from containg thorn to a hard T (where German drifted to a hard D) . Both may relate to avoiding the thorn letter, transcribing it differently then having the pronunciation following the orthography .
́
A number of "implicitly dropped" consonants are not dropped in standard Danish, including the prefix "at " (= English "to "). The ending "-er" in standard Danish retains the R letter as a very soft modifier of the E sound, identical to the word "er" (= English "is").
23:58 (lower right, table left) gelegen, as I have learned, is analysed as the past participle of liegen, instead of being derived from the verb legen (although one may argue that legen could be the causative of liegen, but causative is no longer productive in modern German) I would consider it a misfit in the table.
The letter "j" was literally invented to write /j/ because in latin they just used the letter "i" and it in languages other than latin it got confusing if you should read any "i" as /i/ or /j/. English is not atypical for a germanic language, its atypical for an europian language.
I'm not familiar with any other europian languages
@@memeulusmaximus How is this possible?
Pulmonic ingressive pronunciation happens in Norwegian, too.
Also, in Northern Norwegian, you can form a sentence entirely with vowels. "Å, æ e i A, æ å." Which means, "Oh, I'm also in A," A being understood here to be a school class.
Northern Norwegian also has the use of pronouns before names when not addressing someone and not using a job title: "Han Julius Cæsar gjekk over Rubikonelva." - "He Julius Caesar crossed the river Rubicon."
Also, Norwegian has basically lost the formal second person pronoun: "De," and the gendered standard titles: "Herr", "Fru", "Frøken." These are still comprehensible, but archaic, showing up mainly in translated foreign media. The equvalent of English "thou": Perfectly comprehensible, but weird. This is a recent development, occuring in the last few decades. The joke is that you only use "De" when addressing the king or threating a lawsuit. In fact, using these terms is kind of rude, implying that someone is arrogant and condescending.
And, fun fact: Norwegians understand both Danies and Swedes better than either understand Norwegians, while Danes and Swedes understand Norwegians better than each other. This means Norwegian is the best Nordic language to learn if you want to understand as many people as possible.
Southern swedish, "Å i åa ä e ö" = "And, in the creek there's an island"
@@falukropp2000 Cool! This is Skåne?
"Og i elva é det ei øy." Not quite :) .
@@annominous826 No a bit further north, Småland region (och i ån är en ö)
@@falukropp2000 Cool, it's a nifty sentence.
Ha ha! Svenska är bäst.
Dialects in Norway even have different spellings for the same word. For example. I is Jeg in Oslo, æ in trondheim, Je in lillehammer, Ek in Bergen an sogn, also sonded like ee or i in other variants. Same with “not”. Ikke, ikkje, itte and ei in some places.
Thank you, youtube recommended for making the decision that I'm going to watch an hour long video on germanic languages today
So what have we learned? That there is a Dutch word "Paashaasschaamhaarverzamelaars" XD which does not even comes close to "hottentottententententoonstellingskaartenverkoophokje" which is a small booth where they sell tickets to an exhibition on Hottentot tents.
What Dutch also can do, and I do not know how unique this is, is add multiple verbs after eachother in one sentence: "Ik zou je wel eens willen hebben zien staan kijken" (I would have loved to see you standing there looking)
😂😂😂😂
On the yiddish section, unsure if you were updated or found out eventually, but the ch in chassidish is not ch like cheese but ch like in loch
Great intro to Germanic languages. Could you maybe focus on West Germanic languages in another project? I'm learning Dutch at the moment, and I find comparative linguistics really handy in breaking down Dutch words and reconstructing them in pseudo-English words. For example, when I the Dutch word "supermacht", I automatically convert it into "supermight" in my head. It makes learning Dutch very easy and super fun! Switching between different Germanic languages is like playing a detective, putting the puzzles back together.
'Supermacht' is also the same in German ....
Provided you ever make a video about baltic languages feel free to ask me (someone formally educated in linguistics) anything you wish to know about my native latvian.
Quick correction, the sj-sound is actually closer to [f͡x̞] but can look like [xʷ] or [χ] or [ʃ] or very occasionally [fʷ]. It’s never [x͡ʃ] natively.
Jag menar väl att sje-ljudet är snarlikt alla dessa läten, men det är ju bara motsatta ljudet till Norrmännens inandnings ja. Det är ju bara en helt vanlig utandning. Skulle jag klassificera det, så hade det varit närmre [l] än [x]. Sedan är det frågan om vilket sje-ljud vi pratar om, är det, det bakre sje-ljudet som är mer snarlikt [ʁ] och [χ] i var ljudet är formerat, eller är det mer snarlikt [ʒ] och [ɹ̠˔] som är Alveola, eller är det snarare som det främre sje-ljudet som är mer snarlikt [fʷ] eller till och med [βʷ].
Det är trots allt det svåraste ljudet i svenska språket för utlandsfödda att lära sig, och varierar delvis på vilket dialektområde samt ordval för vilken variant som brukas.
Thanks, tusen tack 🙏🏻 🇸🇪, for a really interesting video! 🇸🇪Standard Swedish actually has 21 different vowel-sounds. 9 vowel-letters a o u å e i y ä ö all have a short and a long version so double that. Short e and ä are the same so minus one. ä and ö, both short and long versions, have a different quality before r so that is plus four.
min 04:06 - differently from the phonetic change occuring in strong verbs regardless of the sound context and serving as an "automatic" morphosynctactic indicator (like in English to sing-sang-sung, German singen-sang-gesungen, Swedish sjunga-sjöng-sjungit etc.), the passage from a root vowel to another in plurals (like in English man vs men, German Mann vs Männer, Swedish man vs män) was due to the nature of the original ending, which influenced the radical vowel triggering a reaction conditioned by the neighbouring sounds. The first phenomenon goes under the German definition of "Ablaut", whereas the second one (as an outcome of combinatorial phonetics) is known as "Umlaut" - the respective Greek-inspired definitions being "apophony" and "metaphony".
That was a very good overview!
(Elfdahlian, here we come!)
Now, if I could just understand all those lingual terms! (I can't tell an umlaut from a fricative, though I grasp laryngeal and dipthong).
I could make all the sounds, but I couldn't define them. Sigh.
Nice video! :)
Small correction for Dutch though: "dj" is generally pronounced as "tj" as far as I'm aware.
Source: am Dutch
As someone who spent his youth listening to Dutch radio (you were the only ones with a good rock radio channel that I could pick up) I think you guys have invented a consonant that is a 50/50 mix of t and d.
The most common misconception *by far* for Germanic languages is that "being different" equals "archaic". Just as often, differences are due to innovations.
The typical case is Icelandic. Hardly any other North Germanic language changed the pronunciation of both vowels and consonants as radically as Icelandic - but most non-experts still think Icelandic pronunciation is archaic when in fact its full of innovations (in contrast, Icelandic grammar really *is* archaic).
Same for Elfdalian. Many know it's different from standard Swedish. And yes, many differences are due to Elfdalian being more archaic - but quite a few differences are also due to Elfdalian being more innovative than Swedish.
Same applies to Swiss German. Due to the conservative setting in small alpine villages, some believe it's a more archaic variety, when in reality it is one of the most innovative German varieties.
Long story short: dialects and smaller languages being "different" from the larger ones doesn't automatically mean they are more archaic.
People think Icelandic pronounciation is archaic because it sounds similar to old English with all the dental fricatives
I think that did come through pretty well when he was talking about Bavarian. Sure, there are more diphthongs carried over from Middle High German, but also one more consonant shift (k -> kch, sometimes b -> p), one case that was dropped and a significant change in how past tense is used.
Very interesting! Got to slow it down a bit.
I watched a video a week and a half ago by King Ming Lam about the mutual intelligibility of germanic languages so this seemed pretty interesting
35:37 slight correction - bli corresponds to "to become" and vara corresponds to "to be"