Germany Holidays: Platt Deutsch

It is spoken by older people, on the stage, and even in the USA, but Low German is not an official language in Germany.

Platt Deutsch culture preserves unusual traditions ©Bremer Touristik Zentrale

The East Frisian baccalaureat in action ©www.ostfriesland.de

People who sing don't talk nonsense! or so say the Beeksheepers, a Platt Deutsch choir ©Tourismus Marketing Niedersachsen

It’s fair to say that Low German – Platt Deutsch – is pretty flat all round. It sounds flat, its speakers tend towards the monosyllabic, and it is spoken in a flat landscape – basically a deep band of northern Germany stretching from the Dutch border through to Hamburg. It is also spoken in the Netherlands, and prior to World War II it was regularly heard as far away as Silesia, once German, but now part of Poland.

For the tourist, these days the most obvious manifestation is the ubiquitous Moin Moin, a north German greeting which sounds like ‘morning’, but can be used at any stage of the day and simply means ‘good’(it’s a shortened version of the Dutch for ‘good day’). But never fear, meeting one Moin Moin with another will not trigger a torrent of unfamiliar vowel sounds, as these days the actual language is rarely spoken on the street. It may not be an official language, in the sense that public documents are not translated into it, but it does appear regularly in the local newspapers, it is taught in some schools, and is the lingua franca of NDR’s TV talk show Talk op Platt. It is not, however, the focus of any separatist movement, as many minority languages are.

Where it is still spoken it is regarded with great affection. It is the language of local festivals, of club comedians, and there are some theatres which specialize in Platt Deutsch dramas.

It sounds flat, its speakers tend towards the monosyllabic, and it is spoken in a flat landscape

Interestingly, Low German is also the base language of the Mennonites in the USA and Canada, a clear indication of their origins. And even the Pennsylvania Dutch – including the Amish – speak a variety of Platt Deutsch, with ‘Dutch’ in this case a corruption of Deutsch.

For English speakers, Platt Deutsch can actually be more readily understood than German. Pronunciation is easy. Eten for eat (German has essen), schipp for ship (German has Schiff), maken for make (German has machen), wief for wife (German has Frau). And indeed there is a strong connection between the UK and this region of northern Germany. We are, after all, Anglo-Saxons, thanks to the numbers of immigrants from what is now Lower Saxony from the middle of the 5th century onwards, so it’s not surprising that the languages have words in common.

Germans from other regions talk of the Platt Deutschers as being ‘mouth lazy’, ie reluctant to say anything more than absolutely necessary. And the flat vowel sounds tend to make the Platters the butt of a certain amount of piss-taking. For example the East Frisians, they say, are so stupid there’s no way they could go to a normal university, so they’ve invented the Platt Deutsch baccalaureat, with a curriculum of jumping over ditches, welly hurling, and throwing teabags. Moin Moin!