Where is hochdeutsch spoken

We and our partners use cookies to better understand your needs, improve performance and provide you with personalised content and advertisements. To allow us to provide a better and more tailored experience please click "OK". Sign Up. Travel Guides. Videos Beyond Hollywood Hungerlust Pioneers of love. Sarah Coughlan. Essential Niederdeutsch:. All of the big cities in Germany and Austria speak standard German just with a regional accent and a few local words, so it's not something to worry about.

Pleasant and colorful, yes, but also wildly difficult to understand at times. Still, not as bad as ze Schweizerdeutsch. A complex question, indeed!

Since the Hochsprache--the standardized version of the language--was largely coalesced by Martin Luther's translation of the Bible, and that translation was based largely on the dialects of the South, one might expect that there would be a town in that region that exemplifies "true standard German".

The problem is that the Hochsprache attempts to strike a "happy medium" among the various dialects--that is, to create some common ground for mutual understanding of dialects that often were not mutually intelligible. That said, Hannover is a town that is often cited as having a "standard" German pronunciation and vocabulary. Of course, all educated people in German-speaking countries speak both the Hochsprache and a regional dialect of some sort, with whatever degree of divergence it may have from that standardized language.

I agree that the Bavarian dialects are particularly pleasant on the ears of course, this is the dialect I happen to speak, and was the region where I learned the Hochsprache as well , but I cannot claim that it bears a close similarity to the textbook standard.

As somebody said before, every educated person should be able to speak hoch deutsch, as it happens everywhere, in every country!

The earliest of these were made by Prof. Lester W. He was a professor of German at the UW—Madison and a leading figure in German-American linguistics, not only because of his research on Wisconsin German, but also Pennsylvania Dutch, on which he wrote his doctoral dissertation. Eichhoff grew up in Hamburg and, like Prof. Seifert, learned both Low and High German natively. Dialects of a language are usually mutually intelligible, but sometimes it takes some effort for speakers with differing dialects to understand each other.

We do have a few examples, though. What do you call something baked that is round, flat and sweet — a cookie or a biscuit? Or what do you call long slices of fried potatoes — fries, chips or something else entirely? The concept of Hochdeutsch can be a little confusing for learners to grasp. People use it to refer to both Standard German and a dialect group within German more on that later.

Unsurprisingly, Standard German is the result of the standardization of the German language. In lieu of this, the Duden dictionary is often consulted as an authoritative reference. Public officials and civil servants including teachers are meant to use official Hochdeutsch established by government regulations.

Not really. They thus tend to use more grammatical regularity when speaking. Some dialect pronunciations follow the spelling more closely , with a long [i] and a [g] at the end. The biggest benefit of Hochdeutsch is that it allows communication across Germany between speakers of different dialects.