Old High German - Dialects

Dialects

There was no standard or supra-regional variety of Old High German—every text is written in a particular dialect, or in some cases a mixture of dialects. Broadly speaking, the main dialect divisions of Old High German seem to have been similar to those of later periods—they are based on established territorial groupings and the effects of the Second Sound Shift, which have remained influential until the present day. But because the direct evidence for Old High German consists solely of manuscripts produced in a few major ecclesiastical centres, there is no isogloss information of the sort on which modern dialect maps are based. For this reason the dialects may be termed monastery dialects.

The main dialects, with their bishoprics and monasteries:

• Central German
  • Middle Franconian: Trier, Echternach, Cologne
  • Rhine Franconian: Lorsch, Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Frankfurt
  • South Rhine Franconian: Weissenburg im Elsaß
  • East Franconian: Fulda, Bamberg, Würzburg
  • Thuringian: (no texts)
  • West Franconian: conjectural dialect of the Franks in Northern Gaul

• Upper German
  • Alemannic: Murbach, Reichenau, Sankt Gallen. Strasbourg
  • Bavarian: Freising, Passau, Regensburg, Augsburg, Ebersberg, Wessobrunn, Tegernsee, Salzburg, Mondsee
  • Langobardic: (fragmentary, classification as OHG uncertain)

There are some important differences between the geographical spread of the Old High German dialects and that of Modern German:

• no German dialects were spoken east of the Rivers Elbe and Saale—in the Old High German period this area was occupied by Slavic peoples since the Völkerwanderung and was not settled by German speakers until the late 10th and the early 11th century
• the Langobardic dialect of the Lombards who invaded Northern Italy in the 6th century is assumed to have been an Upper German dialect, though little evidence of it remains apart from names and individual words in Latin texts, and a few inscriptions
• the Old Frankish language is a special case among the old West Germanic languages. The Frankish tribes built their empire at the same time as the High German consonant shift took place. This meant that the dialects of Frankish in the north of their empire, the Low Countries, did not shift, while the dialects in the south did. The dialects in the south are part of Old High German; the ones in the north are part of Old Dutch (Low Franconian).