Schwäbisch

In August I visited friends in Ohio and their area is also Amish country.

We visited Behalt, an Amish & Mennonite Heritage Center, and I got to speak German with an Amish man.

I got to speak German with an Amish man!!!

I also learned that:

• most people have no clue about the Amish and Mennonite people.

• most of what we (think we) know about the Amish and Mennonite is incorrect.

• the Amish speak no Dutch!

• they're also not from Pennsylvania.

• they don't all speak Pfälzisch.…

Harald Schmidt, who has since given up his late night spot on German television, is to Germany was Letterman and Leno were to the US. He's also a Schwab, he's an incredible mimic and can reproduce pretty much any German dialect.

Here his Sprachkurs (Crashkurs) Schwäbisch.

If you're not yet familiar with Swabian, here's a comparison that should help you understand how it relates to German:

Swabian is to German as Creole is to North American English.

Swabian and German are related, but just as…

As a follow-up to yesterday's post Wer sind die Schwaben?, here's a wonderful little song, completely in Swabian and entrenched in the Swabian culture.

A few helps for understanding what they're singing:

-Swabians are really frugal, so frugal in fact, that they drop the final 'n' on a lot of words. Thus "Schwabenland" becomes "Schwabeland." "Mein" becomes "Mei." An exception to this is verbs and the final 'n' becomes a 't,' thus "sparen" (to save) becomes "sparet."

-"Wir" is pronounced as "mi…

Who are the Swabians?

The Swabians are the people of Württemberg, which is part of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. (The folk of the area of Baden are Badisch and their dialect is different.) Each area of Germany has its own characteristics and peculiarities, however since I spent a lot of time there, it's worth spending a bit of time getting to know these hard-working folk. They do not speak what you normally know of as "high German*," but they speak Swabian. It's a dialect …