Ms. Burkhart-Funk, you are a dialect researcher and dialect speaker from Bavarian Swabia. I am addressing you as a Bavarian Swabian, dialect speaker and worried father who has to realize that his children growing up in Munich no longer speak a dialect. What to do?
Language is constantly changing, and as society changes, so do the demands placed on it. I’m just like that.
So it doesn’t look good for the dialect?
There will always be regional language differences, but not as small as I got to know as a child – I was born in 1956 – even compared to the neighboring town. And language will probably also be handled differently socially. That wasn’t the case before, every dialect used to be spoken, there was no need to speak a different variety, so to use a different language, because you weren’t mobile.
The issue of mobility seems to me to be a crucial point for language development. Mobility in the area, but au dʼsocial mobility.
Until the middle of the last century, people could hardly get out of their village, maybe into the next or the next neighboring village. For example dr Lech north of Augschburg: That was a very sharp dividing line, probably the strongest dialect border in Germany. Up until now, no one has married across Lech, and then language developed completely apart.
People don’t mix and match and that doesn’t mean that the dialect can be worn down?
It only really got going after the Second World War. Of course, the media also play an important role. Until then there were almost only newspapers. Well, radio, there was that before, but language is a cumbersome thing, it doesn’t change that quickly. Up until the Second World War language change took place very slowly, after that it became a very rapid story, precisely because of increased mobility and media consumption.
What role did Bayerischer Rundfunk play for the dialects in Bavaria?
A: For a long time, Dr BR was strongly centered on Munich, and even if he allegedly broadcast in a dialect close to the dialect, then it was always a bit a “Käferzelt-Bavarian”, as sʼamaol a colleague of mine said. In any case, it wasn’t the Bavarian language that people speak in the countryside of Lower Bavaria, and it wasn’t the dialect that people speak here in Swabia, for example, and there was hardly any Franconian either, only recently did regional studios come up with more.
Why “Käferzelt-Bairisch” and not Swabian?
Ma naturally likes to identify with a region that is successful, that is potent, that is innovative. Why a language has prestige has nothing to do with the language itself. I’ve been dealing with dialect for a good 40 years now, every local dialect has a very special charm, a very own beauty. What we call prestige always has non-linguistic reasons. It’s not about whether the dialect itself is beautiful or ugly. You always associate language with the people who speak it. If you find people attractive and prestigious, you automatically find their language beautiful.
What is sexier about Upper Bavaria than about Swabia?