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Palatinate German

File:Palatine_Fraktur_Poem.jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons

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Palatinate German

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Also known as Pälzisch, Pfälzisch language, Pakatinate German dialect group, Pfälzisch, Palatinate German dialect, Pälzisch language, Palatinate German language, Pfaelzisch

West Franconian dialect of German

Key facts

Native to
Palatinate ; Pennsylvania Dutch Country
Ethnicity
Palatine
Native speakers
(undated figure of 400,000)
Language family
Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Weser-Rhine Germanic West Central German Rhine Franconian Pfälzisch– Lothringisch Palatine German
Early forms
Proto-Indo-European Proto-Germanic Frankish Old High Franconian Old Rhine Franconian
Dialects
Pennsylvania Dutch
Writing system
Latin ( German alphabet )
Iso 639 3
pfl
Glottolog
pala1330

via Wikipedia infobox

~4 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Palatine German (Standard German: Pfälzisch [ˈp͡fɛlt͡sɪʃ] , endonym: Pälzisch) is a group of Rhine Franconian dialects spoken in the Upper Rhine Valley, roughly in the area between Zweibrücken, Kaiserslautern, Alzey, Worms, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Mannheim, Odenwald, Heidelberg, Speyer, Landau, Wörth am Rhein and the border to Alsace and Lorraine, in France, but also beyond.

The English term Palatine refers to the Palatinate region (German: Pfalz). Almost all traditional dialects of the Palatinate belong to the Palatine dialect group, but the Palatine speech area also extends to the west and east into neighboring regions (Saarland, Kurpfalz, southern Hesse). The main dialect divisions within Palatine German are Westpfälzisch (also called Hinterpfälzisch) and Vorderpfälzisch (also called Ostpfälzisch).

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Palatinate German” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.