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You arrive in Berlin, Germany, on a chilly morning. You’re excited! You’ve spent years of your life getting as far as C1 German, and you’re ready to explore Germany, its culture and, of course, converse with the people!

But you start noticing something as the weeks go by.
In Hamburg, you notice people say “De Jung” instead of “Der Junge.” No biggie, you think. Maybe it’s just an accent northerners have, you know?
But as the days go on, you realise – no. Every few cities, German… changes! There are many dialects around.
While you learned “Ich weiß nicht” as “I don’t know” in regular, standard German, in the south they say “I weiß ned.”

And while “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” is “Der Apfel fällt weit vom Stamm” in Standard German, in the North they say: “De Appel fallt wiet van de Stamm.”
Congrats, my friend. You have just figured out that German, alongside many of the world’s languages, exists not as a single state but as a dialect continuum!
And the more North you go, you begin to realise that… Northern German (Plattdütsch__) sounds like Dutch!

What is a dialect continuum?

A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a term used in sociolinguistics that describes a chain of dialects spoken throughout an area. One will notice that a German town and a Swiss town bordering each other in the South will understand each other better than they will with a person from the North, despite speaking, simply, German.

David Crystal, in a Dictionary of Linguistics, says it like this: “At any point in the chain, speakers of a dialect can understand the speakers of other dialects who live adjacent to them; but people who live further away may be difficult or impossible to understand.”

But what are dialects?

Simply put, dialects of a language can be regarded as subdivisions of a language. If a language is a whole cake with various colours, a dialect may look like a slice which has its own flavour, flavours and sweet stuff from around it.
Most linguists will say that languages differ by mutual intelligibility – the ability of speakers to understand each other using the words they have.

J.K. Chambers and Peter Trudgill in the book Dialectology say: “One way of looking at this has often been to say that ‘a language is a collection of mutually intelligible dialects’. This definition has the benefit of characterising dialects as subparts of a language and of providing a criterion for distinguishing between one language and another.”

Although Chambers and Trudgill hold some scepticism of this view because Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are usually thought of as different languages, they are essentially, well, mutually intelligible.
Of course, I’m not here to yap about linguistic debate over even the most basic terms in the science.
The question really is…

How did German become a dialect continuum?

To answer this question, we can probably go back a couple years. You know, just a couple, like from 500 BC when the Nordic Bronze Age happened.

Though in reality, not a lot is known about the early history of the initial Germanic tribes, it is typically agreed upon that there used to be a couple of tribes settling around southern Scandinavia and northern Germany.

Generally, we agree that they spoke an early Indo-European language called Proto-Germanic, which was related to Latin and Sanskrit.
In the 1st Century BC, Julius Caesar of the Roman Empire built the first known bridges across the Rhine during his campaign in Gaul. He led soldiers down against and into local Germanic territory.

In the 1st Century CE, Augustus led forces against the Germanic tribes across the Rhine. They led campaigns into Germania Magna, the area north of the Danube and east of the Rhine. By 100 AD, several Germanic tribes were already living under Rome.

Between 235 AD and 285 AD, foreign invasion, civil war and economic disaster plagued the Roman Empire. West Germanic tribes like the Franks, the Saxons and the Alamanni would begin to settle in Roman territory.

Invasions from Germanic tribes like the Visigoths, Ostrogoths and the Vandals also brought more Germanic-speaking people into the area.
Over the centuries, more than 300 kingdoms would emerge from these tribes and settlements. By 1871, Otto van Bismarck of Prussia would lead the formation of hundreds of small kingdoms into one modern German nation-state.

Living as separate tribes and kingdoms throughout the century means that German had never really been a completely unified, centralised language that was the same through and through.

In fact, what is quite surprising to me is why German isn’t really a bunch of completely different languages spoken in one country – at least, it’s not considered that way.

At the end of the day, a national language is also the pride of a nation. The unification of Germany meant that a standard German language needed to be established and that the fragmentation of people’s communication had to end.

Looking at it this way, the dialect continuum in Germany with the neighbouring Netherlands becomes completely understandable.
In fact, most of the world’s languages developed this way and have continued to develop this way.

Language, at the end of the day, is a means of communication. And with political decisions, territorial changes and economic needs, it continues to evolve depending on the conditions around it.

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