Hochdeutsch is the language that many Germans regard as their native language and other Germans use as a means for formal communication while sticking to dialects in most day-to-day conversations. Hochdeutsch ‘High German’ originally refers to the German dialects that have been spoken in Upper Germany, i.e. the hilly and mountainous regions in the South of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In contrast, Niederdeutsch ‘Low German’ designates the dialects that have been spoken in the lowlands that extend to the coast of the North Sea. However, most German speakers are not aware of the geographical distinction and use the term Hochdeutsch to refer to standardized German. Probably they make use of the metaphor UP IS GOOD/DOWN IS BAD when they interpret high in High German as ‘good’ and ‘correct.’
In fact, I met many German speakers from North and Central Germany – the homeland of Low German – who are convinced that they speak pure Hochdeutsch. They claim that their spoken and written German is identical with the standard, i.e. the correct German, in contrast to German dialects spoken by people from the South – like myself. In these conversations, North German fellows occasionally point out that one should say sheena instead of keena to refer to China. They argue that everyone who usually says keena should accommodate to the pronunciation sheena because they consider it as the only correct form. There are several other typical examples which have been used in these kinds of lay linguistic discussions. For example, Northerners claim that it is correct to use the feminine article die with Butter ‘butter’, whereas I always say der Butter – in the masculine form.
I want to point out that there is something inherently odd about speakers from the Low German area telling speakers of High German dialects how to speak correct High German. It seems common to conflate geographical and normative aspects about German. For example, many German speakers are going to tell you that Germans from Hannover speak the purest form of Hochdeutsch. However from a linguistic perspective, Hannoveraners do use regional linguistic forms and they certainly deviate in certain ways from normative correct German as it is defined in grammars (Elmentaler 2012). If not in Hannover, one could go on asking where else to look for the purest form of High German – in the sense of the only correct form of German. However, this approach is misleading because it assumes that correct German has been spoken by one regionally defined group whose ways of speaking somehow gained the status of Standard German.
Actually, the story of Standard German and probably every standardized language is much more complex. To my surprise, relatively little is known about the standardisation process of German. Dante and the Accademia della Crusca seem to be responsible for the apparently Tuscan shape of Standard Italian. The Queen and Oxford have been considered as authorities for English, just as the Académie Française for Standard French. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda has been praised as the father of Modern Hebrew, just as Atatürk’s father role consequently has been extended to the Turkish language.
It seems odd that, as a linguist, I didn’t come across any of the standardisation myths that we associate with other languages in regard to German. I could only guess, were it the Prussian Hohenzollern rulers who codified German for instructional purposes in the course of their educational reforms? Which other personalities played a role? Goethe, Schiller or the story collectors and early linguists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm?
Here are the few facts about the standardisation of German that are somewhat undisputed:
Well before Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, standardisation processes are attested in written German. As writers gradually abandoned Latin in favour of the vernacular language, intradialectal levelling of written German carried on for several hundred years. Obviously, Luther’s translation of the bible (1534) in conjunction with Gutenberg’s printing press influenced the shape of Standard written German. In the 17th century, early grammarians argued that normative German should be based on the dialect of the East German city Meissen because it was estimated and prestigious. Some of the early grammarians like Schottelius were motivated by religious philosophical causes in their quest to uncover the original German. Even at this early stage of German language planning, normativists disfavoured dialects. However, German speakers continued to speak dialects for a long time – the classicist poets Goethe and Schiller spoke in their native Hessian and Swabian dialects which resonate occasionally in their rhymes: Some of their verses only rhyme in their dialects, but not in Standard German. Naturally, proponents of language purism and their fear of language decline grew stronger with upcoming nationalism. With the first edition of the lexicon Duden (1880), named after its editor Konrad Duden, a tradition of lexicography was established that has been influencing German orthography until today. Despite the abundance of normative publications on Standard German, there remains room for interpretation in grammar, lexicon and orthography where explicit linguistic norms are missing or ambiguous.
What is most puzzling to me – most German speakers today claim to speak Hochdeutsch, which is essentially an artificial and originally written form of German i.e. Standard German. How come that large numbers of German speakers at some point in the last 150 years shifted completely from their (Low) German dialects to Hochdeutsch, a partially codified language that they had to learn actively? In other words, why didn’t the Low German speakers (and many others) keep on speaking their dialects in certain contexts and Standard German in others, without mixing them, just as most German speaking Swiss? If nations are imagined communities (cf. Anderson 1983) are national languages imagined as well?
Literature
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso.
Berner, E., W. Schmidt, N.R. Wolf & H. Langner. 2014. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache: Ein Lehrbuch für das germanistische Studium. S. Hirzel Verlag.
Besch, Werner. 2003. Die Entstehung und Ausformung der neuhochdeutschen Schriftsprache/Standardsprache. In Sprachgeschichte: Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und ihrer Erforschung, vol. 3, 2252–2296. De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110194173-004. (12 December, 2023).
Elmentaler, Michael. 2012. In Hannover wird das beste Hochdeutsch gesprochen. In Lieselotte Anderwald (ed.), Sprachmythen–Fiktion oder Wirklichkeit (Kieler Forschungen Zur Sprachwissenschaft 3), 101–115. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Hoffmeister, T. 2021. Sprachwelten und Sprachwissen: Theorie und Praxis einer kognitiven Laienlinguistik (Sprache Und Wissen (SuW)). De Gruyter.