Ripuarian language

For other uses, see Ripuarian (disambiguation).

Ripuarian (Ripoarish or Ripuarisch Platt, literally: "Riverine" or "Riparian Low German") is a West Germanic dialect group spoken in the Rhineland, eastern Belgium and southern Dutch Limburg from northwest of Düsseldorf and Cologne to Aachen in the west, and Waldbröl in the east, and also the name of the people (Ripuarian Franks) who spoke it. It belongs to Central Franconian and Rhinelandic. The most famous member is Kölsch, the dialect of Cologne. Dialects belonging to the Ripuarian group almost always call themselves Platt like Öcher Platt (of Aachen) or Eischwiele Platt (of Eschweiler) or Bönsch Platt (of Bonn). Most of the more than one hundred Ripuarian dialects are bound to one specific village or municipality. Usually there are small distinctive differences between neighboring dialects (which are however easily noticeable to locals), and increasingly bigger ones between the more distant ones. These are described by a set of isoglosses called the Rheinischer Fächer in linguistics. The way someone talks, even if he is not using Ripuarian, quite often allows him to be traced precisely to a village or city quarter where he learned to speak.

Ripuarian forms a common dialect family called Central Franconian together with the Moselle Franconian in Luxembourg and Rhineland-Palatinate. Ripuarian languages thus are part of the west middle continental Germanic language group.

Number of speakers

About a million people speak a Ripuarian dialect, so about one quarter of the inhabitants of the area do, on average. Penetration of Ripuarian in everyday communication varies considerably, as does the percentage of Ripuarian speakers from one place to another. In some places there may be only a few elderly speakers left, while elsewhere almost everyone still speaks Ripuarian in everyday life. Both in the genuine Ripuarian area and far around it, the number of people passively understanding Ripuarian to some extent exceeds the number of active speakers by far. Estimates assume some ten, and up to twenty million.

Influences

These Ripuarian varieties are related to the Moselle Franconian languages of Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany, to the Luxembourgish language in Luxembourg, to the southeastern Limburgish language in the province of Limburg (Netherlands) in the Netherlands, and to Low Dietsch in the province of Liege, Belgium. Most of the historic roots of Ripuarian languages are in Middle High German, but there were other influences too, such as Latin, Low German, Dutch, French, and Southern Meuse-Rhenish (Limburgish). Several elements of grammar are unique to Ripuarian, they do not exist in any other German language. The states Belgium and The Netherlands officially recognise some Ripuarian dialects as minority languages, and the European Union likewise follows.

See also

• Southern Meuse-Rhenish
• Low Dietsch