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Dialects in Black Forest

Dialects? Yes, in the plural: there is no one single, uniform Black Forest dialect. The spectrum of sounds and vocabulary used by people from the Black Forest is just as varied as the landscape - which might seem quite uniform, but only on first sight, its different house-styles and traditional costumes. But what differences there are between the way the locals speak in Pforzheim and in Lörrach, and how different the dialect sounds when it is spoken by someone from Waldshut compared to what you will hear in the area around Karlsruhe!

For example, this is how the phrase "ich bin daheim gewesen" (I was at home) sounds in the different areas of the Black Forest: it is pronounced i bin dahaaim gwää in Gernsbach, i ben daheim gwä in Pforzheim and i be dahaem gwää in Wildbad. However, south of a line from Bühl to Nagold in the western part of the central Black Forest, it sounds completely different: i bin dahaim gsi (or even gsii). It is i bi dahai gsi in the South in Göhrwihl and i bin dahó gsi on the eastern border of the central Black Forest in Schramberg. In neighbouring Tennenbronn, you will hear i bin dahóam gsi - and, even more markedly, in Baiersbronn, they say i bãe dahãem gsãe.
Note on the phonetics: I am attempting to reproduce the exact articulations in the dialect examples using the normal alphabet. Only for the 'open' o-sound, which lies between a and o, I am writing ó. The tilde indicates that the vowel indicated by it is pronounced nasally. Where vowels are written as double vowels, I am indicating that they are pronounced 'long' (like o in the High German word "Brot"). We have the industrious research carried out by a whole series of dialectologists - some of whom were working as long as a hundred years ago - to thank for what we know about these and many other dialect boundaries. These scholars conducted first written, and then later also oral surveys among dialect speakers.

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