LOW GERMAN 

[Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser No. 16, January 19, 1841] 

What first strikes the stranger here is the use of the Low 
German language, even in the most respected families. As soon as 
the people of Bremen become cordial and familiar they speak Low 
German; indeed they are so attached to this dialect that they carry 
it over the ocean. On the Lonja? in Havana as much Bremen Low 
German is spoken as Spanish. I know people who have learnt the 
Bremen dialect perfectly in New York and Veracruz from the 

 Stock exchange.— Ed. 

Bremen people living there in large numbers. It is, of course, not 
yet three hundred years since High German was declared the 
official language; the basic laws of the city, the Tafel and the Neue 
Eintracht,""' are written in the Low German language, and the first 
sounds which an infant here learns to imitate are Low German. It 
is rare for a child to begin to speak High German before the age 
of four or five. The peasants in this region never learn it and thus 
very often compel the courts to conduct proceedings in Low 
German and record in High German. Incidentally, Low Saxon is 
still spoken here in a very pure form and has remained completely 
free from mixing with High German forms, which disfigures the 
Hessian and Rhenish dialects. The North-Hanoverian dialect has 
certain archaisms which are not found in the Bremen dialect but 
suffers all the more from various local colourings; the Westphalian 
has lost greatly through a most ugly broadening of the 
diphthongs, while west of the Weser the transition to Frisian 
begins. One may safely regard the dialect of Bremen as the purest 
further development of the old Low Saxon written language; even 
now the popular language is so conscious of itself that it constantly 
changes High German words in accordance with the phonetic laws 
of Low German and assimilates them, a capacity which only a few 
Low Saxon popular dialects still enjoy. Almost the only thing 
which distinguishes the language of Reineke Vos' from the 
present dialect is its fuller, now contracted, forms, while the roots 
of the words, with few exceptions, still survive. The linguists were 
therefore quite right to regard the Bremisches Worterbuch as giving 
the lexical median of present-day Low Saxon popular idioms, and 
a grammar of the Bremen dialect taking into consideration the 
dialects between the Weser and the Elbe would be a most 
meritorious work. Several scholars here have displayed interest in 
Low German, and it is greatly to be desired that one of them 
should undertake this task.