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| Westphalian | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Germany1 | |
| Region: | Northwestern, Westphalian1 | |
| Total speakers: | unknown1 | |
| Language family: | Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Low Franconian Low Saxon1 Westphalian |
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | gem [Germanic, other] | |
| ISO 639-3: | wep | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Westphalian is one of the major dialect groups of West Low German. Its most salient feature is the diphthongization (rising diphthongs). For example, we get iEten instead of Eːten for eat. (There is also a difference in the use of consonants within the Westphalian dialects: North of the Wiehengebirge, people tend to speak hard consonants, south of the Wiehengebirge they speak soft consonants, e.g. Foite <-> Foide.) The Westphalian dialect region includes the north-eastern part of North Rhine-Westphalia, i.e. the former Prussian province of Westphalia, without Siegerland and Wittgenstein, but including the southern part of former Weser-Ems (e.g. the region around Osnabrück and the landscape of Emsland).
It has many lexical similarities and other proximities with Eastphalian, extending to the East and a bit to the North of the area where Westphalian is spoken.
References
- ^ a b c d Ethnologue entry
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 2 December 2008, at 18:07.
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