Rhinelandic regiolect

The terms Rhinelandic, Rhenish, and Rhinelandic regiolect are used to name the colloquial language spoken in the so-called Rhineland of West Germany. This linguistic region is approximately formed of the West of North-Rhine Westphalia, the North of Rhineland-Palatinate and several smaller adjacent areas, including some areas in neighbouring countries.

Although there is such a thing as a Rhinelandic accent, and the regiolect uses it, the Rhinelandic regiolect is not simply German spoken with an accent. Indeed, it deviates from Standard German with several thousand commonly used additional words, phrases, and idioms, and some grammatical constructions. Like other German regiolects, there is not a strict definition of what constitutues Rhinelandic; it can be spoken in a way very close to the standard language, but if locals talk to each other, it is mostly unintelligible to inhabitants of other German speaking regions.

Linguists classify the Rhinelandic Regiolect as a dialect of Standard German having a strong substratum of the many diverse local community languages of the Rhineland. As such, it has a middle position between the group of older West Central German languages, Franconian languages, and Low Franconian languages spoken in the Rhineland, and the newer Standard German. The latter has only been brought into the area recently, under the Prussian reign, when local speakers merged many common properties and words of their local languages into the standard language. Thus a new regiolect formed, which in many respects follows the conventions of Standard German, but at the same time continues local linguistic traditions, making it comprehensible in a much wider area than the original local languages. Nevertheless, it still reflects differences inside the dialect continuum of the Rhineland, since speakers often prefer distinct words, styles or linguistic forms depending on the subregion they come from.

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