Swabian language

Swabian
Schwäbisch
Native to	Germany
Native speakers	820,000 (2006)
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic High German Alemannic Swabian
Writing system	Latin (German alphabet)
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Glottolog	swab1242
Areas where Alemannic dialects are spoken   Swabian
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Swabian ( Schwäbisch ) is one of the Alemannic dialects of High German. It is spoken in Swabia, which covers much of the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg, including its capital, Stuttgart. It is also spoken in the rural area known as the Swabian Alb, and in the southwest of Bavarian Swabia. Swabian is also nominally spoken by the Danube Swabian population of Hungary, the former Yugoslavia and Romania and by the Caucasus Germans.

Swabian is difficult to understand for speakers of Standard German, not just because of its pronunciation but because it contains vocabulary that differs from Standard German. For example, "strawberry jam" in Standard German is Erdbeermarmelade while in Swabian it is Bräschdlingsgsälz.

In 2009, the word "Muggeseggele" (a Swabian idiom), meaning the scrotum of a housefly, was voted in a readers' survey by Stuttgarter Nachrichten, the largest newspaper in Stuttgart, as the most beautiful Swabian word, well ahead of any other term. The expression is used in an ironic way to describe a small unit of measure and is deemed appropriate to use in front of small children (compare Bubenspitzle). German broadcaster SWR's children's website, Kindernetz, explained the meaning of Muggeseggele in their Swabian dictionary in the Swabian-based TV series Ein Fall für B.A.R.Z.