Dutch & German dialogue that sounds like English

Germanic languages share a common ancestor and are closely related. Normally, most of them are different enough that they’re not mutually intelligible. But is it possible to construct “universal” dialogues of Germanic languages that can be mutually understood by various Germanic languages? In this video I constructed an example. You will hear what it sounds like in various Germanic languages, not just in mainstream Germanic languages, but also in lesser known languages like Frisian and Low German. And what would it sound like in their common ancestor language Proto-Germanic? I shall answer that question and also provide a brief historical and linguistic overview of Germanic languages.

00:00 Introduction
00:50 Same dialogue in each major Germanic languages
03:29 Why are they so similar?
04:56 History of Germanic languages
06:29 Low German and Frisian
08:27 How would it sound in Proto-Germanic?
13:16 Icelandic and why the languages evolved the way they did
18:03 French and English

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#linguistics #languages #history

[lamkingming]

Thanks very much to everyone who liked, commented or subscribed, I really appreciate it!

For a next video, I’m hoping to make a video covering all other Germanic languages that I didn’t cover in this video – a video of “all Germanic languages past and present”. If you’re a native speaker of any Germanic languages or dialects not covered in this video, and you’re happy to help record the short dialogue in this video in your native tongue, please send me an email (you can find it in my channel’s About page)!

Also welcome if you speak the languages already covered here but with a distinct regional accent, or if you’re an expert in a particular historical Germanic languages (e.g. Middle Low German, Old Norse etc). With your help, maybe we can create a complete repository of all Germanic languages, dialects, and accents – which would be so cool! Thank you all!

[davidpitchford]

If a Dutch person speaks under water it comes out as English, and vice versa, making a simple bath tub an analog translator. This is because large parts of Holland had been below sea level.

[goldeneddie]

My wife shouted from outside the other day. She's English, so I was surprised to hear her speaking some Proto-Germanic tongue: "Oupen die duurr, ets mee", she said, " ik heb min hanz voll". It was then that I realised she was carrying four bags of food shopping in both hands, and had her car keys in her mouth.

[Chris_Toney]

My wife is Dutch, and I'm American. My in-laws were shocked that I could read what was written on the side of an old Friesian church, and they couldn't. I just told them that it was very old English. I'm able to speak Dutch now, so the similarities are much more comfortable for me.

[Black.Templar_]

its kind of beautiful that such a simple and warming sentence can illustrate the common germanic heritage of so many modern peoples. As a German myself this really resonated with me.

[davidtrak]

This is grade-A linguistics class material. Much better than most lessons, built like a suspense plot, which is what it really is

[joycemelton]

I had two friends, one of German ancestry and one of Danish. Talking to each other (in American English) they discovered their grandparents came from villages only about 20 km (12 mi) apart. Speaking to each other in the dialects they had learned from their grandparents, supposedly Danish and Plattdeutsch, they discovered they could easily understand one another. :) They took a vacation together in Europe and explored their mutual ancestral area, finding that the way to tell if one was in Denmark or Germany was by the roadsigns since the local dialect was the same on either side of the border. :)

[PinkPanter]

This can also be done for Slavic languages. Attempts have been made to make an ultimate Slavic language that all Slavs can understand and it actually went pretty well.

[joso]

As an Englishman living in China I went native and only spoke Cantonese and some raw pigeon English for months. Then there were 2 Europeans walking in front of me in the park so i tried to work out where they were from. I thought they were speaking the harsh guttural Dutch but then i got closer and realised they were speaking my own language English. Yes they are very similar.

[jodofe]

As a native Frisian speaker, I have one very minor nitpick. 'tichtby' usually refers to being close by in terms of place. If you are talking about being close by in terms of time, such as winter being near, words like 'nei' or 'neiby' would sound better. That would also have more closely mirrored the translation in other languages.

[niekhofman]

As a native dutch speaker, the low German dialogue really shocked me, although I am quite proficient in high german, I instantly recognised low german not of my knowledge of high german but of my knowledge of Dutch. It really sounds like a Dutch dialect often spoken in the northeast of the country, which my grandparents also speak.

[Namminamm]

Being Icelandic, I was practically shouting at my screen when you forgot to mention the Icelandic word éta! We have both borða and éta! People borða, but animals éta. Specifically because people eat at a table, wheras animals do not. But you could use éta for people too :).

[carlosmacmartin]

American English speaker here. I was pleasantly surprised I understood 90% of the spoken dialogue. Thank you for sharing.

[djw]

I am bilingual in English and German--but I usually cannot understand *spoken* Dutch. Thank you for providing a short monologue in Dutch that I could understand 100%!

[jackdubz]

Fascinating video. I'm from Scotland and it tickles me to hear a lot of the Germanic pronunciations alive and well in Scots. For example, the way words like House, Water, Cow and Cold are pronounced are much closer to the Dutch, German, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish ways (but not in all cases) than than they are to standard English. I think it has something to do with the great vowel shift England went through, and Scotland didn't.

[LunaGladius]

Here's the dialogue from the beginning in Afrikaans:

"Die koue winter is naby, 'n sneeustorm sal kom. Kom in my warm huis, my vriend. Welkom! Kom hier, sing en dans, eet en drink. Dit is my plan. Ons het water, bier, en melk vars van die koei. O, en warm sop!"

[parmentier]

I live in the east of the Netherlands (Twente region) and also speak Low Saxon. I was surprised that (German) Low Saxon was 90% similar to what we speak. Low Saxon in the Netherlands was under pressure for decades because it was seen as an inferior language. At school we were not allowed to speak Low Saxon, only Dutch. But once outside the classroom everyone spoke Low Saxon again.

But for a few years now, Low Saxon and Limburgish have been officially recognized languages. And since then these languages are promoted more. Slightly more than half of the population in the eastern Netherlands understands Low Saxon. About 30% speak Low Saxon at home.

[uweshep]

As a linguistic anthropologist who focuses on Old Norse and the Germanic languages, kudos and hats off. This is splendid.

[NoriMori]

Those first few minutes actually made me pretty emotional. Maybe it's just because I'm not European so I haven't had as much exposure to the other Germanic languages, but as an English speaker, especially a Canadian one who learned enough French to understand 19:07, I've always felt so disconnected from the other Germanic languages. Whenever I pondered the fact that English is Germanic, I would look at the other languages in that category and feel no kinship. It felt like French was so much more similar, in vocabulary if not in grammar. Even though this was partly because I had _studied_ French, it still felt like I should feel more recognition when I looked at samples of German or Dutch or Frisian. They seemed a lot more similar to each other than to English. And it felt kind of… lonely. Like English didn't belong. Seeing the connections laid out so plainly was so affirming, like yes, English _is_ Germanic, even if I can't see it most of the time. English does belong.

[triplebog]

The paragraph you chose for the Germanic languages has such a warm and cozy feeling to it that calls to some core element of experience