Berlin/Brandenburg. Phonetically and grammatically, along with the Gothic script of which I’m totally ignorant, it is a mystery to me.
Yiddish also doesn’t have all those complex, multisyllabic compounds which totally lose me. Prefix, suffix and root. That’s it. I was told that was by a native speaker that that was the dialect in the South that she recalled as a girl (my high school’s German teacher; never took the class).
But in a Conrad story involving a harbor-master’s courtship of a sea-captain’s daughter who spoke what Conrad called “Platt Deutsch,” the snatches of dialogue in the short story sounded just like my familiar derivative language. Those with a more extensive knowledge of German told me that “Platt Deutsch” was what a northern dialect was called.
