Ostphalien

Eastphalian, or Eastfalian (Ostfälisch), is a dialect of West Low German, spoken in southeastern parts of Lower Saxony and western parts of Saxony-Anhalt in Germany. The language area between the Weser and Elbe rivers stretches from the Lüneburg Heath in the north to the Harz mountain range and Weser Uplands in the south. It comprises Hanover Region, Brunswick and Calenberg Land as well as the Magdeburg Börde, including the cities of Hanover, Braunschweig, Hildesheim, Göttingen and Magdeburg. It roughly corresponds with the historic region of Eastphalia. Eastphalian as a separate dialect was determined by 19th century linguistics, tracing it back to Old Saxon variants spoken in eastern parts of the medieval stem duchy of Saxony. Towards the Elbe region in the southeast, the language area is increasingly influenced by the High German consonant shift. The most prominent characteristic in Eastphalian are the object pronouns mek and dek in contrast to mi and di in Northern Lower Saxon, respectively for High German mir and mich resp. dir and dich), as well as öhne, ösch/össek and jöck (Northern Low German em, u[n]s, jo [ju], High German ihm/ihn, uns, euch). Although Eastphalian agrees with many Low German dialects (with exceptions, e.g., in southern Westphalian) in that the dative has coincided with the accusative in the forms mentioned, its peculiarity is shown by the fact that the accusative has prevailed over the dative in all of these forms (in Northern Low Saxon it is the other way around). In Eastphalian, an accusative of the first person plural has been preserved with the form üsch and southern Eastphalian össek (cf. Old High German unsih, Old English ūsic [besides ūs], also High Alemannic üs, südbairisch ins in Upper German). The e-apocope, i.e. the omission of the -e at the end of the word, as took place in North Lower Saxon, was entirely absent in Eastphalian. Thus, the ablaut -e in words like Sprake (language, speech) and Wiele (while) remains and is not dropped.