Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Colognian
Summary
Colognian or Kölsch (ˈkœlʃ; natively Kölsch Platt) is a small set of very closely related dialects, or variants, of the Ripuarian group of dialects of the Central German group. These dialects are spoken in the area covered by the Archdiocese and former Electorate of Cologne reaching from Neuss in the north to just south of Bonn, west to Düren and east to Olpe in northwest Germany.
In the Ripuarian dialects, "kölsch" is an adjective meaning "from Cologne" or "pertaining to Cologne", thus equivalent to "Colognian". Its nominalized forms (ene Kölsche, de Kölsche etc.) denote the inhabitants of Cologne. The word "Kölsch", without an article, refers to either the dialect or the local Kölsch beer. Hence the humorous Colognian saying: "Ours is the only language you can drink!"
In Cologne, it is actively spoken by about 250,000 people, roughly one quarter of the population.
Almost all speakers are also fluent in standard or high German.
It is widely understood in a region inhabited by some 10 million people (a conservative estimate).
There is a community of people who speak a variety of Kölsch in Dane County, Wisconsin, United States.
There are local (decreasingly divergent) variants of Kölsch in the Quarters, most notably those only recently incorporated into the city, and the Hinterland. Sometimes, also the far more than 100 clearly distinct Ripuarian languages of Belgium, the Netherlands, and German Rhineland are incorrectly referred to as Kölsch, as well as the Rhinelandic regiolect. In fact, the regiolect is very different from Kölsch, being the regional variety of Standard German influenced only to a certain degree by the dialect. As such, many native speakers of the regiolect are in fact unaware of the fact that a “regiolect” exists, believing they speak plain Standard German.
In its modern form it is of comparatively recent origin. It developed from Historic Colognian, but has been under the influence of New High German since the 17th century.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.