Low German on the campus? It’s everywhere: “Schnack statt Chat” (“A natter instead of a chat”) is written on the new posters for the #SafeOnCampus campaign, for example. Students of German studies can choose to specialise in Low German, and in the canteen a large sign greets hungry students with a “Moin moin”.
It’s no surprise that these Low German terms immediately catch the eye of Marina Rohloff and Marina Frank. Low German – that’s what these German language scholars do for a living. Both are in their mid-20s and are conducting research specialising in Low German and Sater Frisian at the Institute for German Studies under Prof. Dr Jörg Peters.
Unlike most other languages, there is no standardised pronunciation or spelling for Low German. How well or poorly someone ‘speaks Low German’ has so far been almost impossible to measure objectively. ‘There are no rules for pronunciation; after all, it varies from region to region. What’s more, the language is constantly evolving and is increasingly influenced by High German,” says Marina Rohloff.
Test participants read aloud and tell stories
That is why she and her colleague are now looking for objective criteria that can be used to measure how well someone speaks Low German. To this end, the PhD students are interviewing their participants – around 100 people from Krummhörn in East Frisia – and asking them, amongst other things, to read texts aloud and retell picture stories. The recorded speech data is analysed for speaking rate, fundamental frequency and voice quality.
Marina Frank, aged 25, grew up in Baden-Baden and studied in Marburg – the geographical distance to her East Frisian research region could hardly be greater. In her bachelor’s and master’s theses, she focused on the Luxembourgish language. “But the methods used in regional language research are the same,” she says.
Research at the East Frisian living-room table
What differs significantly, however, are the cultural customs. To their own surprise, Rohloff and Frank suddenly found themselves sitting at a well-laid East Frisian living-room table at the start of their fieldwork. It belonged to one of the interviewees whom the pair had recruited in Krummhörn for their research project. The researchers themselves would not have been able to conduct the interviews in Low German due to their own lack of language skills. Their Low German-speaking ‘temporary colleague’ promptly expanded her remit to include catering for the guests from the University of Oldenburg, and, whilst she was at it, treated them to canapés, cake and, of course, East Frisian tea. “We’d actually planned to just pop to the bakery for a quick bite during our lunch break – but we weren’t allowed to,” says Rohloff with a laugh.
However, with the onset of Covid-19, East Frisian hospitality also came to an end. The interviews and discussion sessions suddenly had to take place online. Of the nearly 100 East Frisians aged between 15 and 87, many nevertheless remained in the research project, with some having their children explain how they could answer the two PhD students’ questions in Oldenburg via the internet. “Many of them were particularly pleased to have a change of pace during the pandemic,” says Frank. Furthermore, for some, taking part in the project is a real labour of love.
Low German as a first language is becoming increasingly rare
For the Oldenburg researchers, too, their study is something very special. After all, the number of people who learnt Low German as their first language is becoming increasingly rare. There are no longer any men or women who speak Low German exclusively. This makes it all the more interesting for Frank and Rohloff to find out what significance this regional language holds for the people who speak it as a first or second language.
They look for indications of language proficiency in the acoustic characteristics of the speech data from Low German speakers. Speech rate, for example, provides an indication of how fluently someone speaks a language. And the pitch at which someone speaks also depends on how confident they are when speaking. When speaking a foreign language, most people speak in a higher pitch because they are tense.
The researchers also want to learn ‘Platt’ themselves
The project ‘Acoustic indicators of language dominance among bilingual speakers of High German and Low German in East Frisia’ will run until the middle of next year. By the time they present their findings, the PhD students hope to be able to speak the language themselves. They have already completed their first lessons using the “PlattinO” Low German app published by the Ostfriesische Landschaft and plan to attend their colleague Frank Fokken’s Low German language practice course in the 2021/22 winter semester.
Although she was part of a Low German theatre group as a teenager in Schleswig-Holstein, Rohloff still speaks the language just as little as her colleague from southern Germany. Nevertheless, she has noticed that the “Moin moin” on the canteen poster doesn’t quite fit. She had painstakingly broken herself of the habit of saying “Moin moin” twice – as is customary in Schleswig-Holstein – whilst in Oldenburg. “I kept being told that ‘Moin moin’ was just gibberish, and then a poster like that turns up on the campus,” she says with a wink.
