| Also Known As: Kolsch language
Description:
Kölsch (Colognian) is a very closely related small set of dialects, or variants, of the Ripuarian Central German group of languages. Kölsch is spoken in, and partially around Cologne, in the West of Germany. Kölsch is one of the very few only city dialect in Germany, besides for example the one in Berlin ("Berliner Schnauze").
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 German. It is widely understood in a region inhabited by some 10 million people (a conservative estimate).
There are local (increasingly divergent) variants of Kölsch in the Quarters, most notably those only recently incorporated into the city. Sometimes, also the far more than 100 clearly distinct Ripuarian languages of Belgium, Netherlands, and German Rhineland are incorrectly referred to as Kölsch, as well as the so called rheinisch tongue. In fact, the rheinisch regiolect has very little in common with Kölsch, being a variety of standard German, to which it is so close that local speakers of lesser education usually cannot even tell the difference.
Kölsch is one of the variants of the Ripuarian dialects (also..... full article at Wikipedia |
