Talk:Colognian

Moved / Kölsch-Ripuarish WP
People are trying to build a Kölsch - or Ripuarish - Wikipedia. If you can speak or understand Kölsch, please help! The discussion is here. Dbach 12:58, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

A Kölsch Wiki has been founded externally. Plz don't use the page mentioned above anymore. Dbach 14:53, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Please support the Ripuarian/Kölsch Wikipedia on Metawiki. Thank You! -- Purodha Blissenbach 04:45, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

I've moved the article from 'dialect' to 'language'. This is because the former term is subjective. Although it's common to think that dialects are somehow subsidiary to languages this is not the case. See the article on dialect for more information. --Gareth Hughes 18:44, 24 November 2005 (UTC)


 * (This discussion belongs in a section, not at the top of the page; but since I have found the announcement here, here is where I respond. ...)
 * You really should not have moved it without a consensus, and that consensus should not come from enthusiasts of Kölsch (or of dialect "independence") alone. "Language" is just as subjective a term as is "dialect", and speaking of every local variety as a language in its own right, though currently very popular, tends to be less linguistically principled and more politically motivated. Difficult as this requirement may be to follow, there still need to be some semblance of proper linguistic criteria applied (such as mutual intelligibility or the lack thereof; also, some combination of historical relationship to, and varying degrees of local integration with, a national or international standard language; also, the existence or lack of a well-developed independent literary tradition; ...), or at the very least, clear and official political ones (e.g., Is it officially acknowledged by the EU as a Minority or Regional Language?), and not just unilateral declarations. I'm not looking for a battle, I just don't think this was an adequately considered move.--IfYouDoIfYouDon&#39;t (talk) 00:02, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

Warning: Amateurish level
A warning to all readers: this article on the Cologne dialect or language, although not containing any outright untruths, is seriously lacking in quality and accuracy. I am not an expert on this particular dialect but as a Germanic philologist I know enough about German dialectology to see that this article needs serious reworking. What this article needs is: Lufiend 01:45, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
 * more accurate terminology
 * more scientific/scholarly description
 * clearer organization.


 * I agree; the part about intonation needs to be organsied and clarified, for one. I have tagged the article accordingly. There's much of value in the article but also much more needing to be done. Nach0king 11:10, 3 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree; Wschroedter kindly pointed me here on my talk page. I am a native Kölsch speaker, co-author of the German Wikipedia article on Kölsch ([[Image:Qsicon_lesenswert.svg|15px]]suggested reading), part-educated a linguist, author and admin of the Wikipedia of Ripuarian languages which has many Articles in the Kölsch language, so I should be able to help enhance this article. My biggest problem is lack of time. The second most one is structural or organisational, concering the subject matter. Much can be said about Kölsch, that in fact applies to all Ripuarian, or even several more in the Continental West Middle Germanic language group, plus some of the adjacent Lower Franconian languages. Giving complex information a good structure, avoiding duplication, is one of the aims I have in mind. Unfortunately, I know no sources in Englich language :-(
 * As time permits, I shall likely translate some sections or chapters of the German article sooner or later. But, basically anyone can do that! I for one am happy if I don't have to :-) --Purodha Blissenbach (talk) 21:45, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * If we follow the suggestion of initiating a Wikiproject I'd suggest devoting it to the subject matter of "Rhineland Languages" or similar. Be warned: According to linguist Georg Cornelissen, an expert on this field, and author of numerous books, there are published dictionaries of about 150 of those languages alone. Of course, there are non-dictionaries, too, and only a fraction of the existing languages have been documented at all. Kölsch is only a prominent language among the Rhineland ones. --Purodha Blissenbach (talk) 22:17, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, I know no sources in Englich language :-( That's not really a big problem. Citing German language sources is allowed. One idea is attaching quotations with translations to the refs to make things easier for editors who don't read German (or not too well). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:07, 8 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Starting with the title! The dialect of Cologne is Colonian, with no g. Wegesrand (talk) 18:36, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

spoken by about 250,000 people
"In Cologne, it is actively spoken by about 250,000 people, roughly one quarter of the population." that guess far to high. I am from Cologne. Where is the source? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.196.249.221 (talk) 23:20, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
 * The figure is sourced from Ethnologue / SIL who cite a certain H. Jakobs. But this reference isn't present in their bibliography and SIL has been known to be very unprofessional with its figures. It is entirely possible no scientific publication by H. Jakobs in 1997 about this subject actually exists.
 * The same figure is also ‘estimated’ by Georg Cornelissen but he's a Kölsch enthusiast and may very well have copied SIL's number.
 * According to Zwischen Dialekt und Standard by Anette Huesmann about 15% of the city speaks Kölsch. In a small town just outside the Ripuarian area, the number of proper local language speakers (Dialekt in the book, as opposed to regional varieties of standard High German) is about 50%. In both cases, most of these people also speak (a regional variety of) standard German. The criterion that determines whether a given speaker speaks Dialekt is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, but it seems reasonable to me. Using these figures, we arrive at the following:


 * Köln city||Kölsch||1,080,394||×||15%||=||162,059
 * Köln metro||Kölsch||3,573,500||×||15%||=||536,025
 * Köln district w/o c. & m.||Mostly Ripuarian|| 0, 880,728||×||50%||=||440,364
 * Köln district total||Mostly Ripuarian||4,454,228||||22%||||976,389
 * }
 * Please note again however, that most of these people also speak (regional) standard German, perhaps even most of the time in some cases. Oh, I used population figures for 31 December 2017, add 2% for today's figures.
 * Going by these numbers, the 250 thousand in Köln figure is an overestimate, but at the same time there are probably a lot of Kölsch speakers outside Köln proper in the wider metropolitan area which were not counted in the estimate at all. The number of Dialekt speakers in the district is probably a good estimate of the total number of Ripuarian speakers. Yes, the borders of the Ripuarian language area and the district aren't quite the same, but at first glance where the borders differ the most the population density is lower. In any case, the number we find closely matches the (uncited(!) and added by an enthusiast) estimate given in the Ripuarian language article.
 * Another point that should be mentioned is that Kölsch is in decline. Less people speak it, those who speak it are starting to use standard German more and more and when they do speak Kölsch they use characteristic Kölsch vocabulary less and less.
 * All in all, it seems your intuition was spot on. Hope this helps answer your question. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.86.20.136 (talk) 01:27, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Going by these numbers, the 250 thousand in Köln figure is an overestimate, but at the same time there are probably a lot of Kölsch speakers outside Köln proper in the wider metropolitan area which were not counted in the estimate at all. The number of Dialekt speakers in the district is probably a good estimate of the total number of Ripuarian speakers. Yes, the borders of the Ripuarian language area and the district aren't quite the same, but at first glance where the borders differ the most the population density is lower. In any case, the number we find closely matches the (uncited(!) and added by an enthusiast) estimate given in the Ripuarian language article.
 * Another point that should be mentioned is that Kölsch is in decline. Less people speak it, those who speak it are starting to use standard German more and more and when they do speak Kölsch they use characteristic Kölsch vocabulary less and less.
 * All in all, it seems your intuition was spot on. Hope this helps answer your question. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.86.20.136 (talk) 01:27, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Kolisch phrases
what about those special collaquisms!? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 158.143.244.212 (talk) 17:59, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Colognian or Kölsch? Dialect or language?
Every other page on Colognian/Kölsch calls it 'Colognian' (Colognian phonology, Help:IPA for Colognian, etc.), but lang-ksh calls it 'Kölsch' and IPA-ksh calls it 'Colognian (Kölsch)'. It'd be nice to be consistent. — Lfdder (talk) 01:00, 22 April 2013 (UTC)


 * 'Colognian' doesn't feel like real English to me; is there a source outside Wikipedia for this usage? Maybe a local English newspaper for expats living in Cologne or a reputable guidebook or a regional history? Personally the only adjective relating to Cologne that I've ever heard is 'Kölsch'... Q·L·1968 ☿ 22:01, 1 June 2015 (UTC)


 * 'Colognian' is wrong. The English (from French) name of the city, Cologne, has a -gn- to represent the diphthong inherited from the Latin name, Colonia. When you add the latinate -ian ending to make the adjective Colonian, you're putting back the -ia and thus reaching back to before the French -gn-. The French adjective for "from Cologne" is colonais, by the way: the -gn- is not preserved. I propose to move the page to "Colonian dialect". Wegesrand (talk) 11:24, 18 October 2016 (UTC)

Possible suggestion
Hi, I was passing through and noticed that it might be useful to add the Standard German version of The Lord's Prayer here next to present version -- to show contrasts between Standard German and Kölsch. Cheers! Tezamen (talk) 23:56, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
 * The present version not being a literal rendition, that might cause some confusion. Richard 08:53, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

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IPA
(transferred from user talk:Richardw)
 * Colognian
 * Please note that the Dutch hoge toon "high tone" and valtoon "falling tone" are descriptive only when applied to certain varieties. Applied to Colognian they would be misnomers.
 * At Help:IPA/Colognian it is proposed to mark Schleifton with the IPA symbol for half-long segments and leave its geschärft counterpart untranscribed. As Schleifton seems to be the default "accent" with a much wider distribution and is the one that lacks the Schärfung/geschärft feature (which probably also developed later in history) I consider this an unfortunate decision. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 11:57, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Just for the diphthongs. Monophthongs take the long mark for Stoßton.

I'm copying the table into the main article. — kwami (talk) 13:00, 22 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Going back to the original question: Article Colognian dialect not only has in the lead section but also  in the Features in comparison to Standard German section. The transcription between slashes seems more detailed than the one in square brackets. (What is that stress mark meant to inform us of?) Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 14:12, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

I assume the stress mark is meant to convey the tone accents, that the position, presence or choice of 1ary vs 2ary stress indicates whether it's T1 or T2, since tone accent only occurs on stressed syllables. Swedish and Norwegian have similar conventions. But ideally we'd want some way to convey this with the IPA, so that naive readers can have some idea of what's going on. If I had to guess, I'd think that in $\langle\rangle$, the stress mark indicates that the syllable has a tonic accent, and the length mark tells us which one -- in this case T1, which of course contradicts the transcription $\langle\rangle$.

There are lots of walled-garden conventions for using digits to indicate tone. A lot of the SE Asia articles use 1 for low tone and 5 for high tone, but claim that's IPA, and it's a constant cleanup effort to convert them to actual IPA. But at least with Chao tone letters (bars) the conversion is straightforward. Digits don't work because the African convention is that 5 is low and 1 is high, or sometimes 2 and 1 for low and high, while in Mesoamerica 1 is low and 3 is high, or sometimes 4. Digits are opaque unless you're privy to the local convention, which is at odds with the entire idea of an international phonetic alphabet, and with the MOS where it's been decided that we should use the IPA and other international conventions. I think it probably won't be so difficult with Swedish and Norwegian -- one tone diacritic vs two, patterned after the standard language, and readers familiar with other dialects should be able to extrapolate the local realizations of the tone accents. For Colognian, the half-long vs long convention is misleading, but perhaps it's adequate. If we actually indicate tone, which I'd prefer, I assume we'd want either one tone diacritic, to be placed on the tonic syllable of tone-marked words, which evidently would be T1, or two contrasting diacritics for T1 and T2.

Should we take this discussion to Kbb2? I don't know your background. I wouldn't want to decide something, go to the effort of converting the articles, only to have someone who really knows their stuff tell us we got it backwards. — kwami (talk) 22:54, 22 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Hm. Article Colognian dialect has with $\langle\rangle$ for standard German Kölsch as well. And yes, I would like Mr KEBAB to discuss this with us, no matter where.
 * But that's a phonemic transcription, so it would need to indicate stress regardless. — kwami (talk) 03:41, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I don't think this is a phonemic transcription. I contest that aspiration of voiceless obstruents is phonemic in Standard German and that speakers saying without aspiration use a different sequence of phonemes that has the potential of representing a different word. The same goes for stress of monosyllables. To me this looks like an inappropriate use of slashes. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 15:48, 23 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Mr KEBAB's link to de Vaan (sine anno) is very interesting, especially their remark on p. 27 that accent 1 "in Vianden are always realized with a glottal stop". This is reminiscent of Danish stød, and maybe it is not a coincidence that stød and Stoßton/stoottoon are cognates. (Stød is nowadays typically realised as creaky voice. So are the allotones of the Standard Chinese tones 3 and 4 that drop low [i.e. tone 3, unless it precedes another tone 3 syllable, and tone 4, unless it precedes another tone 4 syllable].) Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 23:46, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I'll re-check my sources and will get back to you. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 23:54, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Another question would be whether we bother with stress marks. If we have some convention for both T1 and T2, then it would be redundant. If we only indicate the 'marked' tone accent, then the stress mark would indicate the other. (But it could also mean whoever added the pronunciation didn't know the tone accent and so ignored it.) And then there's the question of secondary stress. AFAIK, that's never been demonstrated to be phonemic in any language. It certainly isn't in English, despite what American dictionaries claim (though thankfully not the OED anymore). — kwami (talk) 03:38, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Based on that paper, given the author's opinion that it's unfortunate the conventional notation resembles IPA length marks (implying that they're not supposed to indicate length), and while waiting for Mr KEBAB to get back to us, I propose a circumflex for T1 and either just a stress mark or some other tonal diacritic, maybe a grave, for T2 -- say, (T1) vs  (T2), or  vs. — kwami (talk) 06:01, 23 January 2019 (UTC)


 * }

Pronunciation of CH
Does anyone have any source that actually claims that the realisation of  is [ɧ]? I'm aware the Kölsch-Akademie like to claim it is /ɧ/, but they never actually make a claim for it sounding anything like [ɧ]. In fact their description from their grammar they published, "De kölsche Sproch", puts it pretty clearly in [ɕ]-range: Et ch [ç] em Deutsche en recht, mich, Wächter ... es em Kölsche et ch [ɧ], ene Laut, dä zweschen dem deutsche ch [ç] und sch [ʃ] ze fingen es, dobei nöher am sch [ʃ] litt. The last part, "a sound which is between ç and ʃ, but a bit closer to ʃ" is a pretty accurate lay description of [ɕ]. I almost wonder if the people who came up with that transcription [ɧ] (which despite the brackets I am sure must be a phonemic transcription, as the Akademie also uses [r] to describe the second consonant in the word sage [zaː¹ʁə]) misunderstood what "simultaneous /ʃ/ and /x/," the IPA official description of /ɧ/, means. [ç] and [x] are, after all, allophones in German. Worth mentioning that the Akademie still claim is "[ʃ]", while simultaneously also explicitly claiming in other materials ("Usgesproche Kölsch," an audio pronunciation guide) that "ch and sch are pronounced identically" 70.162.100.208 (talk) 19:43, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Is this true? "Kölsch is one of the very few city dialects in Germany."
Seems very unlikely, but if it's true, it needs a sentence or two of explanation. As it stands, it leaves the impression that in Munich and Frankfurt, for example, the local language has been replaced by Standard(ized) High German. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 15:52, 9 October 2021 (UTC)