Berlin German

Berlin German, known in German as Berlinerisch or Berliner Dialekt, is the regional speech of the city of Berlin and its surrounding metropolitan area, a High German dialect that grew out of the older Brandenburgisch dialect with a Low German substrate beneath it. It is still spoken across Berlin, Brandenburg, and parts of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony-Anhalt, and remains the everyday colloquial standard in Brandenburg, though within Berlin itself it now functions more as a marker of social background than of simple geography, as immigration and educated speech increasingly favor Standard German. Its most recognizable features include heavy contraction across several words at once and the replacement of the g sound with a j sound, so that gut becomes jut, along with the collapse of certain diphthongs into single vowels, for example au becoming oo, and a simplified system of grammatical cases. The region originally belonged to the Low German speaking area, but Berlin gave up Low German as a written language in the sixteenth century and later as a spoken one, and a Central German koine based on Upper Saxon speech took hold in the late eighteenth century before being reshaped again by heavy immigration from Saxony and Silesia after 1871. Linguistically it belongs to the Indo-European, Germanic, West Germanic, and High German branches.