Low German is a West Germanic language spoken mainly in northern Germany, including Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hamburg, Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and in the northeastern Netherlands, including Groningen, Drenthe and Overijssel; its Plautdietsch dialect is also spoken by Mennonite communities across the Americas. Speaker estimates range from about 2 to 5 million in Germany and roughly 2.15 million in the Netherlands, with as many as 10 million said to understand some Low German. It did not undergo the High German consonant shift, placing it, alongside Frisian and English, in the North Sea Germanic group and making it linguistically closer to English than to Standard German; it descends from Old Saxon and is recognized as a regional minority language in both Germany and the Netherlands.
Facts
RegionLow German is spoken mainly in Northern Germany and the northeastern Netherlands. 1 Speaker CommunityLow German has an estimated 2 to 5 million speakers, concentrated in Northern Germany. 1 Distinguishing FeaturesLow German has not undergone the High German consonant shift, unlike Standard German, aligning it instead with Frisian, English, Dutch and the North Germanic languages in this respect. 1 Classification
Variety Kind Sources
1. Wikipedia: Low German
Wikimedia FoundationLead section, consonant-shift sentence
Like Frisian, English, Dutch and the North Germanic languages, Low German has not undergone the High German consonant shift
Lead section, opening sentence
Low German is a West Germanic language spoken mainly in Northern Germany and the northeastern Netherlands
Lead section, speaker-estimate sentence
It has been estimated that Low German has approximately 2-5 million speakers in Germany, primarily Northern Germany
Variety kind, Low German entity page
Low German is a West Germanic language spoken mainly in northern Germany, including Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hamburg, Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and in the northeastern Netherlands, including Groningen, Drenthe and Overijssel; its Plautdietsch dialect is also spoken by Mennonite communities across the Americas.
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