Re:Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'
by Grue3 on Saturday March 03, 2018 @01:48AM
(#16508238)
>Visiting Strasbourg (in Alsace, France), people's surnames, street and place names, and the local cuisine are all German, but nobody speaks a word of it.
Maybe they don't speak it normally, but I'm pretty sure a lot of people there can speak German. You can literally take a city bus (or walk) over the border into a German town Kiel. And everyone speaks German there. There are people who work in Strasbourg and live in Kiel, or vice versa.
The Alsatian dialect was always more of a rural thing. Both French and the Nazis suppressed it so unfortunately it's pretty rare these days. Still, according to Wikipedia, 43% of adults in Alsace could speak it in 1999. [1]
Maybe they don't speak it normally, but I'm pretty sure a lot of people there can speak German. You can literally take a city bus (or walk) over the border into a German town Kiel. And everyone speaks German there. There are people who work in Strasbourg and live in Kiel, or vice versa.
The Alsatian dialect was always more of a rural thing. Both French and the Nazis suppressed it so unfortunately it's pretty rare these days. Still, according to Wikipedia, 43% of adults in Alsace could speak it in 1999. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsatian_dialect