As a technical term, the "high" in High German is a geographical reference to the group of dialects that forms "High German" (i.e. "Highland" German), out of which developed Standard German, Yiddish and Luxembourgish. It refers to the Central Uplands (Mittelgebirge) and Alpine areas of central and southern Germany; it also includes Luxembourg, Austria, Liechtenstein, and most of Switzerland. This is opposed to Low German, which is spoken in the lowlands and along the flat sea coasts of the North German Plain.[5]
High German is distinguished from other West Germanic varieties in that it took part in the High German consonant shift (c. AD 500). To see this, compare the following:[7][page needed]
In the southernmost High Alemannic dialects, there is a further shift: Sack (like English/Low German "sack/Sack") is pronounced [z̥ak͡x] ([k] to [k͡x]).
Divisions between subfamilies within Germanic are rarely precisely defined, because most form continuous clines, with adjacent dialects being mutually intelligible and more separated ones not. In particular, there has never been an original "Proto-High German". For this and other reasons, the idea of representing the relationships between West Germanic language forms in a tree diagram at all is controversial among linguists. What follows should be used with care in the light of this caveat.
^W. Heeringa: Measuring Dialect Pronunciation Differences using Levenshtein Distance. University of Groningen, 2009, pp. 232–234.
^Peter Wiesinger: Die Einteilung der deutschen Dialekte. In: Werner Besch, Ulrich Knoop, Wolfgang Putschke, Herbert Ernst Wiegand (Hrsg.): Dialektologie. Ein Handbuch zur deutschen und allgemeinen Dialektforschung, 2. Halbband. de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1983, ISBN 3-11-009571-8, pp. 807–900.
^Werner König: dtv-Atlas Deutsche Sprache. 19. Auflage. dtv, München 2019, ISBN 978-3-423-03025-0, pp. 230.
^C. Giesbers: Dialecten op de grens van twee talen. Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, 2008, pp. 233.
^Compare the definition of "high" in the Oxford English Dictionary (Concise Edition): "... situated far above ground, sealevel, etc; upper, inland, as ... High German".
Hermann Niebaum, Jürgen Macha, Einführung in die Dialektologie des Deutschen (series: Germanistische Arbeitshefte), 2nd ed., Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, 2006, p. 220 [1st ed. 1999, 3rd ed. 2014]
Gabriele Graefen, Martina Liedke-Göbel, Germanistische Sprachwissenschaft: Deutsch als Erst-, Zweit- oder Fremdsprache, 3rd ed., 2020, p. 31.
For the Middle High German time e.g.:
Howard Jones & Martin H. Jones, The Oxford Guide to Middle High German, Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 7
M. O'C. Walshe, A Middle High German reader with grammar, notes, and glossary, Oxford University Press, 1974, p. 3
^Robinson, Orrin. Old English and its Closest Relatives. Routledge, 1994.
^Russ, Charles V.J. The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction. Routledge, 1994, p. 15f.
Further reading
Friedrich Maurer (1942), Nordgermanen und Alemannen: Studien zur germanischen und frühdeutschen Sprachgeschichte, Stammes- und Volkskunde, Strasbourg: Hünenburg, [designation of High German languages as Irminonic].
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