On the positive side, I understand Weidel’s German enormously better than I understand Merz. Do they have different regional accents? Does anybody know?
4 responses to “Regional Accents”
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Both Weidel and Merz, it turns out, were born in North Rhine-Westphalia. So the difference in their German isn’t easily explained by their having different regional accents…
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Interesting! Does he have a bit of a lisp, then? Or is it age-related that he speaks more mumbly?
Thank you for checking the accents!
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I suspect your guess about age may be correct. Also, Weidel may simply be more intelligent and better at speaking clearly to non-native Germans.
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“Weidel’s German … Does anybody know?”
I was wondering if having a non-native speaking partner might be part of it, but wegen wikipedia the partner, though born in Sri Lanka, was adopted as an infant by a couple from…… Schweiz… so her native language would most likely be some variety of Swiss German… like Schwiizertüütsch.
More than once, when I had a bunch of German tv channels, Swiss speakers would get subtitles on German TV. OTH most Swiss can speak something like Hochdeutsch when they need/want to so maybe the home language is a compromise between otherwise not so intelligible dialects and this carries over in public.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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