Säggs’isch: in defence of Germany’s ‘worst dialect’

Illustration of Albrechtsburg castle by Evie Heathcock

As a German heritage speaker with strong ties to Saxony, I have grown up surrounded by the Saxon dialect whenever we visited my maternal side of the family. Although it never stood out to me as a child, I now feel a fond sense of kinship every time I stumble across someone with a Saxon dialect outside of the region. Despite this affection, my relationship with Säggs’isch has not always been positive. My mother, with concern for my language development, always discouraged me picking up the way my cousins spoke, insisting I would never learn ‘proper German’ mimicking my Omi and Opi, and that I was only a Halbsachse (half-Saxon), therefore should say Guten Tag instead of Gudn Daach. I cannot blame her for her dissuasion: in mainstream German media, for as long as I can recall, the dialect has regularly received a hefty dose of mockery, even from other dialect speakers. A 2014 survey showed that only eight percent of Germans favoured Saxon, which, among other research, has crowned Sächsisch the “worst German dialect”.

This reputation has caused countless doubts over whether I should be picking up the dialect, which somewhat organically occurred whilst spending part of the pandemic with my Leipzig-born-and-bred Omi. It seems I am not the only Sachse who has this worry: it is common knowledge amongst Saxons that many speakers consciously drop their dialect to conform to schools and workplaces outside of Saxony, reporting personal incidents of purposeful exclusion and disadvantage from classmates and colleagues. One of my own cousins moved back home after a couple of years, foregoing a better wage working in Frankfurt, confiding in us that he simply could not fit in and find friends as a direct result of dialect mockery.

The negativity surrounding Sächsisch is, historically speaking, quite recent. Being of sächsischer Herkunft (Saxon origin) was, for many years, of great value. Sachsen (Saxony) was Europe’s hot spot of the Middle Ages, attracting people from all over, who helped enrich and shape the Saxon dialect as we know it. Due to Saxony’s convenient placement right at the heart of mainland Europe at the crossroads of European trade, Meißner Kanzeleideutsch, a variant of German originating from the Meissen region, spread as the official trading language of the Holy Roman Empire.

With its political importance, the dialect gained a reputation of education and class: it was the language used by Martin Luther to translate the Bible. Even Germany’s very own Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, was sent to study in Leipzig by his father, both to read law and learn the language spoken there. His love for the city and its people was immortalised in the quotation: “Mein Leipzig lob’ ich mir” (I praise my Leipzig). Unfortunately, the first blow the dialect faced was Saxony’s loss of the Seven Year War against Prussia, which almost caused its extinction when the Prussian dialect became the newest trend. By the nineteenth century, speakers were equated to croaking frogs by dramatist Franz Grillparzer, with a Maulfaulheit (laziness of the mouth).

Despite the bad press it receives for being unintelligible to other German speakers, there is debate whether Saxon can even be considered a dialect: its grammar is predominantly oriented around standard German, therefore making it more of a Regiolekt (regional dialect). Although viewed as a sub-branch of the standard language, it is quite possible that Sächsisch, in fact, shaped modern German.

The hallmarks of Säggs’isch include a tight jaw, static lips and the tongue sitting in the back of the mouth, which results in softened consonants, words melting into one, and melodic intonation, rarely but flatteringly likened to French.

One of my favourite words of its wide vocabulary is Bliemchengaffee, written standardly as Blümchenkaffee (flower coffee). It describes a thinly brewed cup of coffee, where one can see through to the bottom of the cup with a flower design known as Gestreute Blümchen. This popular choice of image stems from the Meißener Porzellanmanufaktur, a famous porcelain production town. The term is used nowadays to label a coffee as poorly made, a term I grew up hearing my Opi use often, who took his coffee rather seriously.

So, with such a rich linguistic history, this now poses the question: why can’t Saxon be taken seriously? Even with outdated stereotypes like the “Bavarian farmer”, Sächsisch is the only dialect that cannot be used to sincerely portray a character of intellect and education, due to the prevailing portrait of a Sachse as uneducated, odd, and simple. A primary reason for its constant mockery is that Saxony represents the typical East German. The dialect lends its voice to an Ossi, a figure still linked to hypersensitivity, laziness, and the former Eastern Bloc in the eyes of many who grew up in West Germany – the people who tend to dominate more positions of power, therefore, are in control of mainstream media.

Even the Leipzig-based edition of the famous crime series Tatort, named SOKO Leipzig has its characters speaking standard German, due to the supposed lack of actors who genuinely speak and act in Sächsisch. This shows that, one way or another, Saxons sense that their career and reputation rely on them speaking ‘properly’, a choice they should not have to make.

The prejudice held against Sächsisch only makes up part of the wider cleft between East and West, and this debate is certainly encompassed within a wider discourse regarding the value society places on every dialect, which finally seem to be in a renaissance within communities and school syllabuses in Germany. Nevertheless, without serious media representation and honest communication, where speakers can see the linguistic variety in their home region celebrated and validated, these feelings of inadequacy and shame will continue to contribute towards the extinction of an invaluable dialectal tradition. Everyone, even a Halbsachse like myself, should feel proud to speak in the tongue of Luther, Goethe, and their family.