ABSTRACT
The German spoken and written in the FRG is largely standardised; none the less, anyone travelling there will surely become aware of differences in sounds and dialects-as would be the case in any country. A linguistician would be able to identify very many dialects and subdialects, but for our purposes it suffices to know that apart from the Hochsprache, the standard language of educated speakers, the roots of which are in the north and which is the norm taught in schools throughout the country, three major dialect areas can be distinguished: Niederdeutsch (Low German [in the north]), Mitteldeutsch (Central German), and Oberdeutsch (Upper German [in the south]). There are great differences in pronunciation, so that ich, for example, varies from ik (Niederdeutsch) at one extreme to i (Oberdeutsch) at the other (König 1983: 162).
