You might think German is just one language—but the reality is a bit more complicated than that. What’s spoken in media across Germany is Hochdeutsch, or Standard German, an artificial standard that unites people of the Central European country’s various regions. Natively, people speak a wide variety of local dialects, some of which are so distinct that they’re better considered separate languages (e.g., Bavarian). In some cases, these vernaculars have spread to other continents, giving rise to languages like Plautdietsch.
Plautdietsch boasts an estimated 450,000 native speakers across a large swath of countries in Europe, Asia, and particularly the Americas. With such a disconnected speaker community, Plautdietsch varies in pronunciation from locale to locale, which presents challenges in creating a standard orthography to cover its various dialects. As a result, despite attempts to create an official orthography, Plautdietsch remains primarily a spoken language. This puts it at risk, especially as larger languages like English or Spanish threaten its vitality. Plautdietsch also typically lacks translation resources, so we at TranslationServices.com are proud to present our new Plautdietsch translation team.
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Plautdietsch: German’s secret daughter language spread across the Americas
Plautdietsch speakers are typically descendants of the Mennonite community that originated in East Frisia, Flanders, and parts of western Germany who fled to Poland’s Vistula delta region. A couple hundred years later, Plautdietsch speakers began migrating to the United States and Canada, and later yet, settlers in these countries began moving further south to Mexico, Paraguay, Brazil, and elsewhere in Latin America. Today, you can find Plautdietsch speakers in Poland, Germany, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Canada, the US, Mexico, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Belize, Peru, Uruguay, and more.
Plautdietsch derives most of its grammar and vocabulary from Low German (Plattdeutsch), which largely resembles Germany’s modern standard, High German (Hochdeutsch). However, its grammar has simplified to some degree, although it retains much of the inflection that German is known for. Plautdietsch features three genders and two cases, although the cases are only distinguished in the masculine gender. Plural nouns are formed through various means, sometimes by adding a suffix, sometimes by changing the vowels, and sometimes without any change at all, with plurality solely indicated by plural form of “the.” Plautdietsch can also add the suffix -kje to a noun to indicate smallness or cuteness. The various nuances of Plautdietsch demand translation finesse, which our native-speaking translators are equipped to provide.
We provide highly customizable Plautdietsch translation services for any project.
If you’re looking for quality in Plautdietsch translation services, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve gone to great lengths to hire native speakers of this unique language from the many different countries in which it’s spoken, and we’re open to requests for specific dialects, so don’t be shy! Our Plautdietsch translators are eager to help clients from all over the world, no matter the kind of project they’re pursuing—so, whether you’re seeking translation services from English to Plautdietsch or you have Plautdietsch-language documents you’d like to translate into English, our team is here to help.
The flexibility of our translation services runs deep—we offer Plautdietsch translation services across a wide range of domains. We have specialists catering to academic translation services, business translation services, literary translation services, and localization services, so if you’re a researcher, professor, student, CEO, entrepreneur, marketer, author, poet, blogger, journalist, speaker, software developer, language activist, or anyone else who may require Plautdietsch translation services, just reach out to us. We also cover projects that contain technical vocabulary, since many of our Plautdietsch translators are domain experts in different areas.
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