Dreieich is a city in the Offenbach Rural District in the state of Hesse, Germany.

Geography 

Dreieich is in the Rhine Main area. Its northern urban district Sprendlingen is 10 km south of Frankfurt. In the south it touches the City of Darmstadt. The whole area of the town is 53.33 km2 large and it is 140 m above sea level. It is a plain area with no hills.

About 35 to 20 million years ago in the Age of Tertiary the whole region was lying under sea level. At that time it was covered by an ocean which was warm and not very deep. Lots of sediments sank to its bottom. Then the region rose again and the water left, leaving soil which is mostly sandy and poor.

The city consists out of the towns Dreieichenhain and Sprendlingen and the 3 former independent villages Buchschlag, Götzenhain and Offenthal, all now urban districts of Dreieich. On 1 January 1977 they were united and became the City of Dreieich.

The name Dreieich means three oaks. This is a hint to the former landscape. In the Middle Ages the Dreieich area was a huge forest with a lot of wild animals, where only the emperor had the right of hunting.

The neighbours of Dreieich are: 
 Neu-Isenburg (North)
 Rödermark, Dietzenbach and Heusenstamm (East)
 Messel (Darmstadt-Dieburg Rural District) and Darmstadt (South)
 Langen (West)

Dreieich has 40,432 inhabitants (2008).

The climate of the town is mild. There is less rain than in other parts of Germany.

Some local people are speaking a regional type (dialect) of the German language with a certain tone and special words. It is a Hessian dialect (German: Hessisch). This language type is related to other dialects in the south of Germany. In former times mostly every place had its own special dialect, sometimes hard to understand for people of other parts of Germany. Today the dialect speakers are a minority and the majority of them does not speak the real dialect. They rather speak a kind of regular German with a certain pronunciation.

History 

In the 9th century the names of Sprendlingen and Offenthal were written down in documents for the first time. But people think, that especially Sprendlingen is much older because of its name. They say the name was given by the Alamanni, a band of west germanic tribes (see also: germanic peoples), which had settled in the area a long time before.

Formerly the people in the Dreieich area were mostly farmers and craftsmen but not tradesmen. Every family had land to grow their food. When the property was handed to the next generation it was divided within the children. Therefore, most families had only small farms and were poor. With the industrial revolution the Rhine Main area got lots of factories and developed to a center for metal working and leather manufacturing, also chemical processing. Many men got workmen and found a job in the factories and earned money. This increased living conditions partly.

Twinned cities 

  Montier-en-Der, France
  Joinville, France
  Bleiswijk, Netherlands
  Oisterwijk, Netherlands
  Stafford, Great Britain

References

Other websites 

Official website of Dreieich, looked up on 17 January 2010, German.
, looked up on 17 January 2010, German.

Offenbach (district)