page_title: Old High German
section_title: Dialects
hierarchical_section_title: Old High German / Dialects
caption_attribution_description: English: Map showing the main Old High German scriptoria and the areas of the Old High German "monastery dialects".
context_page_description: Old High German is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally covering the period from around 750 to 1050.
  There is no standardised or supra-regional form of German at this period, and Old High German is an umbrella term for the group of continental West Germanic dialects which underwent the set of consonantal changes called the Second Sound Shift.
  At the start of this period, the main dialect areas belonged to largely independent tribal kingdoms, but by 788 the conquests of Charlemagne had brought all OHG dialect areas into a single polity. The period also saw the development of a stable linguistic border between French and German.
  The surviving OHG texts were all written in monastic scriptoria and, as a result, the overwhelming majority of them are religious in nature or, when secular, belong to the Latinate literary culture of Christianity. The earliest written texts in Old High German, glosses and interlinear translations for Latin texts, appear in the latter half of the 8th century.
context_section_description: There was no standard or supra-regional variety of Old High German—every text is written in a particular dialect, or in some cases a mixture of dialects. Broadly speaking, the main dialect divisions of Old High German seem to have been similar to those of later periods—they are based on established territorial groupings and the effects of the Second Sound Shift, which have remained influential until the present day. But because the direct evidence for Old High German consists solely of manuscripts produced in a few major ecclesiastical centres, there is no isogloss information of the sort on which modern dialect maps are based. For this reason the dialects may be termed "monastery dialects" (German Klosterdialekte).
  The main dialects, with their bishoprics and monasteries:
  Central German
  East Franconian: Fulda, Bamberg, Würzburg
  Middle Franconian: Trier, Echternach, Cologne
  Rhine Franconian: Lorsch, Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Frankfurt
  South Rhine Franconian: Wissembourg
  Upper German
  Alemannic: Murbach, Reichenau, Sankt Gallen, Strasbourg
  Bavarian: Freising, Passau, Regensburg, Augsburg, Ebersberg, Wessobrunn, Benediktbeuern, Tegernsee, Salzburg, Mondsee
  In addition, there are two poorly attested dialects:
  Thuringian is attested only in four runic inscriptions and some possible glosses.
  Langobardic was the dialect of the Lombards who invaded Northern Italy in the 6th century, and little evidence of it remains apart from names and individual words in Latin texts, and a few runic inscriptions. It declined after the conquest of the Lombard Kingdom by the Franks in 774. It is classified as Upper German on the basis of evidence of the Second Sound Shift.
  The continued existence of a West Frankish dialect in the Western, Romanized part of Francia is uncertain. Claims that this might have been the language of the Carolingian court or that it is attested in the Ludwigslied, whose presence in a French manuscript suggests bilingualism, are controversial.
caption: Map showing the main Old High German scriptoria and the areas of the Old High German "monastery dialects".
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