Berliner Schnauze.

Joe Baur writes for BBC Travel about the way Berliners talk:

Berliners generally have a reputation for being cold, outspoken and blunt. This modus operandi is cheekily (or fearfully) called the Berliner Schnauze, literally the “Berliner Snout”. It plays off a need for order, an assumption that everyone else is doing something wrong, followed by a brash correction of the behaviour.

Victims of the Berliner Schnauze are usually passersby, getting told off for something they didn’t realise they were doing wrong. In our case, it was triggered by the recycling bins overflowing at the apartment building. Others have experienced it on the U-Bahn when they were too hasty getting on and someone barked, “Erst raus dann rein!” (“First out, then in!”). Whatever the case may be, the Berliner Schnauze strikes without warning, usually unprovoked, delivering a brutal level of honesty you never asked for.

On paper, Berliner Schnauze is simply a dialect of German spoken in and around Berlin. In reality, it’s a visceral dialect merged with working-class attitude and influences from French and Yiddish that can be as polarising as it is varied.

Dr Peter Rosenberg, a West Berlin-born linguist whose familiarity with Berliner Schnauze comes from years of study and lived experience, describes it as a “schlagfertig”, or quick-witted linguistic game. He says that it’s the colloquial language of Berlin – the spark behind a comment or the way you respond to a situation.

Sure, there are differences in pronunciation, grammar and syntax between Berliner Schnauze and Hochdeutsch, or High German (the standard German spoken throughout the country). For example, the Berliner Schnauze uses a “j” where High German uses a “g”. So gut (good) becomes jut. But most don’t think about grammar and syntax when it comes to Berliner Schnauze. It’s an attitude that’s entirely based on a situation.

“In a certain sense, the Berliner Schnauze refers to taking advantage of the comedic potential of any given situation, and occasionally, at the expense of the conversation partner,” Rosenberg said. “This is where the misunderstanding comes from outsiders.”

Despite the cultural confusion, Berliner Schnauze has been influenced by foreigners and minority cultures for centuries.

Descriptions of Berliner Schnauze increased in the 19th Century as High German grew in usage. According to Rosenberg, Berliner Schnauze was lambasted as a primitive form of language along with other German dialects like Niederdeutsch, or Low German. The criticisms were varied, and critics played up the supposed rough nature of Berliners. During the Berlin Wall era, Berliner Schnauze was more common in Communist East Berlin, seen by many in the upper echelons of West Berlin society as a language of the underclass.

But Berliner Schnauze wasn’t born from isolation. Rosenberg names a number of cultural and linguistic influences that have left their mark on the dialect. For instance, Yiddish is well represented in Berliner Schnauze thanks to a historically sizable Jewish community. Glück gehabt (to have luck), for instance, became Mazel gehabt. Meschugge (crazy) and Mischpoke (family) also entered the Berliner Schnauze lexicon through Yiddish.

In addition, French influence came from the time of Napoleon’s occupation of Berlin in the early 19th Century. Blümerant (unwell), Kommode (chest of drawers), Toilette (toilet) and Kostüm (costume) can all trace their origin to this period. English, too, is having an influence given its position as the city’s second-most spoken language.

Lots more at the link (including the inevitable laments that it’s in decline); I wonder why German would borrow Yiddish משפּחה‎ (mishpokhe) with /k/ when it has a perfectly good fricative of its own? Anyway, it’s all interesting stuff; we discussed the dialect of Berliners back in 2009.

Comments

  1. A “visceral dialect” is especially unpleasant when a gastric liquid and voiceless anal fricative are followed by a nasal ingressive.

  2. J.W. Brewer says

    It is fairly standardly claimed that circa 1700 approximately 20% of the population of Berlin were L1 Francophones, viz. Huguenot refugees from the regime of Louis XIV who various Protestant rulers thought would be economically advantageous to welcome and resettle. That seems a more plausible vector for French lexemes to enter the local dialect than a comparatively transitory military occupation during the Napoleonic era, but who knows — I guess you’d need to trace the first attested appearance of particular loanwords. (It wasn’t like French troops weren’t marching hither and thither throughout other dialect areas in Germany in the Napoleonic era as well …)

  3. David Marjanović says

    On paper, Berliner Schnauze is simply a dialect of German spoken in and around Berlin.

    No. Berliner Schnauze refers to the attitude described in the two paragraphs before.

    The author simply has no idea what “dialect” means. I suspect that comes with being British and expecting to see sociolects everywhere.

    Kommode and Kostüm are universal in German, Toilette is universal in some registers (though it is true that in Berlin it’s in all registers; Klo seems to be unknown there). I only know blümerant from reading; my impression was it was more widespread but died out perhaps a century ago…

    Glück gehabt (to have luck), for instance, became Mazel gehabt.

    Perhaps, but if you spell it with z, that’s a recipe for disaster… interestingly, the only forms of that word I’ve seen written in German have ss, e.g. vermasseln “screw up”.

    Also, Glück gehabt means “omitted part of the sentence is in luck/lucky”.

  4. David Marjanović says

    I think there are actually similar numbers of French loans in Berlin, Vienna and, say, Berne today. And I think they’re all loans from French-as-a-superstrate, not from any particular immigration or battle.

    Retour has pretty much replaced zurück in Vienna…

  5. Speaking of Vienna, check out Ewa Kasp Placzyńska’s Instagram videos — they’re delightful.

  6. J.W. Brewer says

    Re what David says about the absence of “Klo” versus “Toilette” in Berlin, I suspect that to be a fairly recent development, solely based on the fact that the 1981 movie “Taxi zum Klo” is set in West Berlin. Although for all I know they could have overridden local dialect to come up with a title that would be catchier for the intended audience in the rest of West Germany?

    Edited to add: and of course “Klo” is itself a (clipped) loanword, innit? I guess borrowed from English, but English had borrowed it from French earlier on …

  7. David Marjanović says

    and of course “Klo” is itself a (clipped) loanword, innit?

    Yes. Probably refrenchified (Klosett, final stress; extinct in that form) from English, as often happened in the 19th century. Proof of English is the abbreviation WC, used everywhere on the European mainland and standing for water closet.

  8. Is “00” still in common use in Europe? I didn’t pay attention last I was there.

    (Supposedly that comes from designating the room at the end of hotel corridors.)

  9. There is also “Hamburger Schnauze” apparently, which seems to be the equivalent of “Wiener Schmäh” or Berliner Schnauze, as David said, an attitude not a dialect.

  10. Berlinerin Nina Hagen using “Klo”. (At 1:18) But she may have done it for the rhyme.

  11. I wonder why German would borrow Yiddish משפּחה‎ (mishpokhe) with /k/ when it has a perfectly good fricative of its own?

    German /k/ for Yiddish ח /χ/ is also observable in Schockelmei ‘coffee’, of Yiddish origin. There is an account of the Western Yiddish etymon in Alfred Klepsch (2011) Westjiddisches Wörterbuch, p. 1138, visible (I hope) here (formed like a virtual Yiddish *Shvartswaser ‘black water’ from Hebrew שָׁחוֹר šāḥôr ‘black’, adj., and מַיִם máyim ‘water’). For the variants of Schockelmei ‘coffee’ in Rotwelsch, see Siegmund A. Wolf (1987) Wörterbuch des Rotwelschen, p. 296, no. 5107, visible (I hope) here, under Schocher. Similarly, Ammon et al. (2004) Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen, p. 505 here, give both Mischpoche and Mischpoke, Muschpoke for Germany. I wonder if the variation in these items somehow reflects the influence of the distribution of /k/ and /x/~/χ/ north and south of the Benrath Line at some point in the assimilation of these words into German.

    (I was interested by all this because of attempts to etymologize the etymologically mysterious Armenian word for ‘coffee’, սուրճ surč. This word appears suddenly in the 18th century in a New Julfan context and is most likely an onomatopoeia imitating the sound of sipping a hot liquid. But people often offer a folk etymology as a compound of սեւ sew ‘black’ and ջուր ǰur ‘water’, even though this is phonologically very difficult.)

  12. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    It’s been a long time since I’ve seen 00 on a toilet, but it seems to have been used in the 1960s in places I went to. I seem to recall that in one country (Israel?) 00 and 000 were both used, one for men and one for women, but I’m not sure I remember which was which — maybe a reference to the number of orifices.

  13. David Marjanović says

    Wiener Schmäh is a kind of deadpan snark.

    refrenchified

    retrogallicized

    Is “00” still in common use in Europe?

    I think so, but only in places with room numbers, hotels especially.

    I wonder if the variation in these items somehow reflects the influence of the distribution of /k/ and /x/~/χ/ north and south of the Benrath Line at some point in the assimilation of these words into German.

    Ooh, etymological nativization. That makes sense!

  14. As for the Berliner attitude, I lived there two times in the 90s for a couple of months each, and it’s the only place I ever lived where a check-out person (in this case a middle-aged lady) at a supermarket commented on the contents of my shopping haul, noting that I only bought canned food that could be easily heated (“Wir ham wohl Erasco-Wochen, wa?”*) – what can I say, it was the first time I lived alone and had to cook for myself 🙂
    *Meaning “Seems we have Erasco**-weeks?”
    **A brand of canned food

  15. Stu Clayton says

    a check-out person (in this case a middle-aged lady) at a supermarket … “Wir ham wohl Erasco-Wochen, wa?”

    1. She notices. Not every Kassiererin would.
    2. She has a nice sense of humor.
    3. Erasco is the best brand I know of

  16. Of course I had to know:

    Erasco ist eine Marke des spanischen Unternehmens The GB Foods. Der Begriff Erasco ist aus der früheren Firmierung des Unternehmens unter Paul Erasmi & Co. GmbH abgeleitet.

  17. Stu Clayton says

    #
    Erasco zählte im Jahr 2003 zu den deutschen Marktführern bei Suppen (32 %), im ==> Eintopfsegment (54 %) <== und bei Instantsuppen (56 %).
    #

  18. David Marjanović says

    4. She sounds like she’s scolding you. She isn’t. She’s literally just asking a question – but if you’re not used to Berliner Schnauze, you’d never guess.

  19. Berlinerin Nina Hagen using “Klo”. (At 1:18) But she may have done it for the rhyme.

    The person she’s describing is Ariane “Ari Up” Forster of The Slits, who was actually from Bavaria and spoke with a noticeable Bavarian accent (whenever she spoke German, and not English or Jamaican patois).

    I wouldn’t describe Klosett as extinct. Actually, to me at least, it seems to be more vulgar than the shortened Klo. Toilette is always pronounced with /o/ in the first syllable, never with /oa/ (disyllabic), the usual Standard German approximation of French /wa/.

  20. @Stu: You’re right on points 1 and 2, and on 3 I’m happy to see that my taste was so good (and while I learnt to cook fo myself long ago, I still fondly remember the Erasco Eintöpfe).
    @DM: Nah, that question was purely rhetorical. After all, she would have known if there really was an Aktionswoche.
    I wouldn’t describe Klosett as extinct.
    Yes. Googling it gives a lot of hits for offers of sanitary equipment, and, as a special treat including choice period fashion, this highbrow song from the 80s also uses the word (at 0:49, if you don’t want to suffer through all of it).

  21. Well for what it’s worth, in ex-Austrian Dalmazien, we still say “klozet” for toilet.

    Though “ve-ce” (as in WC) is way more polite

  22. Stu Clayton says

    Now I have to wonder whether being “in the closet” originally referred to a clothes closet or a water closet. Or to closeted cardinals about to spring a new pope. The Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli.

  23. J.W. Brewer says

    Elsewhere in for-the-sake-of-the-rhyme, Schuitoilettn rhymes with Zigarettn in this Bavarian-dialect (I think?) riff on the same general topic as the AmEng “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUoM8791jnc

    Lyrics transcribed (in attempted dialect orthography) here: https://genius.com/Spider-murphy-gang-zwoa-zigarettn-lyrics

  24. J.W. Brewer says

    I neglected to note in the prior comment (my memory of the chorus after 40 years is apparently stronger than my memory of the verses!) that the same song also uses “Klo” for the sake of a different rhyme:

    “Zwoa Minutn später bin i scho draußn auf’m Klo /
    I sog: Geh weiter, Toni, zünd ma glei oane o!”

  25. Speaking of for-the-sake-of-the-rhyme, I first learned the word “Klo” a good while ago from news photos of protest signs: PERSHING ZWO / AB INS KLO. I suppose that numeral form survives only in rhymes?

  26. Stu Clayton says

    “Zwo” is still used sometimes by some people (dont moi) when spelling out numbers. The purported purpose is to prevent the listener from confusing “zwei” and “drei”. Like that foxtrot charlie convention for spelling out words.

    I’m guessing “zwo” is cognate with English “two”. At any rate “zwo” stood on its own zwo feet for a long time, before it degraded into a spelling-out convention in “standard German”. For all I know “zwo” is still alive in Berlin or Bavaria, or some other out-of-the-way place.

  27. J.W. Brewer says

    As indicated above, standard “zwei” is “zwoa” (or “zwaa”) in Bavarian. Another source gives zwåe / zwoi / zwoe as the options in Swabian. Plain “zwo” may suggest too simple a final vowel for any self-respecting dialect orthography?

  28. Zwoa is just the normal Bavarian form for Standard German zwei. Until the 18th century, zwo was the feminine form, and zwei was neutral (zween was masculine — Hölderlin still used this form somewhere). Zwo was apparently revived in Standard German after WWI (that’s what the dictionaries say).

  29. @ David Marjanović says
    January 13, 2023 at 6:08 pm

    “On paper, Berliner Schnauze is simply a dialect of German spoken in and around Berlin.

    No. Berliner Schnauze refers to the attitude described in the two paragraphs before.

    The author simply has no idea what “dialect” means. I suspect that comes with being British and expecting to see sociolects everywhere.”

    Agreed. The term for the dialect is Berlinerisch, not Berliner Schnauze. Apparently the writer is a travel writer and lives in the USA. He may not speak (much) German. I suppose the bit about sociolects and the British is a joke, maybe a US joke?

  30. David Marjanović says

    For all I know “zwo” is still alive in Berlin or Bavaria, or some other out-of-the-way place.

    Definitely not Bavaria, but perhaps in Berlin, where I’ve heard it more often than I can explain as disambiguation from drei – also, I’d expect the cognate of zwei in Berlin dialect (to the extent that there is such a thing) to be *zwee anyway, and I’ve never heard that (for what that’s worth), even though een(-) is still fairly common.

    Plain “zwo” may suggest too simple a final vowel for any self-respecting dialect orthography?

    No – the Bavarian* and Swabian sounds are all diphthongs and regularly correspond to Standard ei**. Zwoa rhymes with Ohr, not with Klo.

    * Except for the “aa”, which is eastern (but has been spreading west along the railway, e.g. I have it natively). However, in none of those dialects is vowel length phonemic.
    **… the “old” one, not the “new” one found in drei for example; fascinatingly, they’ve only merged in Standard German and Standard Dutch as far as I’m aware.

    I suppose the bit about sociolects and the British is a joke, maybe a US joke?

    No, I just saw “BBC” and jumped to conclusions. 😐 If he’s American, though, he simply has another likely excuse for not knowing what “dialect” means.

  31. J.W. Brewer says

    The wackiest-looking dialect variant of standard “zwei” I found in a little more poking around is “tsboai,” in Gottscheerisch, now critically endangered-to-moribund on account of the enclave it which it traditionally floruit (located in present-day Slovenia) having been ethnically cleansed during the WW2 era …

  32. David Marjanović says

    Oh, did it have *[w] > [b] like Cimbrian…

  33. PlasticPaddy says

    Re zwëen, the old English form (compare modern “twain”) has a “non-etymological” g between the two vowels which is not reflected in Old Dutch or OHG. For the “nine” word, both Old Dutch and Old English (also Old Saxon and Old Frisian, but not OHG) have the “non-etymological” g between the two vowels–the English g is a glide, but the Dutch is (and would have been?) [Gamma].
    From etymologiebank.nl:
    De westgerm. vormen met g zijn te verklaren door overgang van w > g, evenals in brug, mug, jeugd.

  34. I haven’t read all the comments, but “zwo” is definitely used in Franconia, which is part of Bavaria.

  35. David Marjanović says

    De westgerm. vormen met g zijn te verklaren door overgang van w > g, evenals in brug, mug, jeugd.

    Are bridge & midge really limited to West Germanic? Or can we, if bridge really is related to brow, blame them on Cowgill’s law (i.e. Grimm’s applied to *wH)?

    Youth (Old English geoguþ and such, IIRC) seem to have a completely different explanation: analogy from the word for “full adult age”, which was soon used to calque virtus and now means “virtue” exclusively (German Tugend, still rhyming with Jugend).

    Franconia, which is part of Bavaria

    Not linguistically, though, or in any other sense than the current political borders that nobody is happy with, neither the ethnic Franks nor the ethnic Bavarians.

  36. David Marjanović says

    Youth

    Source: pp. 118–120 of this paper (in German and chock full of typos), a digression from a digression tacked on at the very end. In my field it’d be a Least Publishable Unit and would actually be read and cited…

    Grimm’s applied to *wH

    No, Verner’s. Source: pp. 56–57 in this paper (in beautifully legible Italian).

  37. ” Franconia, which is part of Bavaria

    Not linguistically, though, or in any other sense than the current political borders that nobody is happy with, neither the ethnic Franks nor the ethnic Bavarians.”

    Yes, agreed, but I didn’t bother to say that. Zwo does alternate with zwa.

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