De Klaane Prinz — from Hessen.
Rhine Franconian (Rheinfränkisch) reaches well beyond Saarland and the Palatinate to cover much of southern Hesse too, where it survives most famously as South Hessian (Südhessisch), the broad dialect family whose best known member is the speech of Frankfurt am Main, still affectionately called the Frankfurt dialect (Frankforterisch). Like its cousins further west, Hessian Rhine Franconian sits squarely within the Rhenish Fan of isoglosses that trace how far the High German consonant shift travelled south from the Low German plain, sharing with Saarland and the Palatinate a similar partial application of that shift, distinctive verb endings, and a recognisably soft, rolling consonant quality that marks the whole Rhine Franconian belt off from both the harder sounds further north and the fully shifted Upper German dialects further south.
What gives Frankfurt’s own corner of this dialect family its particular flavour is the city’s own extraordinary civic history. For centuries Frankfurt stood as a Free Imperial City (Freie Reichsstadt), answerable directly to the Holy Roman Emperor rather than to any regional prince, hosting both imperial coronations in its cathedral, the Kaiserdom, and the great Frankfurt trade fair, the Frankfurter Messe, one of Europe’s oldest and most important commercial gatherings, so that the local dialect grew up as the everyday speech of merchants, bankers, and printers at the very centre of the Holy Roman Empire’s political and financial life, a rather grander pedigree than most regional German dialects can claim. It was also, famously, the childhood speech of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born in the city in 1749, whose letters and early writing still carry faint traces of the local vernacular beneath his polished literary German. Curiously, Frankfurt only became administratively part of modern Hesse fairly late, losing its independence and being annexed by Prussia in 1866 after backing the losing side in the Austro Prussian War, so the dialect’s inclusion under the label Hessian is, in political terms, a rather more recent arrangement than its centuries deep linguistic kinship with the wider Rhine Franconian world would suggest.
That kinship shows most vividly in how differently the same broad dialect family has aged in its various homes. Where Saarland’s Rhine Franconian speech carries the marks of a contested border repeatedly fought over between France and Germany, Frankfurt’s version thrives instead in the convivial, slightly irreverent culture of the city’s apple wine (Ebbelwoi) taverns, where the dialect is spoken with evident pride over glasses of the tart local cider and where its characteristic verb for chatting away, babbeln, captures something of its warm, talkative, comic reputation across the rest of Germany. Sibling dialects along the same Rhine Franconian belt, from the Palatinate to Saarland, remain readily recognisable to a Frankfurt ear and vice versa, evidence of a shared linguistic backbone running the length of the Rhine valley, even as each community has draped that shared grammar in its own local history, whether the grandeur of imperial coronations and trade fairs in Hesse or the restless border politics further west.
