Location: Aichach, Bavaria, Germany; originally Bogotá, Colombia

 discovered the Lowlands website by mere coincidence, while looking around for information about my heritage.

I want to thank you for this wonderful job you have done. It is just refreshing to read all the material, and also listen to all recordings.

My story is far more complex than yours, Reinhard, in terms of ethnicity and languages. I was born in Colombia, South America. My father is “Dutch,” my mother Colombian with French ancestry. Physically, I look like a Dutchman. But I speak Spanish, because my father never wanted to teach me the Dutch language. At school in Colombia, I was always a kind of “gringo” for the others. Sometimes I enjoyed it, sometimes not. But I also developed an interest in languages. I am not as good as you are, but I keep trying.

My father was from Amsterdam, but his father, and in general his ancestors, were from the eastern part of the Netherlands, in the area of Twente and Drenthe. My father is now 78 years old, and he can remember Opa and Oma speaking some kind of eastern dialect, sometimes far away from standard Dutch.

I now live in a small town in Bavaria, Germany, were I am learning the language. My knowledge of Spanish and a little bit of French and Italian showed me exactly this phenomenon you were describing on how the old Saxon language was gradually replaced in Germany. The truth is that Modern German seems to me to have a lot of influence from Romance languages, especially in the pronunciation, and some idiomatic expressions not related with Germanic influence. I have been in Austria and Switzerland where this is even more notorious. (For sure the Romans were there). But the nice thing about this is precisely to understand how languages and culture are transformed over decades, hundreds or thousands of years because of the intermingling of different cores and cultures. The funniest thing is to realize that most of the people don’t understand it, or are just aware of two or three generations behind them, living in a static “today” and regarding the past as being some sort of movie.

For the next two years I will explore German (Hochdeutsch), and then I would like to do the Scandinavian trip as well if I can save enough money. Something I see as very interesting is also the border between the Germans and the Slavs, and Finland and the Hungarian languages, which are a complete mystery to me.

Anyway I just wanted to extend my congratulations on bringing this nice job to normal people like me over a web page.