Upper Saxon dialect
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
Upper Saxon (German: Obersächsisch or colloquially, Sächsisch) is a dialect of German spoken in much of the modern German Free States of Saxony and Thuringia. The degree of accent varies from place to place within the states, with it being anywhere from a relatively mild accent in the larger cities such as Dresden or Chemnitz, to a stronger form in the villages of the Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge). The most notable distinguishing feature of the dialect is that the letters 'o' and 'u' are often pronounced as they would be if written with an umlaut.
For example, 'aus' is pronounced 'aűs' (using standard high German phonetics), and 'Oma' is pronounced 'Őma'. Often, when a word is spelled with an umlauted 'o,' the Saxon variant will be pronounced in a fashion similar to an English long 'a'. When a word ends with the letters 'er,' the Saxon variant will usually be pronounced like a long 'o.' Therefore, the word 'Dőner' would be pronounced, if spelled out in English, as 'DAY-noh'
