German Language Stack Exchange is a bilingual question and answer site for speakers of all levels who want to share and increase their knowledge of the German language. It's 100% free, no registration required.
Sign up to join this community
I've noticed that the Bayern accent, or at least the München and Ansbach accents, have a hard roll of the 'R's. In addition, the DW newscast has the occasional R-roll. Yet the two other regions that I am familiar with, Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia, do not [rather, the speakers that I know from that region emphatically do not -- they've tried to break me of the habit].
My question is, how common is R-rolling and is it pleasing or irritating to most native Germans?
I'm from Northern Germany. I hardly pronounce the /r/ at all, instead I either lengthen the previous vowel (as in Arbeit: /a:beit/) or pronounce it almost as /x/ (the 'ch' sound), especially at the beginning of a word. Even in depressiv I would do that, as /depxesi:f/
In my own experience it is mainly the Southern dialects, including Austrian, which roll the 'r', I don't think I've ever come across it in a Northern speaker. I would find it slightly irritating, as it sounds grating to me, and putting too much emphasis on a sound that I almost not pronounce at all.
[The phonetic transcriptions are of course not accurate and only approximations]
I am from Düsseldorf (North Rhine-Westphalia, NRW) and I hear it very strongly when I hear someone who is from Franconia ("Franken", Northern Bavaria). Here in NRW we just roll it with certain words such as:
DepRessiv
or
Rastplatz
It's not pleasing to hear guys from Franconia. Because the R seems to sound so dominant when they speak. Because they roll it in every Word.
The regular Use is okay for me.
Another region where the people roll the 'R' is the southern and eastern part of the Upper Lusatia (Oberlausitz). There's an example in the German Wikipedia, if you are curious.
The "Wäller" dialect heavily rolls the r. Municipality of Rennerod in the Westerwaldkreis being a center of that dialect.
Listen to this guy:
People in the Wetterau Area (north of Frankfurt am Main) are said to roll the R. In the local dialect, the name of the region is Wetteraa/Wedderaa, with a rolled R.
That said, I am living not far from there and went there several times for hiking, but I never heard someone rolling the R. I guess the number of speakers of the original dialect has declined considerably.
Today the dialect is probably only spoken by older people. My father told me that he once was there as a schoolboy with his school class (must have been about 70 years ago) and that they had trouble understanding a farmer who spoke to them because the farmer's dialect differed a lot from the south Hessian dialect he was used to.
In upper bavaria you have the "Oberfranken", "Mittefranken", and "Unterfranken" dialects. I am from Berlin where slang we use "ike/icke" instead of "ich". "Pfankuchen" in Franconia is called "Krapfen". In Bavia "Pfandkuchen" is pancake but in Berlin they call it "Eierkuchen". It's like on part says "Brötchen" other parts call "Semmel", "Weck", or in Berlin we say "Schrippe".
