7.2 The Krasna dialect

The Krasna people retained their German mother tongue in the Palatine dialect until resettlement, even though the official and school languages (increasingly since 1871) were Russian and Romanian respectively.

In his dissertation “Die Mundarten der deutschen Mutterkolonien Bessarabiens und ihre Stammheimat” ¹⁾, Albert Eckert meticulously proved that Krasna occupies a special position among the 24 colonies studied. Only here do the decisive characteristics for a Central German dialect apply. According to his investigations, Krasna's original home is the Palatinate. He believes that it can be stated with certainty that the majority of the Krasna settlers must have come from the Rhenish Palatinate region. Eckert: “Their special Catholic position did not allow for a greater mixture in terms of settlement, transport and language.

Eduard Ruscheinsky writes: “Over time, a uniform dialect developed among the colonists and Palatine seemed to have prevailed as the dominant dialect, although it was dressed up with various dialect chunks” (see Krasna Dictionary below).

People always remained faithful to the German mother tongue, but foreign words gradually crept into the vocabulary. Hellmut Erich Fiechtner ²⁾ has carried out an extensive study and has shown that many words and idioms from other languages were taken up, especially from Polish, Russian, Turkish, Bulgarian and Romanian. His work contains a considerable list of words and their origins which have also found their way into the Krasna dialect.

Eckert (see above) also writes about loan words from other languages in connection with his dialect research. A shorter description of the words adopted by the Bessarabian Germans can be found in Erwin Heer, Bessarabischer Heimatkalender 1955, pp. 59-61 and Heimatkalender 1981 pp. 74-86.

The following is a list of typical expressions and idioms in Krasna dialect, which goes back to such a dictionary in the Heimatbuch 25 years after the resettlement in 1965. This dictionary has been revised and completed by Ernst Schäfer. It is printed in: Erinnerungen an Bessarabia 60 Jahre nach der Umsiedlung, Landsmannschaft der Bessarabiadeutschen Rheinland-Pfalz e.V., 2001, pp. 265-271.

Ernst Schäfer writes in his preface: “Due to the different origins of the Catholic Bessarabians and the interference of foreign languages and idioms, a dialect of their own was formed in Krasna and Emmental. The basis for this was, of course, the language brought from the old homeland, into which other expressions and idioms were then mixed over the course of time. The dialect that developed in this way was preserved throughout the years until the resettlement and is still cultivated today at gatherings of the local people.

The origin of the colonists can still be clearly recognised in many of the words and phrases that have been handed down. Thus, people still speak with these dialectal colourings here in the Rhineland and also in the Saarland and Alsace.
Certainly, many words and typical expressions from that time have been lost, so I would like to record below all that is still known. I will also try to explain individual, completely incomprehensible words, expressions and phrases.

In the following list, the German words are arranged in alphabetical order, followed by the Bessarabian expression.
z. In some cases, individual terms were also used in other meanings than those shown here.

Words borrowed from other languages (as far as known) are marked as follows

• from Russian ^rus
• from Polish ^pol
• from Romanian ^rum

<ignore>

</ignore>