How to Speak Wisconsindeutsch

This is a beginner’s primer in Wisconsindeutsch, the German vernacular of the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin. It teaches Die Madisoner Norm, the codified standard, because the Norm is the form the schoolbooks and the dictionary use and the only form anyone can teach on a page. Everything below is the standard as written; the way the language is actually spoken drops half of it, and the last section shows you how far.

One warning before the first word. Wisconsindeutsch is a language that has survived, by its own speakers’ careful arrangement, precisely by never becoming worth anything, and a keen outsider learner is regarded with roughly the same wary courtesy as a German with a chequebook. You will be helped, corrected, and fed. You will not quite be let in. This is not unfriendliness. It is the immune system of a tongue that has watched what happens to minority languages the moment the wrong people decide they are precious. Learn it anyway, and learn it well, but learn it knowing that the surest sign you are speaking it right is that no one thinks to remark on it.

The one rule that matters

If you learn a single thing about Wisconsindeutsch, learn the R.

The sound that names the language is the American R. Every German R, the throaty uvular scrape of Munich and the rolled R of the stage, is replaced, in every register and every county, by the ordinary rhotic R of American English, the same R you use in road and farmer and river. It is used everywhere, at the front of a word and the back, in the plough report and the high liturgy alike, and it is the one feature that tells a listener from Munich, instantly and before any word has finished, exactly which side of the ocean he is standing on.

It cannot be shown to you here, because it has no spelling. It appears nowhere on the page. So take the rule on faith and carry it through every example below: wherever you see an R, do not reach for the German sound. Say it like an American, and you are already speaking Wisconsindeutsch. Say it like a Berliner, and you are speaking German with a costume on, and the whole tavern will know.

The two shortcuts

Two habits carry you most of the rest of the way, because both of them are about throwing grammar out.

Say du to everyone. German’s polite Sie, the formal you, does not exist in living Wisconsindeutsch. It was abandoned long ago as too European, too cold, too much like being addressed by a clerk, and no one has written it in a private letter in living memory. You say du to the Grand Duke and to the man who plows your road, and neither is offended, because the offence would be to do anything else. Forget Sie. It is the single fastest way to mark yourself a foreigner.

Say net, not nicht. In print, in the Norm, the negation is the standard German nicht. In the mouth it is always net. Ich weiss net, I don’t know. Das geht net, that won’t work. Er kommt net, he isn’t coming. If you want to negate two things, the second one takes auch net, also not: die Ko-op auch net, the co-op neither. Learn net, use it everywhere you would say nicht, and you will sound, at a stroke, like someone who belongs.

Those two, the universal du and the universal net, are the load-bearing shortcuts. Almost everything else is German you already half-know, worn in a Wisconsin way.

The small words

Two small habits colour the whole language.

The first is the diminutive -erl, a Bavarian ending that rides on the Swabian frame and long ago stopped marking anyone’s church. You attach it to make a thing small, dear, or manageable: a Haserl is a bunny, a Hunderl a little dog, a Katzerl a kitten, a Bratserl a nice little sausage, a Stückerl a small piece. Above all you learn a bisserl, a little bit, which you will use twenty times a day. A bisserl kalt heut, a bit cold today. Wart a bisserl, wait a little. If in doubt, make it an -erl; Wisconsin almost always prefers the smaller, friendlier form.

The second is that English words, when they are borrowed, become German words. They take a German capital letter automatically, and they take a German gender, assigned by analogy to whatever German word they most resemble. So the plow is der Plow (after der Pflug), the county is die County, the meeting is das Meeting, the sheriff is der Sheriff, and the pickup truck is der Pickup. The rule for the learner is simple: when you borrow a word, do not borrow it shyly. Capitalise it, give it der, die, or das, and say it with the American R, and it is Wisconsindeutsch now. A word that still needs an apologetic italic is not yet a loan. The council waits until it does not.

The little tags

Wisconsindeutsch, like the Wisconsin English that grew up beside it, hangs a small question on the end of a great many sentences, less to ask anything than to reach for agreement. The three you need are na?, gell?, and oder?, and they all mean something close to right? or isn’t it?

Kalt heut, gell? Cold today, isn’t it. Du kommst mit, oder? You’re coming along, aren’t you. Schön, na? Nice, eh? A sentence without one of these can sound abrupt, almost rude, like a door shut a little too firmly. Add the tag and you have left the door open, which is the whole point of it. These are also the forms that leaked into the English of the Grand Duchy, where even Wisconsinites with no German at all end their sentences with ain’a? and never wonder where it came from.

Your first words

Wisconsindeutsch	English	Note
Grüss Gott	Hello / good day	The standard greeting, a Catholic hello spelled the Lutheran way; everyone says it
Servus	Hi / bye (informal)	To a friend, coming or going
Pfiati	Bye (God keep you)	Warm, everyday farewell
Auf Wiederschauen	Goodbye (formal)	For the shop, the office, the stranger
Danke / Vergelts Gott	Thanks / bless you for it	The second is warmer, older, and never wrong
Bitte	Please / you’re welcome	Both, as in German
Ja / Nei	Yes / no	Nei is the everyday no; do not confuse it with the tag na?
Wie gehts?	How’s it going?	Answer: Passt scho, it’s fine, it’ll do

Passt scho deserves its own line. It means, roughly, “that’s all right, it’ll do, no need to fuss,” and it is as close as Wisconsindeutsch comes to a philosophy of life. A dented fender, a late co-op meeting, a winter that will not end: passt scho. Learn to say it with a small shrug and you have understood something the grammar cannot teach you.

The weather and the road

Here is the living heart of the language, and the most useful thing in this primer. The most-listened programming on the Crown broadcaster ABC Wisconsindeutsch is not song or story. It is the weather and the road closures, the plough report, and if you learn one field of vocabulary, learn this one, because it is the German a Wisconsiner actually needs before dawn on a January morning.

Wisconsindeutsch	English
der Schnee	the snow
es schneit	it’s snowing
der Plow	the plow
die Strasse ist gesperrt	the road is closed
das Glatteis	black ice
glatt	slippery
kalt / saukalt	cold / brutally cold
der Wind	the wind
fahr vorsichtig	drive carefully
bleib daheim	stay home
es friert	it’s freezing

Note saukalt, literally “pig-cold,” which is not vulgar and is used freely on the air; the pig, in Wisconsindeutsch, is an all-purpose intensifier for anything extreme, and the weather is usually extreme. The broadcaster’s own slogan is worth keeping in your ear, because it is the whole spirit of the register: Der Schnee fragt nicht nach Zuständigkeit, the snow does not ask who has jurisdiction. When the plough report tells you die Strasse ist gesperrt, bleib daheim, it is not advice. It is the closest thing the Grand Duchy has to a command, and everyone obeys it.

At the co-op and the supper club

Away from the weather, daily Wisconsindeutsch runs on the farm, the co-operative, the table, and the tavern.

Wisconsindeutsch	English
die Kuh, pl. die Kühe	the cow, the cows
die Milch / der Käse	the milk / the cheese
die Ko-op	the co-operative
die Sitzung	the meeting
der Traktor	the tractor
das Bier / a Bierl	the beer / a little beer
die Bratwurst	the bratwurst
der Supper Club	the supper club (a Wisconsin institution)
der Fish Fry am Freitag	the Friday fish fry
das Wetter	the weather (always a safe subject)

The Grand Duchy’s oldest proverb about politics is a farming proverb, and you should know it: Die Kühe warten nicht auf den Landtag, the cows do not wait on the legislature. It means that real work, the milking and the harvest, keeps its own schedule and cannot be adjourned for anyone’s speeches, and it is quoted about the weather, about the government, and, above all, about the endless meetings of the co-operative board, which is the subject of the one novel every speaker knows by heart.

How to insult a man’s farming

Wisconsindeutsch profanity is rich, and it is agricultural, and its sharpest edge is never about a man’s mother but about the quality of his farming. To call a man a poor farmer, in the right words, is to say everything, and it is worth knowing the shape of it even if you never dare use it.

Ein Sonntagsbauer. A Sunday farmer. A hobbyist, a dabbler, a man who plays at it. Mild, and deadly.
Bei dem wächst net amol das Unkraut. At his place, not even the weeds will grow. The land itself has given up on him.
Seine Kühe kennen den Weg zum Nachbarn. His cows know the way to the neighbour’s. His animals would rather be someone else’s; he keeps them that badly.
Der lässt den Mist zu lang stehen. He lets the manure sit too long. A whole indictment of a man’s husbandry in six words.
Der könnt net amol eine Kuh melken ohne Sitzung. He couldn’t milk a cow without calling a meeting first. The unanswerable insult, which says a man is both a bad farmer and the kind of committee-minded time-waster the whole culture holds in gentle contempt.

Use none of these to a man’s face unless you are prepared for the consequences, which in the Grand Duchy are social rather than physical and last considerably longer.

Sounding Right

The difference between speaking Wisconsindeutsch and speaking German in Wisconsin is a short list of tells, and a listener sorts you by them in the first sentence.

Say the R like an American. This is the whole game. Miss it and nothing else will save you.
Never say Sie. Du to everyone, always.
Say net, not nicht, once you are past the schoolbook.
End on a tag. Gell? or na? or oder? Leave the door open.
Prefer ss to ß, and do not fret the umlaut. The Norm ranks ae, oe, ue equal to ä, ö, ü, so Strasse and Grüss and Kuehe are all correct, and the same festival is spelled two ways within a mile of itself. Nobody minds. Spelling anxiety is itself a foreign tell.
Reach for the -erl and the bisserl. When in doubt, make it small and friendly.
Say passt scho and mean it. The man who fusses is the man from away.

The ladder, in one sentence

Because the standard drops away as you go down the registers, the same simple thought is correct in half a dozen forms at once, from the Grand Duke’s mouth to a teenager’s phone. Here is the cows do not wait on the legislature, falling down the ladder rung by rung, so you can hear where the grammar goes.

Register	The sentence
Ceremonial (Hochwisconsinsche)	Die Kühe harren nicht des Landtages.
Print standard (the Norm)	Die Kühe warten nicht auf den Landtag.
Newspaper	Die Kühe warten net auf den Landtag, und die Ko-op auch net.
A private letter	D’Kühe warten net auf’n Landtag.
Landdeutsch, as spoken	D’Kieh warta net auf’n Landtag.
A phone, from a teenager	d kieh warten net aufn landtag

Watch the cases go first, then the umlaut, then the apostrophe, then the capital letter, until the sentence has entered a telephone and lost nothing that matters. None of it is broken. Each rung is correct somewhere, and a speaker moves between them all day without thinking. The council, asked to condemn the bottom rung, the badly-typed German of the young, declined on the ground that a language typed badly by teenagers is a language with a future. What no rung can show you, top to bottom, is still the R. The loudest thing in the language remains the one thing the page cannot say.

✎ Editor's Note · Teaching a language whose loudest sound has no spelling

A speaker’s primer for Wisconsindeutsch runs straight into the joke at the centre of the whole invention: the single feature that most defines the language, the American R, cannot be written down, so a written guide must teach everything except the thing that matters most and simply keep pointing at the gap. The primer builds only on features the parent article already fixed, the universal du, net for nicht, the -erl, loanword gender, the ss-preference, the tag particles, the register ladder, and turns them from description into instruction without inventing a new grammar. The framing keeps faith with the language’s governing paradox: a tongue that survives by being worthless has every reason to be wary of eager learners, so the honest primer is one that teaches you the language and warns you, in the same breath, that wanting it too badly is the one thing its speakers have taught themselves to distrust.

Trivia

In-Universe The most important thing in any Wisconsindeutsch lesson is the one thing that cannot be printed. The American R, used in every word and every register, is the sound that names the language, and it appears nowhere on the page, so every primer teaches around a silence it can only point at.
In-Universe The fastest way to mark yourself a foreigner in the Grand Duchy is to say Sie. The polite German you was abandoned as too European, and a learner who reaches for it has announced, in one word, that he learned his German somewhere across the ocean.
In-Universe The most useful Wisconsindeutsch a person can learn is the plough report. The Crown broadcaster's most-listened programming is the weather and the road closures, and 'die Strasse ist gesperrt, bleib daheim,' the road is closed, stay home, is less advice than command.
In-Universe The deadliest insult in Wisconsindeutsch is about a man's farming, and the deadliest of those combines two contempts at once: 'der könnt net amol eine Kuh melken ohne Sitzung,' he couldn't milk a cow without calling a meeting first. It calls a man a bad farmer and a committee-minded time-waster in a single breath.
In-Universe 'Passt scho,' roughly 'it'll do, no need to fuss,' is as close as Wisconsindeutsch comes to a philosophy. Said with a small shrug over a dented fender or an endless winter, it teaches something the grammar cannot, and the man who cannot say it is always the man from away.
Design The primer teaches Die Madisoner Norm, the print standard, because it is the only form that can be taught on a page, then spends its last section showing how far ordinary speech departs from it, dropping the cases, the umlaut, the apostrophe, and the capital letter down a ladder of registers that are each correct somewhere.