Dona, My daughter spent a year and a half living and working in different parts of Germany, and she tells me that my interpretation of high and low German is incorrect. She described it much as you do, and said the polite and familiar forms are used in almost all dialects. I learned "Book German" in college and my mother couldn't understand me. Fred Koch makes a nice comparison of the Volga dialect with an area in Germany. My grandfather used the Ich (long I) for word I, and I just thought he had Americanized it until I studied Koch's comparison. As I recall he had the word listed with the long I instead of the short I which Germans use. Marven On Mon, 20 Aug 2007 10:10:56 -0500 "Reeves-Marquardt, Dona" <dr03@txstate.edu> writes: If you think of "Book German," you might still encounter polite "Wie geht es Ihnen?" in Book German, as well as familiar "Wie geht es Dir?" Both are acceptable. Book German is often refered to as High German. This is the language of the theater, radio and TV. If you think "Home German," you think of dialects, often quite different from Book German. Here it helps to know the International Phonetic Alphabet because there are innumerable and subtle differences. And it is here that you might encounter high German dialects (southern) and low German dialects (northern). This is the study which continues to interest professors as they seek to describe the language used by our people at home, because it is geographically conditioned. On other occasions, High German is considered Book German, because it became, more or less, the standard language in the sixteenth century. The standard language enveloped characteristics of middle and southern parts of the German-speaking area. Low German (north) continued to be used--at home and to a lesser degree in literature even until today. But it is not the standard literary language. "High" and "Low" are geographical terms and have nothing to do with social standing. And I wish my mother had taught me her dialect--or any other German! Dona