In a message dated 5/17/2006 10:15:28 PM Mountain Standard Time, akibb1@verizon.net writes: If you visit there, go to an Inn "Gasthof" in the evening when the local folks come for a drink of beer and play cards..... and then sit quietly in a corner and LISTEN!!! My German cousins speak Egerländer dialect. It is different from modern Bavarian dialects -- sort of sing-song. If you have heard people speaking Yiddish it has sort of that same sing-song to it. It always sounds like a "party in progress" IMO. I can't imagine how that "music" can express anger or frustration!! The dialectical marks used when writing Egerland dialect are not only umlauts. There are other marks that denote a specific sound that is not found in modern German. A Schöne Mächecn in Egerland dialect souns sort of like Shayneh Maydl with some emphasis on the "a" sounds. There is a Egerländisch dictionary somewhere on line somewhere - it may be a work in progress. It is dialact - German. The Egerland newsletter also has a few more pages of their on-going work to produce a dictionary in each edition. At least they used to. The GBHS library has an older small dictionary of dialect to German. It is helpful but it may not have all the words in it that have been collected by other sources since it was published. Dialects of other Sudeton parts of Bohemia are different from Egerländisch. They depend on the influences brought there by early settlers from Saxon and Frankish homes in early Germany with some mix from local peoples already living there or moving there at the same time (like from Silesia or from Austria). There is a dictionary of German dialects being developed by German scholars. It is expected to be from 16-20 volumes by the time it is finished. I saw the first volume for the letter "A" at a Heimat Treffen in Nurnburg in 1997. I understand that there are a few US Universities that will eventually have all of the books. Georgetown University is one of them. They will probably cost about $100-200 per volume and the price is probably prohibitive for most genealogical libraries in the US. I also doubt that they will be available for interlibrary loan from the collegiat institutions that hold them. They are probably the only resource that would help to translate ANY Sudeten dialect as well as other German dialects from Eastern Europe, Austria, Hungary and other areas settled by Germans during the last several centuries. (Many remaining "outland" German populations have been repatriated when possible because of massacres and suppression following WW II.) I found that there are always articles in dialect in Hemat newsletters -- especially in the older editions. The Jeschken-Iser Jahrbuch was alomst 1/2 narratives in dialect. It is a shame that the dictionaries will be so hard to come by for those who want to know more about Sudeten dialects. I don't know if they will also include Swiss dialects which include Alemannisch, Baseldeutsch, Bernedeutsch and Zurichdeutsch. See http://www.ex.ac.uk/~pjoyce/dialects/obschwyz.html for ancestral Swiss dialects. There is some information about German didlects at: http://members.tripod.com/~rjschellen/Dialinks.htm Scroll down to find it. On the page: http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~naeser/dsa-hist.htm there are phrases to compare. At the bottom of the page there is: Ich will es auch nicht mehr wieder tun. (I'll never do that again.) At the bottom of the list of dialects there is: WI1 I wüls a inimma tuan. WI3 I wülls a nimmermehr tuan. WI20 I wir_s a nimma wieda tuan. Those look like Sudeten dialects without typical diacritical marks. I cannot tell from the page if the spelling is supposed to be phonetic for pronuciation. It looks a lot like dialect spelling I have seen. BTW, when I was last in New Ulm for the SGAS conference, there were a lot of German professors and scholars there. The GBHS put on a show of folk culture and the people who could still speak the dialect their ancestors brought to New Ulm (from the Bishofteinetz and Taus borderlands -- not really Egerländer and not exactly Bohemian Forest dialect. I heard some Germans at the table next to me say that they didn't understand one word. They were guessing it was "some kind of Bayerische". I understand that at least one GBHS member is trying to compile a dictionary of his dialect and to preserve recordings from those in the area who still speak it. Lets hope he is able to complete that work!!! Karen