Global InformationBergish dialects information
Bergish (Bergisch or bergische Mundarten) is a collective name for a group of West Germanic dialects spoken in the Bergisches Land region east of the Rhine in western Germany.
In a more narrow sense, Peter Wiesinger defined a Bergisch dialect group that includes the dialects North of Benrath line spoken to the east of the Rhine to about Essen, Mülheim and Wuppertal (except for the area around Düsseldorf). It excludes, however, Ripuarian dialects in the Bergisches Land and other varieties southeast of Wuppertal.
The name is commonly used among its speakers (who often call their local Bergisch variety simply "Platt", a common term in western and northern Germany for traditional local varieties of Low German, Low Franconian and Central German, as opposed to the standard language or regionalized varieties of the latter), but in its broadest sense, it is not of much linguistic relevance, because the varieties belong to several quite distinct groups inside the continental West Germanic dialect continuum.