This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: My ancestral languages, Boarisch (Bavarian) and Schwäbisch (Swabian), are routinely described as German dialects. That might sound like a technical linguistic distinction.
For me, a Boarisch-Schwob scholar and community member, it raises a practical question: What happens to a people when their ancestral language, which carries their identity and "Weltanschauung" (worldview), is excluded from protection under a European language treaty because the modern state and dominant culture reduce it to a dialect? In my recent open-access article, published in the International Journal of Cultural Property, I examine how language classifications shape cultural and human rights. Drawing on linguistic expert reports, European and United Nations frameworks, and my own advocacy, I argue that the categories governments use help determine whose languages receive support and whose decline goes unexamined.
Germany protects Plattdeutsch (Low German) as a regional language under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, a Council of Europe treaty. Boarisch and Schwäbisch remain outside that protection. The charter excludes dialects of a state's official language, so deciding what counts as a language has consequences for institutional support and international monitoring.
The linguistic expert reports I analyze challenge this exclusion. They describe historically developed linguistic systems with their own grammar, vocabulary and literary traditions. Linguist Hannes Scheutz traces Boarisch's written history to around A.D. 800, centuries before modern standard German emerged.
In my analysis, treating it as an informal offshoot of standard German doesn't just obscure that history—it represents a quieter form of political-cultural governance and a strategy of suppression, assimilation and erasure. International language catalogs also list Bavarian and Swabian separately as distinct languages. Even UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger identifies Bavarian and the wider language group encompassing Swabian as endangered.
Yet this international classification has not brought them under Germany's charter protection. International documentation as a distinct language does not automatically secure that protection nationally or within Europe. A language can lose ground through ordinary institutional decisions.
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