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Crusader Kings II >  Workshop > Flint's Workshop > French and Germans improved > Discussions
French and Germans improved
Description Discussions2 Comments18 Change Notes
Flint  [developer] 9 Dec, 2018 @ 6:36am
Germanic languages, dialects, and their borders
Now we're getting serious, the consonant shift. I decided to go "all-german" for consistency, otherwise, if i take it too seriously, i would have to prevent german culture from ever appearing, because all these languages/dialects exist to this day, and the borders are all over germany. Even the distinction between language and dialect is very hard to do.

The second "german" consonant shift did not happen for the Low Saxon dialects, for CK2 this would mean i'd have to prevent Old Saxon from merging into German, and instead have it evolve into Low Saxon.

The Bavarian language would never merge into German, their language exists to this day and most of them speak it on a daily basis, they are very proud of it and Bavaria is the most likely candidate for separating from Germany altogether.

Same for the Alemannic dialects, these would have to evolve into Swabian and Swiss, which are widely used today.

The biggest problem here is that many germans and NLers today are bilingual, they will know both their standard language, to a degree, and their local dialect/language, to a degree. There are exceptions, some will only know High German, some Bavarians and Swabians will not know High German at all cause they didnt pay attention in school, dont watch TV and simply dont need High German for anything since everyone they talk to speaks bavarian or swabian. This is impossible to represent in CK2, this is why i picked the "all-german" approach, all of them did call themselves "Diutisk" despite the huge differences in their particular languages/dialects.

Maybe two different mods would be in order - one with the "all-german" approach, and another where there is no "german" culture at all but only Frankish, Low Franconian, Old Saxon, Low Saxon, Middle Franconian, High Franconian, Alemannic, Bavarian, Swabian, Thuringian cultures.

Maybe it's even possible to have a switch in the game settings, "Unify Germanic cultures", on or off. I will look into the technical possibility of such a switch.

As usual, comments, feedback, suggestions are more than welcome.
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Showing 1-12 of 12 comments
sevens.exposed 10 Dec, 2018 @ 9:31am 
I appreciate all the effort that is being put into the research for the mod, but I don't think there is enough difference between the dialects to properly separate them into separate cultures. One thing that I'd actually prefer to see is more fleshed out romance cultures, since they never got enough love in the game in my opinion (e.g.: Visigothic splitting into iberian romance languages; langobard evolving into italian and frankish eventually becoming french, which absolutely doesn't make sense).
Then again, it depends on the philosophy you have in mind of the mod and the things you'd like to achieve/correct with it from the base game.
#1
Flint  [developer] 10 Dec, 2018 @ 11:22am 
Luckily, i live right inside this german-languages/dialects mess, so i dont have to think too much about whether there is enough difference, i know there is, i see it every day. It is not just a different pronunciation of the same words, i do not understand the germans that live only 200-300 km away from where i live, if they talk in their dialect. When they show interviews with Bavarians on TV, they will often put High German subtitles under that, otherwise people would only understand 30-50%. I do not even fully understand the local dialect in my town, i have an actual printed dictionary for this local dialect, containing several thousand words. And it is not just different words, the grammar is different too.

If you ask me, these are not dialects, these are proper languages with their own literature, art, music, with their own international language code and their own wikipedias. But the difference between languages and dialects is a political one anyways, linguists will just give you a mathematical value for how much two given "ways of speaking" differ from each other.

As for separating and unifiying cultures, i had to decide upon a philosphy for this mod, and the philosophy is, to unify the german cultures north of the alps, into one culture. Politically, this should make sense, culturally maybe not so. But since CK2 is mostly about politics anyways, this will be fine.

For whoever is interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colognian_dialect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historic_Colognian
https://ksh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Houpsigk

I do not really know that much about the Romance cultures, i am probably not the right guy to make a mod about them.
#2
sevens.exposed 10 Dec, 2018 @ 1:42pm 
I guess you're right then, splitting the german culture into regional tongues should be the most appropriate way to deal with their differences and to represent them better in game.
As for the german culture, you could make it so that it pops out in later dates..
#3
Flint  [developer] 10 Dec, 2018 @ 3:09pm 
Based on my research, they started using the term Diutisk/German for the Ripuarian Franks around 800, and between 800 and 1000 this definition also spread onto the other germanic peoples under the rulership of the Franks.

In my mod, the frankish culture will start turning german right away although it will take some time.

If the "faster melting pots" setting is enabled, the other germanic cultures will start turning german as soon as they get a german top liege. If the "faster melting pots" setting is not enabled, this will happen starting with the year 950.

This is only for provinces, the culture conversion of the rulers will start after the provinces start converting.
#4
The Dukester 12 Dec, 2018 @ 3:30pm 
I thought I'd already replied to this duscussion, but I could be misremembering lol. Anyway, I see you took my suggestion to make French represent the Gallo-Romans in the early period. If you're interested, I think you might be able to use customizable localization to make it appear in-game as something like, say, Gallic at game start and rename French after a certain period or certain conditions are met. Of course, it's also possible that French is not actually anachronistic in 769. Wikipedia lists Old French as appearing around the 8th century, so smack dab in the first start date. You might want to research further. I still would suggest separating Salians (Dutch) from Ripuarians (Franken Franks), not just because of the consonant shift, but also because the Salian/Ripuarian divide was a significant enough ethnic one, IMO, and it means not having to worry about where the Dutch come from in-game. You might even be able to use the above-stated localization method to get Dutch culture to read as Salian and Frankish as Rupuarian until some later date. Of course, Wikipedia again lists Old Dutch as coming about around 5th so that may not be problematic either (additionally, if you're interested, there's a good picture on the English wikipedia with the extant area of Old Dutch language, so you too can lament how badly the provinces in the area are shaped for defining that linguistic boundary :p).
#5
The Dukester 12 Dec, 2018 @ 3:39pm 
WRT the question of German melting pot, I actually recognize that, in the context of the game's mechanics, it's actually a very difficult decision to make. What the game could really use is a kind of mechanic that would allow a court culture to form and exist alongside regular cultures. So, in Germany, the nobles would adopt a coalesced court culture of German, while maintaining their own regional cultures as well as helping prevent the regional cultures from going extinct when, as you yourself have attested to, those cultural divisions exist to this very day.
#6
Flint  [developer] 17 Dec, 2018 @ 3:22pm 
This is almost getting philosophical now, i remember reading some old argument about whether nations create countries, or countries create nations. It seems that historically there is some more truth to the latter. I am still trying to come up with a system that fits in the Dutch and other cultures into this system.
Maybe something like this: They start off as Frankish, as in vanilla. If they end up inside a bigger realm under a German ruler, they start turning German themselves. If they split off and become independent, they start turning Dutch. My big problem here is that i do not agree treating the Dutch culture differently from Saxons, Bavarians, Alemanns. Especially the Saxons as their language is way closer to dutch than to german.

Also there is another contradiction there right now - why does the Norse culture split up into several different cultures, while the germanic cultures converge into one German culture.

Very complex topic, and what is "culture" anyways? I should have sticked to these easy-going trade route mods, what have i gotten myself into here.
Last edited by Flint; 17 Dec, 2018 @ 3:24pm
#7
Vincente Steele 19 Dec, 2018 @ 1:37pm 
I mostly read the first two posts and the last one and skipped everything in the middle, but I've an idea.

Since all of the cultures eventually flip to German, why not have events fire that are similar to the Norse events that flip the German culture into the various sub-cultures so the map culture map, in 'the Germanies', at least, appears similarly to how it does at the start of a EU4 game?

There's a couple of other mods that try to do something like that on the workshop, but they're all dead and aren't quite so focused as your mod seems to be.
#8
Flint  [developer] 19 Dec, 2018 @ 1:57pm 
So the idea is to keep them split, in that case i would remove the unified German culture though, otherwise it's going to be weird - they first converge into a unified culture, then split up again along the borders of the previous cultures.

I think the big decision to make here is, do we want the germans to unify into 1x culture, or do we want several germanic cultures. Having both would look very weird.

To get them to look like in EU4, it would have to be something like this:
- Frankish in the low counties would turn to Dutch
- Frankish in the rhineland turns Rhenish
- Alemanni in swabia turns Swabian
- Alemanni in the swiss mountains turn Swiss
- Bavarians in bavaria stay Bavarian
- Bavarians in austria become Austrian
- (old) Saxons in the old saxon areas turn Westphalian
- any kind of germans in pommerania turn Pommeranian
- any kind of germans in the modern area of Saxony become (new) Saxon

This sounds very good, and also like a completely different mod from this one. I guess this would good for when someone does *not* play german, while it would be bad for someone who plays german and wants one united nation.

I will think about what to do with this, more input from the players is always welcome, all this is for you after all, i can mod whatever i want for my own personal games.
Last edited by Flint; 19 Dec, 2018 @ 1:59pm
#9
Flint  [developer] 19 Dec, 2018 @ 5:56pm 
Have a look at the CK+ mod. I just found out they already have all of the above, and more.
#10
AWpCR 17 Jan, 2019 @ 7:12pm 
This discussion reminds me of a quote, the person who said it escapes my mind.

"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." I think that sums it up pretty well.
#11
Flint  [developer] 18 Jan, 2019 @ 11:25am 
The debate on the difference between language and dialect is probably as old as the science of linguistics, and they still cannot agree on where to draw the line.

We humans and our languages are just too complex to understand :)
#12
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