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What’s with this “Wren” thing?
The oldest extant version of the fable
we
are presenting here appeared in 1913 in the first volume of a two-volume anthology
of Low
Saxon folktales (Plattdeutsche
Volksmärchen “Low German Folktales”)
collected by Wilhelm Wisser (1843–1935). Read
more ...
Cleves Franconian, Southern Guelder Franconian
Possibly
a speaker of Cleves
Franconian, Anne of Cleves
(1515–1557) was one of
the six
wives of England’s
Henry VIII
(1491–1547).
Language information:
Cleves Franconian (Kleverländisch, Kleverlands), which is also known as Southern Guelder Franconian (Zuid-Gelders), is a group of Low Franconian varieties spoken in Germany’s state of North-Rhine-Westphalia and in a small contiguous area of the Netherlands.
This
includes the dialects of Rheden, Mülheim on Ruhr, Cleves (Kleve, Kleef), Oberhausen, Essen-Werder, Gummersbach, Wuppertal, Duisburg, Venlo, Venray,
Cuijk, Groesbeek and Zevenaar, also the dialects of Northern Limburg and those
called Ostbergisch in Germany.
Cleves Franconian
is often called Niederrheinisch-Bergisch in Germany, and popularly the Cleves Franconian dialects tend to be lumped together
with Low Saxon, a different language, under the labels Niederdeutsch or Plattdeutsch. Together
with Limburgish it is often referred to as Rhein-Maasfränkisch or Rhein-Maasländisch.
Being Low Franconian, it belongs to the same language sub-group as do Dutch and Afrikaans, and it is also very closely related to the Limburgish and Ripuarian varieties.