Stefan speaking Saxon and Low

Stefan speaks Low Saxon, also called Low German, one of the West Germanic languages. It is related to Frisian and English. It is mainly spoken in Northern Germany, the Netherlands, and Southern Denmark. Low Saxon, or Low German, is a West Germanic language primarily spoken in Northern Germany and in the northeast of the Netherlands. There are an estimated 6.7 million native speakers of Low Saxon. It has been recognized by both the Netherlands and Germany as a regional language, although some linguists argue that Low Saxon is a variety of German. It is also a recognized minority language in Mexico, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Low German may also refer to a group of West Germanic languages; six varieties of Low German are classified by Glottolog as distinct languages due to their limited mutual intelligibility. Low Saxon is most closely related to English and Frisian, two other West Germanic languages. There are two morphologically marked noun cases in Low Saxon, the nominative and oblique cases. Verbs are conjugated for person, number, and tense, and Low Saxon has five tenses: present, preterite, perfect, pluperfect and, in Mennonite Low German, the present perfect. For writing, Low Saxon uses the Latin alphabet; however, there is no true standard orthography, although several guidelines have been developed. As Low Saxon declined in use during the early 20th century because of a cultural inclination towards Dutch or High German, speakers started using the language in music and performance arts to maintain the language. These performance arts, which became very popular in the rural (and less linguistically standardized) parts of Germany and the Netherlands, evolved into a counter-culture movement of Low Saxon that has continued to the present day. There are now many Low Saxon-speaking authors, journalists, playwrights, and musicians for whom the language is a source of pride and cultural inspiration. This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. To download a copy, please contact hello@wikitongues.org. Help us caption & translate this video! https://amara.org/v/C12qx/