Dialekt Versus Mundart
Also, dialect does not simply mean a mispronunciation or a variation in pronunciation, for German linguists Dialekt means there is a different grammar and some different idioms (in Palatinian there are some taken from French and Yiddish), while a Mundart is more a regional pronunciation of the standard language.
Palatinian
There are theoretically hundreds of thousands of people who speak Palatinian actively and are able to use a computer and to write articles in the language, although the language is rarely heard in towns like Heidelberg because it is considered as a sign for poor education and few people understand it who did not learn it in their youth.
There are many people from Palatinate who do not speak so called “High German” although they moderately understand it on TV etc. When they read (German) books or newspapers loudly, they do so in Palatinian. Whenever wording or grammar do not match well enough, the outcome is funny for non-Palatinians. The majority of those people are from rural areas, elderly, and hardly computer-literate, while neither reading or writing English. Incredibly, these people would have to be considered Palatinian monolinguals.
Ripuarian
There are hundreds of Ripuarian dialects, ranging from ‘almost’ Dutch of Heinsberg to ‘almost’ Luxemburgian in the Eifel Tops to ‘almost’ Palatinian (Kolsch) somewhere between Koblenz/Mayen to indistinguishable from Limburgs around Venlo to something very Plattdüütsch-like along a line from north of Oberhausen – Düsseldorf – Gummersbach – Siegen. There are some 120+ lexically and grammatically distinct dialects in the group of Ripuarian languages, using a sum of at least five spelling systems. It’s very difficult to figure out how many actual languages are present in Ripuarian. One? Five? 120+?
