Mother tongue

[tysolna]

Until today, I thought I spoke pretty much run-of-the-mill Czech, or rather, Moravian, which is why the people I spoke to in Prague could guess where I was from, or rather, where my mother is from. Oh yeah, I should add that I grew up more or less bilingual.
Anyway, what I was not aware of is that there's more to my Moravian than I thought. There is apparently a very regional dialect involved, which gets spoken in the area my maternal family comes from. It is not as different to Czech as Low German is to German, but it is very noticeable. It is a lot softer, the vowels are less differentiated (it's mostly "o" or "e" when in czech there's an "ou", and similar), and words beginning with a vowel get a "v" put in front ("voko" instead of the correct "oko"), except of course when there is already a "v" in front of the vowel, because then it is dropped. The geographical closeness to Austria means that there are a lot of German words in that area, though Czechified (such as "hajzl", where correctly it would be "sáchod" or "toileta").
This is something I was sort-of aware of, but it really struck me today when mum read to me two versions of the same tale her great-grandfather used to tell. He was very much into horror stories, and scared generations of children with the tale of the Living Knees (don't ask). One version mum read was the correct Czech one, the other in that Dalesician dialect. We laughed a lot, but in the end, I liked the sound of "our" version better.
And what's more, I finally found out that the old family quote, "Kaně uchzáva, bude pršet" ("The screechowl is pissing, it will rain"), is the punch line in a horror story.

Comments

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall that a while back the Czechs were going through a bit of a linguistic purity phase and there was some campaigning and there were complaints about a few of the presenters on state run tv and/or radio? Or did I hallucinate that?

[tysolna]

I'm not aware of that, but I'll ask mum in the morning.