Thüringen, Deine Sprache

"We carry the homeland around in our mouths," says one protagonist. Not in High German, of course, but in her Meiningen dialect. Dialects in Thuringia are being lost, as in many other areas of Germany. Among younger people, they are hardly spoken anymore. Reason enough to trace them before they disappear completely. So what does Thuringian sound like? Does it exist at all? The language spoken in Meiningen is quite different from that spoken around Erfurt and Jena, and in Sonneberg, Saalfeld and Altenburg it is different from that spoken in Eichsfeld. And then there are areas with very large linguistic peculiarities, such as in and around Ruhla and in the Vogtei near Mühlhausen. The documentary film "Thuringia, Your Language" makes the treasure of these endangered dialects accessible to a larger public. To this end, director Gerald Backhaus, who grew up in Gotha, visited people who still speak dialect with his film team in 2018 and 2019. The film presents the individual types of dialects and dialect spoken in Thuringia and gives them a face and voice with protagonists in their hometowns.