Die Schwabenhymne

As a follow-up to yesterday's post Wer sind die Schwaben?, here's a wonderful little song, completely in Swabian and entrenched in the Swabian culture.

A few helps for understanding what they're singing:

-Swabians are really frugal, so frugal in fact, that they drop the final 'n' on a lot of words. Thus "Schwabenland" becomes "Schwabeland." "Mein" becomes "Mei." An exception to this is verbs and the final 'n' becomes a 't,' thus "sparen" (to save) becomes "sparet."

-"Wir" is pronounced as "mir" so "Mir sparet unser Geld" translates into German as "Wir sparen unser Geld."

-"St" at the beginning of a word in German is pronounced as "sht" or "scht." Swabians use this rule for any "st" anywhere in any word at all times. So "Du bist" becomes "Du bisch." "Das ist" becomes "Das isch."

-The official motto of Baden-Württemberg is "Wir können alles, außer Hochdeutsch." We can do anything, except speak high German. It's true. Just trust me.

Watch the Schwabenhymne on YouTube

Interesting points:

The opening guitar riff takes place in front of the Fernsehturm in Stuttgart, the capitol of Baden-Württemberg.

The vineyards you see are literally on the hillside as you drive up out of the 'Kessel' that Stuttgart sits in.

At a few points they are standing the Bodensee, known in English as Lake Constance. It's way more beautiful than pictured here and it's well worth a visit.