People from
Berlin have a distinctive
dialect or
accent, just like
New Yorkers or
Parisians.
As in some other German regional dialects (as opposed to proper
Hochdeutsch),
Berliners contract infinitive endings, losing the 'e' at the end of verbs:
gehen ->
gehn.
Verbs conjugated into
second-person singular also get contracted when used next to the 2nd-person singular
pronoun:
Hast du... ? ->
Haste... ?.
Two notable
consonant shifts occur in
Berliner Dialekt. A
word-final 's' often changes to a 't', as in
was ->
wat. Perhaps the most distinctive mark of a Berliner is his or her
pronunciation of 'g', mostly in word-initial position:
gut ->
jut. (The 'j' is pronounced as in German
ja.)
The most notable
vowel change is in a
diphthong:
aufstehen ->
uffstehen.
Berliners often mix up
dative and
accusative cases, especially with
prepositions (
mit,
auf, etc.)