Another community live in the Upper Harz Mountains in the Clausthal-Zellerfeld region (Lower Saxony).

Up to 1929, Erzgebirgisch was also spoken in other parts of Mittweida and Freiberg, in Chemnitz, Zwickau and in the extreme West of the Weißeritzkreis, but these areas are now dominated by Thuringian–Upper Saxon dialects.

Until 1945, the bordering Sudetenland also harbored some Erzgebirgisch speakers, namely in the Kaaden-Duppau area, in whose dialect an anthology of words, proverbs and anecdotes was published (see references).

After World War II these speakers had to leave Czechoslovakia and settled down all over the FRG and the GDR.

No official attempts to create an orthography have been made, nevertheless there are countless short stories, poems and songs written in Erzgebirgisch.

The Sächsischer Heimatverein guidelines to writing in Erzgebirgisch were established in 1937, but are by and large not respected by the majority of authors.

This means that linguistic analysis of this dialect has to be done in a field work setting with native speakers.

Many of these languages show a tendency to substitute the German verbal prefix er- by der- (Erzg.

[clarification needed] An [n] in the coda, following a long vowel, is regularly deleted in Erzgebirgisch (e.g. Lichtenst.

Reedlz [ɣeːtˡl̩ts] Rödlitz) The following table illustrates the similarities between Erzgebirgisch and Upper German dialects.

Eastern Erzgebirgisch dialects indicate negation with ni(ch) [nɪ(ç)] whereas nèt [nɛt] is used in the West.

Thus, both forms are found in the town of Lichtenstein, which lies on the northwestern dialect boundary (although ni is perhaps more common).

In both Eastern Erzgebirgisch and in the Lichtenstein dialect, word-initial clusters ⟨kl/gl⟩ and ⟨kn/gn⟩ in Standard German as realized as ⟨tl⟩ and ⟨tn⟩ respectively (e.g. dlee [tˡleː] klein 'small'; dnuchng [ˈtⁿnʊxŋ̍] Knochen 'bone').

Furthermore, there is a strong influence from the neighbouring non-Erzgebirgisch dialects in the region bordering Meißenisch, which makes subclassification cumbersome.

The following table lists the phonemes of the most important Erzgebirgisch dialects, with the IPA value and the corresponding character used in this article.

There is a tendency to stress the first syllable even in French loanwords, where Standard German stresses the final syllable (e.g. biro [ˈpiːɣo] ⟨Büro⟩ 'office'), but loan words which follow the Standard German pattern are more numerous (e.g. dridewààr [txɪtəˈvʌːɰ] Gehsteig 'sidewalk' (from French trottoir)).

Nominative and accusative are not marked in the singular on nouns, but articles, adjectives and possessive pronouns help to disambiguate in these cases.

There are different ways to form the plural in Erzgebirgisch, a feature shared with Standard German.

The North-Western dialect has the following forms: The article n assimilates in place of articulation to the preceding consonant.

The atonal second person singular pronoun is de when it precedes a verb, and du when following.

There are extra pronouns to express politeness, unlike German, which uses third person plural for this function.

German: Er wird wohl wieder nicht da gewesen sein.

Agreement with the subject is indicated as follows: Perfect and pluperfect are construed with a finite form of the auxiliaries sei- and hàb- and the past participle of the full verb.

example: The passive is formed with the auxiliary wèèr- (German werden) and the past participle of the full verb.

The following snippet contains the introduction and the first stanza of a wedding poem from Clausthal (1759) and is written in the Oberharz dialect:[2] Aſs t'r Niemeyer ſeine Schuſtern in de Kerch zur Trauer kefuͤhrt prengt aͤ Vugelſteller Vugel un hot Baͤden kratelirt iſs k'ſchaͤn d. 25.

Do ſtellt ſich d'r Toffel ahch ein aus der Farrn, Har hot ſich ju kraͤts ſchunt de Fraͤhaͤt kenumme, Su iſs'r ahch diesmol mit reiner kekumme.

Se hahn ne ju ſuͤſt wos zu luͤſen[a] kekahn: Ich hoh' ſchiene Vugel, wolln Sie ſe beſahn?

Like many other German dialects, Erzgebirgisch is rich in adverbs, like the notorious fei, whose use is extremely complex and needs further research.

The language area being dominated by mining, some linguistic patterns peculiar to this business have attained general usage, like the salute Glig auf!

English does not have a specialized form to affirm negative questions, unlike French (si), Dutch (jawel) or German (doch).