[15] Variants of Low German are spoken in most parts of Northern Germany, for instance in the states of Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hamburg, Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony-Anhalt, and Brandenburg.

German speakers in this area fled the Red Army or were forcibly expelled after the border changes at the end of World War II.

There are also immigrant communities where Low German is spoken in the Western hemisphere, including Canada, the United States, Mexico, Belize, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Members and friends of the Historical Society of North German Settlements in western New York (Bergholz, New York), a community of Lutherans who trace their immigration from Pomerania in the 1840s, hold quarterly "Plattdeutsch lunch" events, where remaining speakers of the language gather to share and preserve the dialect.

Mennonite colonies in Paraguay, Belize, and Chihuahua, Mexico, have made Low German a "co-official language" of the community.

East Pomeranian-speaking regions of Southern Brazil are often assimilated into the general German Brazilian population and culture, for example celebrating the Oktoberfest, and there can even be a language shift from it to Riograndenser Hunsrückisch in some areas.

The proliferation of names or characterisations is due in part to the grouping stretching mainly across two different countries and to it being a collection of varieties rather than a standardised language.

In the Netherlands, native speakers refer to their language as dialect, plat, Nedersaksisch, or the name of their village, town or district.

This is complicated in that in most Low Franconian varieties, including standard Dutch, the original second-person plural form has replaced the singular.

Because Old Saxon came under strong Old High German and Old Low Franconian influence early on and therefore lost many Ingvaeonic features that were to be found much more extensively in earlier language states.

Although Low German is mostly regarded as an independent language[27] linguistics offers no simple, generally accepted criterion to decide the question.

[28] As stated above, the arguments are not linguistic but rather sociopolitical and revolve mainly around the fact that Low German has no official standard form or use in sophisticated media.

Advocates of the promotion of Low German have expressed considerable hope that this political development will at once lend legitimacy to their claim that Low German is a separate language, and help mitigate the functional limits of the language that may still be cited as objective criteria for a mere dialect (such as the virtually complete absence from legal and administrative contexts, schools, the media, etc.).

[34] The Bundesgerichtshof ruled in a case that this was even to be done at the patent office in Munich, in a non–Low German region, when the applicant then had to pay the charge for a translator,[35][self-published source?]

After mass education in Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries, the slow decline which Low German had been experiencing since the end of the Hanseatic League turned into a free fall.

On one hand, proponents of Low German advocated that since it had a strong cultural and historical value and was the native language of students in northern Germany, it had a place in the classroom.

When historical linguists illustrated the archaic character of certain features and constructions of Low German, this was seen as a sign of its "backwardness".

Nevertheless, opponents claimed that it should simply remain a spoken and informal language to be used on the street and in the home, but not in formal schooling.

Open-source software has been translated into Low German; this used to be coordinated via a page on SourceForge,[43] but as of 2015, the most active project is that of KDE.

[44] In the early 20th century, scholars in the Netherlands argued that speaking dialects hindered language acquisition, and it was therefore strongly discouraged.

When in 1975 dialect folk and rock bands such as Normaal and Boh Foi Toch [nl] became successful with their overt disapproval of what they experienced as "misplaced Dutch snobbery" and the Western Dutch contempt for (speakers of) Low Saxon dialects, they gained a following among the more rurally oriented inhabitants, launching Low Saxon as a sub-culture.

[45] For instance: water [wɒtɜ, ˈwatɜ, ˈwætɜ], later [ˈlɒːtɜ, ˈlaːtɜ, ˈlæːtɜ], bit [bɪt], dish [dis, diʃ], ship [ʃɪp, skɪp, sxɪp], pull [pʊl], good [ɡou̯t, ɣɑu̯t, ɣuːt], clock [klɔk], sail [sɑi̯l], he [hɛi̯, hɑi̯, hi(j)], storm [stoːrm], wind [vɪˑnt], grass [ɡras, ɣras], hold [hoˑʊl(t)], old [oˑʊl(t)].

Some dialects have more and others fewer of these features, while some only occur in older forms of language and only leave relics in modern Low German.

[85] It is often formed periphrastically by using the helping verbs woor, schull, wull, and dee: "Ik woor/wöör/worr/wurr mi freuen, wenn Vader noch lang leev" (I would be glad if father still lived for a long time).

[91] However, there is a lot of variation in that respect and some or all of these distinctions may also be absent, so that a single undeclined form of the adjective can occur in all cases, as in English.

A group of enthusiasts from both sides of the border took his principles and expanded them for the majority of the Low German dialects in both the Netherlands and Germany.

[101] The social position of Low German has improved significantly in recent years and enjoys a high level of prestige, especially in modern cities such as Hamburg and Bremen.

[104]The internet magazine Wearldspråke (alternatively also: Wearldsproake) is run by the musician and language activist Martin ter Denge.

[107] Close relationships also existed in the field of literature and poetry, for example the Norwegian Thidrekssaga (13th century) is based, according to its own information, on "Low German" and "Saxon" templates.

There are also numerous fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, which come from northern Germany, but are not or only partially in the original version in Low German.