“Mundart sprechen heißt in der Sprache barfuß gehen.”
Quoted from an Transylvanian Saxon poem (see video clip below), this line well accounts for the intimacy and sensitivity involved with speaking regional or international minority languages. Transylvanian Saxon is an outlying dialect of Moselle-Franconian spoken by a German minority in Romania which, however, cannot be subsumed under “Standard German”. This German minority group has settled in Romania from the 12th century onwards, where the dialect was developed and maintained independently from other languages within the German minority community. The majority of Transylvanian Saxons now live in Germany. With less than 50.000 speakers in its country of origin, namely Romania, the language is classified as severely endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (www.unesco.org).