What language was spoken in Prussia?

Answer 1

This is kind of a tricky question to answer because Prussia was geographically very differently shaped and situated at different times in German history. Also, the term "Germany" is problematic because the actual country of Germany (Deutschland) wasn't founded until 1871. Prior to 1871, "Germany" was a regional term that referred to several dozen independent principalities, duchies, kingdoms, etc.--and then there was the Holy Roman Empire, whose full name was the "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation," which consisted mostly but not entirely of German-speaking territories, although many German-speaking territories, such as parts of Prussia, were never a part of the Holy Roman Empire.

The original Prussians were actually a Baltic-speaking people; the language "Old Prussian" was closely related to Lithanian and Latvian. Prussia was originally a fairly small duchy created as a part of the Kingdom of Poland in 1525 along the Baltic, south of what is now Lithuania. Its original capital was Koenigsberg (modern Kaliningrad, now part of Russia). Over the centuries, Prussia grew and expanded to become the Kingdom of Prussia; at its height, with its capital eventually moved to Berlin, the Kingdom of Prussia included Prussia proper (the districts of East and West Prussia) as well as what are now called Pomerania, Brandenburg, Silesia, Saxony-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, Westphalia, the Rhineland, and the Palatinate--as well as tiny parts of other territories in north, central, and southern Germany.

As you might infer, then, no one single dialect of German was spoken in the Kingdom of Prussia; rather, Prussian subjects spoke pretty much every German dialect except for Bavarian.

When Germany was founded in 1871 as the German Empire, Prussia was not a "province" but remained a Kingdom within the German Empire, where the Emperor of Germany was also the King of Prussia. (The status of Prussia within the German Empire is quite similar to the status of England within the United Kingdom.) Prussia included three fifths of the area of the German Empire and two thirds of its population. This population again spoke every German dialect apart from Bavarian.

However, the people living in Prussia proper, or the original territory of Prussia (called East and West Prussia, which were just two districts within the Kingdom of Prussia), by 1871 did not speak a Slavic language any more but instead through immigration from the West had come to speak an East Low German dialect called either Low Prussian (Niederpreussisch) or simply Prussian (Preussisch); this dialect was also called Plautdietsch, the Prussian version of the word Plattdeutsch. Low Prussian/Plautdietsch had a lot of vocabulary and cultural influences from Baltic and Slavic languages, but was otherwise very closely related to the Low German dialects (Plattdeutsch) spoken in Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Schleswig, Holstein, and Lower Saxony as well as to Dutch spoken in the Netherlands.

The Slavic language Old Prussian is no longer spoken; the German Prussian dialect (Low Prussian or Plautdietsch) also died out after 1945, when Germans were forcibly removed from East and West Prussia and sent to what became East and West Germany.

Answer 2

Old Prussian is a dead Baltic language, spoken by the original inhabitants of Prussia territory. It was also spoken to the far regions of East and South Prussia, now known as Polesia and Podlasia.

Answer 3

They spoke German with their own accent