Germany's dialect iron curtain still divides the country, study finds

Linguists find use of vernacular expressions aligning east-west 30 years after Berlin Wall fell

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an invisible border running through Germany continues to resist all efforts to make the country truly whole again. However, this dividing line is not about attitudes to democracy, refugees or Russia, but something more elementary: how to tell the time.

In the northern half of the old West Germany, from Flensburg in the north down to Heidelberg in the south, people use the expression viertel nach zehn ("quarter past ten") if their clock reads 10.15. Yet in a tract of land that covers the old socialist GDR as well as parts of Bavaria and Baden-Wi1/4rttemberg, the same time would be described as viertel elf or "quarter eleven".