xBlackHeartx wrote:Wikipedia claims that low German is actually part of a dialectal continuum with other languages in the region, including Dutch interestingly enough (of course, Wikipedia isn't really the best source for anything).
Fully agree on WP not being the best source for anything.
But in that case, they do have a point. Some people would go as far as even calling Standard German and Standard Dutch a single language. Because they wouldn't base their "language or dialect" point of view on geographical borders.
Whatever the case may be...
Lower German a.k.a. Plattdeutsch has more than a single variant. But as for (especially) the one spoken in a few Bundesländer (I think in those that are very near to the Netherlands), it and Standard (!) Dutch are surprisingly similar. The mutual intelligibility (Platt <-> NL) is directly comparable to the one of Dutch and Afrikaans.