Bergish is a collective name for a group of West Germanic dialects spoken in the Bergisches Land region east of the Rhine in western Germany. The name is commonly used among its speakers, but is not of much linguistic relevance, because the varieties belong to several quite distinct groups inside the continental West Germanic dialect continuum. As usual inside a dialect continuum, neighbouring varieties have a high degree mutual intelligibility and share many similarities while the two more distant ones may be completely mutually unintelligible and considerably different. Therefore, speakers usually perceive the differences in their immediate neighbourhood as merely dialectal oddities of an otherwise larger, solid group or language that they are all part of, such as "Bergish". Bergish is i