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'Ripuarian' (''Ripoarish'' or ''Ripuarisch Platt'') is a West Germanic dialect group spoken in the Rhineland, eastern Belgium and southern Dutch Limburg from northwest of Düsseldorf and Cologne to Aachen in the west, and Waldbröl in the east. It belongs to 'Central Franconian' and Rhinelandic. The most famous member is ''Kölsch'', the dialect of Cologne. Dialects belonging to the Ripuarian group almost always call themselves ''Platt'' like ''Öcher Platt'' (of Aachen) or ''Eischwiele Platt'' (of Eschweiler) or ''Bönsch Platt'' (of Bonn). The reason behind it is, most of the far more than hundred Ripuarian dialects are bound to a village or municipality, each. Usually there are small distinctive differences between neighboring dialects, and increasingly bigger ones between the more distant ones. These are described by a set of Isoglosses called the in linguistics. The way someone talks, even if he is not using Ripuarian, quite often allows to trace him precisely to a village or city quarter where he learned to speak.
Ripuarian forms a common dialect family called Central Franconian together with the ''Moselle Franconian'' in Luxembourg and Rhineland-Palatinate. Ripuarian languages thus are part of the west middle continental Germanic language group.
About a million people speak a Ripuarian language, so about ¼ of the inhabitants of the area do, by average. Penetration of Ripuarian in eveydays communication varies considerably, as does the pecentage of Ripuarian speakers from one place to another. There may be only few elderly people left, while elsewhere still almost everyone speaks Ripuarian. Both in the genuine Ripuarian area and far around it, the number of people passively understanding Ripuarian to some extent exeeds the numer of active speakers by far. Estimates assume some ten, and up to twenty million.

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