My name is Marcus Buck. I was born in 1982 and grew up in a small village on the Stader Geest (Lower Saxony) in a three-generation household on a farm. So I heard Low German since birth, even though, as a child in the eighties, an active command of the language was not automatically given along to me. This came by when my grandfather offered me, a young nipper at that time, a bounty if I polish up my Low German. So I borrowed all five Low German books that the school library had to offer at the time and studied Low German.
Since then, my interest never stopped and the fascination with the language always remained. It lasted through school and university with varying degrees of intensity and, in the age of the Internet, culminated in me becoming active on the still young Low German Wikipedia in 2005.
The commitment there raised my interest to a new level. Suddenly I felt the need to express certain facts in Low German that I had never dealt with in Low German before. When you write an article about the neighboring village, the question suddenly arises of how to translate “industrial area” in Low German. So I researched the Internet and dictionaries and sometimes came across creative new words, but sometimes also old pearls. I needed a place to record these finds. This place needed to be as comprehensive as possible and at the same time open to alternative spellings and dialects.
Since these requirements were not met anywhere, the plan finally came up in 2007 to create my own collection of words, which I then implemented by 2009. In that year, Plattmakers went online for the first time. Since then, this website has been collecting Low German words and the related references in literature.