Weesby, with its 459 inhabitants, is an independent municipality. Unimaginable in Denmark's municipal structure, but quite normal in the German parts of the border region. The minimum size for a Danish municipality (kommune) is 20,000 inhabitants. Furthermore, in Germany, municipal autonomy is often symbolised by individual municipal coats of arms. The Weesby coat of arms from 1998 shows the three districts of Weesbyfeld, Weesbydamm and Bögelhuus, symbolically drawn up as oak leaves. The anvil in the coat of arms stands for „Alte Schmiede“ (the Old Smithy), a place that is closely connected with the history of the village.
The diversity of languages in the borderlands (see adjacent panel) implied that people in Weesby mostly used to speak Low German or Sønderjysk (Danish southern dialect) depending on the place, where you lived or worked: In Old Smithy, for example, it was predominantly Sønderjysk. The actual colloquial language, however, was Low German. At the end of the 1950s, when many new settlers who spoke neither Low German nor Sønderjysk moved to the area around Weesby as part of the structural aid programm "Programm Nord", the dialects slowly began to lose importance. Today, it is mainly the old farmers who still speak what is known here as "potato Danish": Sønderjysk.
