- Joined
- Oct 18, 2016
Same here, but the dialects are dying out slowly. Younger people tend to speak standard german influenced a bit by the dialect in their region, especially in bigger towns.Where I live, the dialect can be so thick and vary so much from town to town, you have people from small neighboring towns that can't understand one another. I shit you not. I could barely understand my own grandparents at times.
In small villages, oh dear god, they still have heavy dialects sometimes.
Bavarian though is something else entirely. They always had ideas about separation and are proud of their dialect so they tend to it and encourage the usage. In other southern regions it depends on many factors if dialect is accepted or not, including social standing, wealth and education...I visited Germany in the mid-to-late 2000s, And I realized at some point when in München that I literally couldn't understand people anymore, nor could they understand me. It always perplexed me because I didn't have many issues talking to people in Hamburg, or even Berlin, but München was a whole different story.
Long story short, german language is a clusterfuck and the balkanization in the middle ages and the early modern era wasn't really helpful as well.