That is a completely un-called-for accusation. I've seen elderly bavarians come up to Meck-Pomm and babble at the train attendant over their invalid tickets in high speed in the deepest and most incomprehensible Boarisch possible. There may be some people up here who don't even want to deal with that, but the bigger issue is those bavarians who don't even try to speak common german, or at least slow the fuck down.
This is exactly the kind of culturing issue I was referring to.
Those elderly Bavarians were probably not aware that they aren't being understood.
Either because they were too agitated to switch to Standard German or a toned down Bavarian or because they just didn't know that they wouldn't be understood.
If you lived your whole life in a place where the daily language of different people range from deepest Bavarian to Standard German, it can happen that you don't realize immediately that you speak in a hard to understood variant of the local language as at home, a Standard German speaker is not a reliable indicator that you won't be understood.
Agreeing with all of that. To be clear, my previous post was taking offense to the "not wanting to understand" part. I can guarantee that train attendents want to understand, because every traveller taking up more than a specific amount of time effectively reduces their salary due to bonus structuring. Many people up here simply can't understand Boarisch because it's sufficiently different to be its own language.
Yeah, my reply was a bit tongue in cheek but the main gist is that Bavarian and Standard German are not that far apart linguistically.
With a little bit of exposure you can understand it well enough.
But in Germany the dialects have a lower social status so you don't get lots of opportunities to hear it as even those who speak dialect when at home or with friends usually switch to something more closer to Standard German when talking to obvious non-local people.
In Austria and Switzerland, this is completely different situation there and you can expect to hear more dialect than you ever thought could possibly exist.
In my experience Austrians and Swiss are dialect-deniers. They don't want to admit that Austrian or Swiss are even German. "Some words in common" is the most you'll get them to admit to.
> In my experience Austrians and Swiss are dialect-deniers. They don't want to admit that Austrian or Swiss are even German.
With the last 200 years of history, "being German" and "speaking German" is no longer interchangeable for native speakers, so I don't see an issue there. I'd say that nowadays "being German" is only understood as "being a citizen of Germany".
Of course, culturally Germans, Austrians and Swiss share a big common part. It's quite often the case that people that are culturally close inflate the small differences. To differentiate yourself from the big menacing neighbor or to make yourself bigger than you actually are or whatever reasons.
> "Some words in common" is the most you'll get them to admit to.
I've seen both kinds of people. One claim that they speak "a dialect of German" and the others speak "a completely different language that's only slightly related to German".
But that's for discussions over a beer. Linguists usually don't bother with such categorizations and just record and analyze what individuals actually say, not what they claim the are saying.
Germans and Bavarians on the other hand ...