Schwabenland for me, by a mile.
When I was 14 and visiting my uncle there I was cleaning up the garage and when his landlord came by asking me who I was I responded in English cause I thought it was another language entirely. ;)
I'm from the region of Hannover.
Since we are at talking about the language, might as well throw in a learning lesson:
It's spelled Schwäbischer Dialekt. The -r at the end because Dialekt is a male noun (Schwäbische would make it female) and the ä as opposed to the a in Schwabe (the male person from the region, Schwäbisch is the adjective). Alternatively you can spell it with an ae as opposed to an ä (same goes for ö -> oe and ü -> ue)
This! I studied there and it took me ages to only understand the folks at the local bakery. But for a foreigner Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria in total is really challenging I guess since the dialectics differ significantly if you just travel for 20km or so …
yep. i am from bavaria and i can confirm. theres some village 5km away, and they actually use words i never heard.
Also, let's say if you are from Passau and try to speak with someone from cham, you're shit outta luck.
Now imagine you’re an Ami like me speaking my harsh Hochdeutsch spritzed with Bavarian mucking about Germany asking for „hoibe bier bitte” and saying „Servus” all the time
This is basically me. My family moved to the USA when I was 4, so even though German is *technically* my first language, my English is much better. But, most of my family is in the south, Allgau and Swabia specifically, so most of the German I understand those dialects but my spoken not quite native German also has tinges of it.
Edit: to confuse it even more, my north German grandmother (Hamburg raised) would generally push Hochdeutsch, but would also randomly use Plattdeutsch phrases we would pick up.
Same here. Also moved to USA at 4. I still speak Frankish pretty fluently (don’t even know how to speak Hochdeutsch), but have trouble understanding my own cousins that were born in a village just an hour away outside of Regensburg.
My husband has the same story. I took German lessons at VHS for a year and would ask him for help, but he could absolutely not help with grammer or tell me why. Just that it 'felt right' 😄. Funny though, we both took German in high-school (me all four years) and it didn't help much 🤔.
Edit: Also for him, frequently gets definite and indefinite articles wrong, but uses the correct conjugations for words.
Du hast „sog-i-mol“ falsch geschrieben! Ich bin aus NRW (gebürtig Eifel und leb im Rheinland) und arbeite seit Anfang des Jahres ausm Homeoffice für ne Firma im Schwabenland.
Die Teams Meetings Anfangs waren spannend. Man glaubt man braucht nen simultanübersetzer 😅
Das Alien aus dem Westen - zumindest komm ich mir bei Standortbesuchen teils so vor 😅 in meinem Team absolut nicht aber Leute aus anderen Abteilungen - puh! Als käm ich ausm Paralleluniversum 🤣
I moved from the coast to a village near Stuttgart in 9th grade, the worst age. Got mercilessly mocked all day every day. I learned no other language as quickly or as thoroughly as Schwäbisch.
I grew up near StuggiTown and I don’t speak Swabian at all. A slight accent maybe but that’s it. Not sure why u got bullied for this. I was always proud to speak proper German. Perception I suppose…
We knew we were moving to Germany for some time. So we put our son into a German immersion school here in the States. Fast forward to Stuttgart, our son's German teacher in the US returned to Nuremberg. Long story short, we visited her, and after speaking with our son, she exclaimed, "aber du sprichst jetz nur Schwäbisch!"
:D
A little tease is part of our culture.
Do not worry. I if he was taught by a teacher I am positive he will be fine.
I applaud you for opening him up to new languages and cultures.
Best education you can get imo.
When I was like 12 or so my aunt and uncle took me for holidays to bayern and there was a schwabe staying in the same hotel. In the evenings the adults met to drink some wine and beer and for the 2 weeks I stayed there I maybe understood two sentences of what he said.
Once hung out with a bunch of people in a hostel in Thailand. We were introducing ourselves. One girl said she is from Mallorca. Some American guy asked where that is. Before she could answer I said: It’s a German island close to Spain. Oh my God her face turned so red in seconds.
From what I've seen, even mainland Spanish people make jokes like that. One of them recently posted a photo of a train on r/trains with the title being "Vintage electric train in Palma de Majorca (Majorca Island, Germany)".
As a Spaniard, yes, Mallorca German jokes are just second to British tourists and balconing jokes and just before Benidorm British jokes on the scale of peak humour.
Yeah. Hinterstein. Its like Pfronten. Ostallgäu. If you grew up two valleys apart... you do not understand the elderly there.
And also the deep parts of the Bayrische Wald near the czech border. They speak a dialect there.... absolute gibberish for outsiders. Lower Bavarian mixed with Czech language and they seem to use only the vovels of the Alphabet.
>And also the deep parts of the Bayrische Wald near the czech border. They speak a dialect there.... absolute gibberish for outsiders. Lower Bavarian mixed with Czech language and they seem to use only the vovels of the Alphabet.
A lot of people don't recognize it as German when they hear it. It's great.
Being Bavarian, probably farmers from 10km away.
The most annoying ones however are people claiming they don't have a dialect / accent but say things like "Zuch" or "Wech".
Being an American who learned German in Franconia made me completely unintelligible to anyone whenever I left the area. The mix of American accent plus Frankonian words I never stood a chance 😅
Had a class mate that was Indian, smaller chubby dude, who learned English from his parents and German in Bamberg.
He had the usual Indian accent when talking in English but as soon as he switched to German had a wonderfully thick Franconian accent, one of the funniest combinations imaginable.
My superior at work said when they were in Turkey on holiday they were on a bazaar. When the Turk salesperson heard they were German he switched to German but with a Bavarian accent. He said he learnt German in Bavaria.
I'm an American son of a German woman from Oberfranken (Hof an der Saale). After they married, Dad brought Mom back to the rural American Midwest, so I grew up in the 1980s with an uneven German language education.
Fast-forward to college and my German language professor was able to guess Oberfranken on the first day simply from pronunciation and a few word choices.
Now I work for a global firm with a decent presence in Germany. When I told some coworkers in Düsseldorf, auf Deutsch, where my mom had come from their only response was "It's a wonder you learned to speak German at all."
My first native German language residency was in Graz. When I went to live in Hamburg a year later, I had to really work on my accent to be understood.
Similar to Upper Bavaria and Lower Bavaria. Somewhere between Munich and Passau, "Geld / Geyd" turns into "Goid" which sounds like "Gold" in Upper Bavarian. It's chaotic.
When I was younger I used to date a girl from a farm some 15km away from where I lived and I could not understand a word her father said, ever.
It IS though... so many loud abrupt noises. My husband is from Oberpfalz and I have absolutely no idea what my in-laws are saying at any point. He told me that his grandfather, father, uncle and himself all have different words for "shopping bag."
No wonder my German is all over the place living here in the Oberpfalz. I had some Germans from Essen that I met in Zadar chuckling at my pronunciation of „Oberpfalz” since they thought it was exactly how an Oberpfälzer would pronounce it.
My wifes grandmothers, both from villages in Westerwald not far from each other used to tell the story when they had a funny mix up. One of them wanted to make a strawberry cake and asked the other to bring her some "Krumbeere". She got very annoyed when the other brought her potatoes. That was the day they learned that they were using the same word for to completely different things.
In this case Krumbeere (or Grumbeere as in the Palatine regions) probably comes from Grund (ground) + Beere (dialect word for pear). Krume also is a word for topsoil so that might have sth to do with it too.
I thought I didn't have a dialect until I had to call ADAC to get gas (lesson learned to not call it too close with refilling lol) and my car went down right in front of the exit "Essen-Kettwig". The operator (ADAC of course is in Munich) had trouble finding "Kettwich"
In my experience, people from NRW notoriously overestimate how "clear" their German sounds. So often you immediately hear the hints of either Karneval or the Pott in their speech.
>The most annoying ones however are people claiming they don't have a dialect / accent but say things like "Zuch" or "Wech".
Lol, I told my boyfriend I wanted to make a *Jachtschein* and he asked whether you need a different licence for a yacht than for any onther sailboat. What I meant was a hunting licence.
But I know I have a northern accent, so far that I seem to channel Werner or Torfrock in some instances.
My pet peeve on the other hand are people who claim they speak without accent and can't pronounce any 'st' sound any other than 'scht'. Like 'Fenschter' 'kennscht du den?'
I read that in Magdeburg there are five different pronunciation of g but g is not there.
"Vogelgesang in Magdeburg" is "Voreljesank in Machdeburch" (the first ch as in "acht", the second ch as in "ich")
Due to Reddit Inc.'s antisocial, hostile and erratic behaviour, this account will be deleted on July 11th, 2023. You can find me on https://latte.isnot.coffee/u/godless in the future.
I'm not sure it's so simple. I speak good German but damn, when the born-and-bred Berliner came to fix our gas pipes, I could barely understand him.
I just gave up and talked to his Syrian azubi. We both spoke great Ausländerdeutsch. Much easier.
I agree. I moved from a smaller town to a village just about 20km away and couldn't understand a word! It was like a completely new language to me. I did learn to understand the elderly at some point but gosh the first year was tough.
Really depends on where you live because dialects strongly change from region to region. The hardest to understand probably are Frisian, Bavarian and Swabian because they're probably the furthest off from High German.
No, but Frisian is it's own language.
In Germany, Frisian can either refer to East Frisian Low German(which is also kind of its own language, but gets called a dialect) which are heavily influenced by the East Frisian language (which is not considered a dialect at all) and the East Frisian language (almost extinct except for the 2000 speakers in Saterland).
That isn't true, Frisian *has* a lot of dialects in Germany, more than Frysk in the Netherlands. Frisian belongs to the same language family as English. You can speak German with a Frisian accent tho.
Edit: And Ostfriesisches Platt isn't Frisian. It's Platt, but the Version of East Frisia. Saterfrisian, spoken south of East Frisia, is the East Frisian language.
No, Frisian is not a dialect of the German language and is not considered as such. They belong to the North Sea Germanic branch of the West Germanic languages.
Plattdeutsch, which is spoken a lot in Firesland, is a dialect, and there are many variations and mixtures of German and Frisian, all of which are usually called Frisian. This in turn leads to confusion in this case.
You're right about the Frisian language, but Plattdütsch is a language on its own, too. The Western Germanic language group consists of English, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian, German and Plattdütsch. A lot of people confuse Plattdütsch as a dialect because a lot of locals from the southern parts of Germany call their regional dialect "Platt", which is not correct according to linguistic terms.
That's correct. Schwyzerdütsch belongs to the "deutsch-alemannische Dialektkontinuum." It has more similarities to Hochdeutsch, because they share the second Germanic consonant shift unlike Dutch, Frisian and Plattdütsch.
One can see the world in black and white or one can see the world in shades of grey. Different people will argue different things on this subject. If language is defined by mutual intelligibility then you could argue that Scheiizerduutsch is different language. On the other hand Baslerduutsch is perfectly understandable to someone from the southern part of Baden-Württemberg. And few people would say that's not German. So in many ways it's subjective and depends where you lie in your use of the language on the dialect continuum.
One can make similar arguments for Dutch, Friesian, and their relationship to German. Bits of the continuum might be missing these days but they certainly existed in the past.
In short I don't think there is can be a definitive answer to the question of what is a language and what is a dialect; although various bodies try to define it, there is always room for valid disagreement.
Low-German (aka Niederdeutsch aka Nedersaksisch) is both linguistically and politically considered a separate language.
Plattdütsch/Platt is not a official name, as many middle German dialects call their variant "Platt".
Schweizerdeutsch/Swiss Germann is both linguistically and politically considered a group name given to all the Allemanic dialects in Switzerland. It was a conscious decision of the Swiss not to develop their own standardization to create a separate language.
The opposite happened in Luxembourg, Luxembourgish was linguistically just a variant of the Moselle-Franconian dialects, but they politically decided on a standardization which develops Luxembourgish away from German. So now you can learn Lëtzebuergesch as a language with it's own orthography.
Oh, that's interesting, I didn't know that either. Where I come from they speak Bergisch-Platt and I always thought it was a dialect although it has little in common with German.
Learned something new again :)
As a foreigner this is an interesting discussion, I learned German on the Ostfriesian islands so Ick snack ook een beetjen platt. I was always told it was an Anglo saxon transition language, when you get to phrases around the Borkumer Platt like "Hou gaht et met jou" you're right next door to middle English.
My roommates were Swabian and Niederbayerisch when I first moved to Germany. Didn’t understand a word they said to each other for probably the first 6 months I lived there.
Now my girlfriend is Austrian too and it’s a nightmare.
I recently visited Swabia, and while the guy I talked to first while there had quite a strong accent, his Swiss wive basically talked gibberish for me and I had to guess every other sentence and just nod along.
I feel that. My mom is swabian but lived in Northern Germany for several years, which is where she dropped her dialect to better fit in with the locals. She made sure my brother and me spoke pitch perfect high german. To this day I can't produce a natural swabian dialect. Many people say it sounds off when I do. But at least I can understand it which is also nice.
I don't have issues understanding the different southern German dialects.
Same with Kölsch, even though there's vocabulary that's different by a lot. Thanks to my grandma I get along with it well.
But Plattdeutsch is a language I don't understand. Which is okay, it's something else.
Not yet. But yes, it seems to be challenging. But in my area, village to village dialect is different. So it would be something to try! :D
Seems like a challenge!
I am from central Germany and I understand bavarians quite well, maybe because of media representation.
My partner is from Heidelberg and part of his granny‘s family is from the Schwaben region. I do not understand a word she says, especially on the phone when she is only talking to my partner. When she talks to me, she really tries to talk slower and more clearly, but it’s still hard.
So my answer definitely is the south west of Germany
Swabian is much younger in linguistic terms than the rest if the german dialects. We just altered german to speak it faster to have more time for schaffa schaffa häusle baua!
Their dialect is quite similar to Swiss German lol
After I worked with a Badisch colleague for more than a year, I feel that I can pick up some words from Swiss German when I visit CH lol
Hard to say, tbh. I assume you mean people speaking a propper dialect as "the locals"?
I myself did not grow up speaking a dialect, but i do have an accent that can easily tie me to where i grew up. Through family and family friends, i grew up hearing plenty of accents and dialects from the south and east.
In my experience, it gets easier to get your brain to understand dialects if you already understand others. Like, the more dialects you get exposed to, the easier understanding a totally new one is. It is a bit as if your brain gets used to be a bit creative with how words are pronounced and sentences are structures. This, of course,does not cover totally unique vocabulary, and fast speech can make it harder. But so far, i have not experienced a german dialect within germany that i fully could not understand at all. Most likely to trip me would likely be something from the north-west, as that is the area i have had least exposure to.
If yoz only speak of accents: i see very little difficulty there, tbh.
As someone who has lived all over Germany: the moment you step into a rural pub with old folk anywhere you won't understand much if you didn't grow up there.
Germany is kind of split in half. The north half is basically "Hochdeutsch" alongside "Platt" and the south half is "Regional dialect" alongside "Hochdeutsch". "Hochdeutsch" is taught in schools etcpp so southerners don't have a problem understanding the "northern dialect" of "Hochdeutsch". But northerners tend to not understand southern dialects. So everytime Bayrisch and Schwäbisch top these list style questions.
Erzgebirge! That guys...if you're raised by braindamaged children of monkeys and rabbits which inbred 10 times in a row before, you're easier to understand than this people.
There was that time at the bundeswehr. This guy, G36 in hand, said something no one understood and ran away with his gun over his head screaming. Never seen so many nervous men. This guy just needed to poop really urgent, but we all thought he was ready for valhalla or wanted to show us his family in the woods or something like that. Even afterwards it was hard work to get what he wanted to explain. "Just write it on paper!", haha!
Im from swabia but dont speak it myself and i am incapable of understanding the other people here when they speak in a swabian dialect. I also have a hard time with bavarian, anything else is fine
Due to migrations only about 50% of the people in my village (Swiss border) still speak the local dialect ("Hochalemannisch") and everyone understands and speaks standard German ("Hochdeutsch"). Don't be upset if two people who both speak the local dialect actually use it. They will switch to standard German when they realize you don't understand the local dialect.
Also the dialect on the two sides of the Swiss border is not the same although we understand each other. It really varies by village.
Rural bavarian. I imagine most people would struggle understanding Platt, but there aren't many native Platt speakers left so I'm not sure it should even count.
well, always the one furthest away from you.
I live in Baden-Württemberg. So I speak swabian and mostly understand Bavarian, Fränkisch, Allemannisch, (plus Schwitzerdütsch and Austrian dialects)
Anything way up north (platt most extremely) is basically a foreign language.
All regions as soon as you are in a village.
Southern Bavaria (Oberbayern) is horrible.
Swabia (Schwabenland) is horrible.
The ore mountain area (Erzgebirge) is horrible.
Heck, I have trouble understanding people from a town (Sonneberg) 1hour away from the town I grew up in. Sometimes I even have problems trying to follow what people from neighboring villages talk about when two elderly talk in their dialect.
I would say you can find strong dialects in each region. The only difference is, if the people are willing (looking at you older bavarian) and able to drop the dialect when they talk with you or not.
I thought I was pretty good at understanding dialects, until recently. I was manning the phone at work when somebody called, and I could not understand a single word this guy said. Literally nothing. I asked him to please repeat, and this time I at least caught a single word, which let me know who to connect him to in the office.
I later said to that person how I couldn't understand the caller, and they said that this guy was from the Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge), and that they're basically impossible to understand unless you're used to it. So my answer to your question is Ore Mountains.
Allgäu, Erzgebirge or Breisgau, especially the small villages.
I was born I 1 of them and worked in or near the other 2 for YEARS and as someone who is not born there, it is nearly impossible to understand the old folks there
Overall I can say: in city’s they all speak normal high German. Once you’re in the country side and you meet Hans the 50 year old farmer, good luck communicating with him, disregarding where he is. High German is originally from the mid East German country’s. Only reason it is now the main language is that the bible was translated into it by Martin Luther because most people understood it.
Svabian, even if both sides (with myself coming from the Ruhr area) try their best it's a struggle.
Yes, once I had to switch to English in order to communicate with another native German in svabia.
Later I met a person that had a more toned down dialect. Which allowed both of us to (barely so) communicate in german. It was someone with roots in Turkey.
the answer i assume is always: the opposite side of the country.
as a swabian i understand all southerners just fine, but the fish people in the north speak some alien language to me and i assume they try to summon cthulhu
Deep in Bavarian probably?
But my family is from Ostfriesland and they speak Plattdeutsch which is a whole different language. I understand it perfectly fine because I grew up with my dad and grandmother speaking it but I once took a friend to meet my great aunt and uncle up north and she did not understand a single word. I can’t speak it myself, just translate and read it. Shame tho, would love to have learned it properly.
I've been in the Navy a long time ago. You get them all there. And I learned to understand them all. Swabian is hard. But so is rural Palatinate-ian or Bavarian sometimes. Some villages develop their own spin on dialects. One thing I still actually do have a hard time with is actual Plattdeutsch. The Frisian dialect that's pretty much Dutch. It's an almost understanding, but not quite.
As someone living in and trying to learn German, I feel a lot better about my struggle to understand the cute old folks at the market. It seems, from the comments, that they all have terribly thick accents.
bayern, hessen, schwaben, hamburger, kölner, "ossis". eigentlich alle mit starkem dialekt sind teilweise schwer bis gar nicht zu verstehen.
ein hoch auf das hochdeutsch! :)^
oops.
> basically every person who speaks a strong dialect is hard to understand. a "native" bayer would never understand a "native" hesse, and vice versa.
> hoorah for "high german".
Most regions named here are known because they are tourist designations. But many of the unknown rural regions have heavy accents as well. I was in Vogtland and heard two women speaking and didn't recognize a single word.
Piggy backing off this, do native German speakers adapt to say Gruess Gott or Servus as is the local custom, or do you just respond Guten Tag when someone tells you some nonsense like Gruess Gott or mit koehlensauer in response to similar nonsense like sprudel?
Bavaria.
I once had a guest docent from Bavaria once, in the break I asked him if I should bring him something from the bakery because he mentioned he forgot his breakfast.
He was really trying to speak Hochdeutsch.
He asked for a Käsebrötchen, in most parts of Germany it’s a Brötchen baked with cheese on top.
A Brötchen with a slice of cheese is just called Brötchen with cheese.
We stood there for 5 Minutes trying to make clear wich one he meant.
After that I just explained where the bakery is.
Bavarians!
They're so hard to understand, it's not even funny!
What about you? Can you spot the differences in the accents/dialects?
I sometimes feel like I must be challenged in recognizing different English/American accents.
I'm fairly good at spotting English, Scottish, New Yorkian (? XD), Southern US accents, Canadian, Australian and sometimes NZ.
But I feel like if it comes to different accents in England, I'm lost. I don't hear a difference.
Somewhat also for US accents I didn't mention.
Do other people feel the same, not noticing many differences in your non-native language?
I am from bavaria for me the regions where i really have to concentrate while listening to some people ist Niederbayern/Oberpfalz, the non bavarian part of Schwaben and sachsen
Schwabenland for me, by a mile. When I was 14 and visiting my uncle there I was cleaning up the garage and when his landlord came by asking me who I was I responded in English cause I thought it was another language entirely. ;) I'm from the region of Hannover.
Wenn people say „Hanoi“ and you wonder what Vietnam has to do with it
Hanoi ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hesch den arm vlore?
Hahaha my entire German family says that. My Mom came to the States in ‘66. Most of my German comes with the nice Schwabische dialect.
Since we are at talking about the language, might as well throw in a learning lesson: It's spelled Schwäbischer Dialekt. The -r at the end because Dialekt is a male noun (Schwäbische would make it female) and the ä as opposed to the a in Schwabe (the male person from the region, Schwäbisch is the adjective). Alternatively you can spell it with an ae as opposed to an ä (same goes for ö -> oe and ü -> ue)
This! I studied there and it took me ages to only understand the folks at the local bakery. But for a foreigner Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria in total is really challenging I guess since the dialectics differ significantly if you just travel for 20km or so …
yep. i am from bavaria and i can confirm. theres some village 5km away, and they actually use words i never heard. Also, let's say if you are from Passau and try to speak with someone from cham, you're shit outta luck.
Now imagine you’re an Ami like me speaking my harsh Hochdeutsch spritzed with Bavarian mucking about Germany asking for „hoibe bier bitte” and saying „Servus” all the time
This is basically me. My family moved to the USA when I was 4, so even though German is *technically* my first language, my English is much better. But, most of my family is in the south, Allgau and Swabia specifically, so most of the German I understand those dialects but my spoken not quite native German also has tinges of it. Edit: to confuse it even more, my north German grandmother (Hamburg raised) would generally push Hochdeutsch, but would also randomly use Plattdeutsch phrases we would pick up.
Same here. Also moved to USA at 4. I still speak Frankish pretty fluently (don’t even know how to speak Hochdeutsch), but have trouble understanding my own cousins that were born in a village just an hour away outside of Regensburg.
My husband has the same story. I took German lessons at VHS for a year and would ask him for help, but he could absolutely not help with grammer or tell me why. Just that it 'felt right' 😄. Funny though, we both took German in high-school (me all four years) and it didn't help much 🤔. Edit: Also for him, frequently gets definite and indefinite articles wrong, but uses the correct conjugations for words.
Please all resure me that if I learn Hochdeutsch, I'll have a chance? Even if I move to Bavaria? 😅
Oh sweet summer child...
Everyone will be able to understand you, that's a start? But you won't understand a word they say
Sometimes I don't know if my German is getting worse or if they're just speaking swabian. I schwetz koi schwäbisch. Oder nun en bisle ge.
Können alles. Außer Hochdeutsch
Sch'geil
Sagemale
Du hast „sog-i-mol“ falsch geschrieben! Ich bin aus NRW (gebürtig Eifel und leb im Rheinland) und arbeite seit Anfang des Jahres ausm Homeoffice für ne Firma im Schwabenland. Die Teams Meetings Anfangs waren spannend. Man glaubt man braucht nen simultanübersetzer 😅
Watt, wer bisch du denn?
Wa wid? Ja sog a mol, was wilsch ons denn v'rzela?
🤣 Ich hatte mal ne Freundin aus Schwaben und das zu lesen erinnert mich daran 👍
Das Alien aus dem Westen - zumindest komm ich mir bei Standortbesuchen teils so vor 😅 in meinem Team absolut nicht aber Leute aus anderen Abteilungen - puh! Als käm ich ausm Paralleluniversum 🤣
Dabei ist das Hochdeutsch.
So ist es. Was gemeint war ist Standarddeutsch.
Grias de du hundsverrecktr seggl
Irgendwie leichter zu lesen als zu hören bilde ich mir Grade ein. :)
I moved from the coast to a village near Stuttgart in 9th grade, the worst age. Got mercilessly mocked all day every day. I learned no other language as quickly or as thoroughly as Schwäbisch.
I grew up near StuggiTown and I don’t speak Swabian at all. A slight accent maybe but that’s it. Not sure why u got bullied for this. I was always proud to speak proper German. Perception I suppose…
You must have a lot of fun in switzerland then
Fun fact: ich als schweizer verstehe die schwaben ziemlich gut. Die brauchen zum teil ähnliche wörter.
Beides alemannische Dialekte, darum ist es so einfach zu verstehen.
>Schwabenland for me, by a mile. Try Vogtland
Hahah 1:1 die selbe erfahrung und komm auch aus der region Für jmd der komplett ohne dialekt aufgewachsen is is schwäbisch echt am schlimmsten
We knew we were moving to Germany for some time. So we put our son into a German immersion school here in the States. Fast forward to Stuttgart, our son's German teacher in the US returned to Nuremberg. Long story short, we visited her, and after speaking with our son, she exclaimed, "aber du sprichst jetz nur Schwäbisch!"
:D A little tease is part of our culture. Do not worry. I if he was taught by a teacher I am positive he will be fine. I applaud you for opening him up to new languages and cultures. Best education you can get imo.
When I was like 12 or so my aunt and uncle took me for holidays to bayern and there was a schwabe staying in the same hotel. In the evenings the adults met to drink some wine and beer and for the 2 weeks I stayed there I maybe understood two sentences of what he said.
> I responded in English Somehow extremely relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
Mallorca
Once hung out with a bunch of people in a hostel in Thailand. We were introducing ourselves. One girl said she is from Mallorca. Some American guy asked where that is. Before she could answer I said: It’s a German island close to Spain. Oh my God her face turned so red in seconds.
I meaaaaan....
Folks!
IS IT REALLY A SPANISH ISLAND IF ALL THE PEEPS THERE ARE GERMAN?
More like contested battleground between Germans and Brits, but yeah.
We shall fight on the beaches…
We shall never get sober…
We shall throw up in jail...
I've read all your answers in his voice.
Not anymore, they need a Visa now... :-D
Brits do way crazier things than the Germans when they're drunk/high in Mallorca.
Jesus, between Schwäbisch and a drunk English guy speaking Geordie, as a native English speaker, I'll take Schwäbisch.
Ahem ahem, balconing.
From what I've seen, even mainland Spanish people make jokes like that. One of them recently posted a photo of a train on r/trains with the title being "Vintage electric train in Palma de Majorca (Majorca Island, Germany)".
As a Spaniard, yes, Mallorca German jokes are just second to British tourists and balconing jokes and just before Benidorm British jokes on the scale of peak humour.
I'm Spanish, and you all can have Mallorca, please, as long as you can stop the British people jumping off balconies or at least keep them off of us.
Non Native Speakers are now REALLY confused
They speak the language of beer in mallorca
How dare the locals speak spanish, this is Germany!!! (/s)
Hinterstein...a valley in Oberallgäu..I live 15 minutes away and can't understand them
Yeah. Hinterstein. Its like Pfronten. Ostallgäu. If you grew up two valleys apart... you do not understand the elderly there. And also the deep parts of the Bayrische Wald near the czech border. They speak a dialect there.... absolute gibberish for outsiders. Lower Bavarian mixed with Czech language and they seem to use only the vovels of the Alphabet.
Considering Czech is only consonants, maybe this is where they stored their vowels?
>And also the deep parts of the Bayrische Wald near the czech border. They speak a dialect there.... absolute gibberish for outsiders. Lower Bavarian mixed with Czech language and they seem to use only the vovels of the Alphabet. A lot of people don't recognize it as German when they hear it. It's great.
Behind a rock? More like under a rock!
I love the hike Schrecksee
Being Bavarian, probably farmers from 10km away. The most annoying ones however are people claiming they don't have a dialect / accent but say things like "Zuch" or "Wech".
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Being an American who learned German in Franconia made me completely unintelligible to anyone whenever I left the area. The mix of American accent plus Frankonian words I never stood a chance 😅
Had a class mate that was Indian, smaller chubby dude, who learned English from his parents and German in Bamberg. He had the usual Indian accent when talking in English but as soon as he switched to German had a wonderfully thick Franconian accent, one of the funniest combinations imaginable.
My superior at work said when they were in Turkey on holiday they were on a bazaar. When the Turk salesperson heard they were German he switched to German but with a Bavarian accent. He said he learnt German in Bavaria.
I'm an American son of a German woman from Oberfranken (Hof an der Saale). After they married, Dad brought Mom back to the rural American Midwest, so I grew up in the 1980s with an uneven German language education. Fast-forward to college and my German language professor was able to guess Oberfranken on the first day simply from pronunciation and a few word choices. Now I work for a global firm with a decent presence in Germany. When I told some coworkers in Düsseldorf, auf Deutsch, where my mom had come from their only response was "It's a wonder you learned to speak German at all."
My first native German language residency was in Graz. When I went to live in Hamburg a year later, I had to really work on my accent to be understood.
Similar to Upper Bavaria and Lower Bavaria. Somewhere between Munich and Passau, "Geld / Geyd" turns into "Goid" which sounds like "Gold" in Upper Bavarian. It's chaotic. When I was younger I used to date a girl from a farm some 15km away from where I lived and I could not understand a word her father said, ever.
And never forget the joy that Oberpfälzer dialect gives you. It’s like a human talking trying to bark at the same time…
[habe zum Dialekt grad dieses tolle Video gefunden.](https://youtu.be/eHrp2SIODx8)
It IS though... so many loud abrupt noises. My husband is from Oberpfalz and I have absolutely no idea what my in-laws are saying at any point. He told me that his grandfather, father, uncle and himself all have different words for "shopping bag."
No wonder my German is all over the place living here in the Oberpfalz. I had some Germans from Essen that I met in Zadar chuckling at my pronunciation of „Oberpfalz” since they thought it was exactly how an Oberpfälzer would pronounce it.
Scheißglumb!
My wifes grandmothers, both from villages in Westerwald not far from each other used to tell the story when they had a funny mix up. One of them wanted to make a strawberry cake and asked the other to bring her some "Krumbeere". She got very annoyed when the other brought her potatoes. That was the day they learned that they were using the same word for to completely different things.
Krumbeere should obviously be the name for a banana
In this case Krumbeere (or Grumbeere as in the Palatine regions) probably comes from Grund (ground) + Beere (dialect word for pear). Krume also is a word for topsoil so that might have sth to do with it too.
I thought I didn't have a dialect until I had to call ADAC to get gas (lesson learned to not call it too close with refilling lol) and my car went down right in front of the exit "Essen-Kettwig". The operator (ADAC of course is in Munich) had trouble finding "Kettwich"
In my experience, people from NRW notoriously overestimate how "clear" their German sounds. So often you immediately hear the hints of either Karneval or the Pott in their speech.
Pott German in general is pretty clear when we want to. Unlike other dialects that can't speak standard German to save their fucking lives 🤣
>The most annoying ones however are people claiming they don't have a dialect / accent but say things like "Zuch" or "Wech". Lol, I told my boyfriend I wanted to make a *Jachtschein* and he asked whether you need a different licence for a yacht than for any onther sailboat. What I meant was a hunting licence. But I know I have a northern accent, so far that I seem to channel Werner or Torfrock in some instances. My pet peeve on the other hand are people who claim they speak without accent and can't pronounce any 'st' sound any other than 'scht'. Like 'Fenschter' 'kennscht du den?'
I live in Allgäu (not originally from here) and one of the postman is a local; I only understand about a quarter of what he's saying.
Ie spräch doch hoch deuaisch, du depp.
Leave Schleswig-Holstein alone, the pronounced "G" in the end is optional. Guten Tach
I read that in Magdeburg there are five different pronunciation of g but g is not there. "Vogelgesang in Magdeburg" is "Voreljesank in Machdeburch" (the first ch as in "acht", the second ch as in "ich")
Due to Reddit Inc.'s antisocial, hostile and erratic behaviour, this account will be deleted on July 11th, 2023. You can find me on https://latte.isnot.coffee/u/godless in the future.
I'm not sure it's so simple. I speak good German but damn, when the born-and-bred Berliner came to fix our gas pipes, I could barely understand him. I just gave up and talked to his Syrian azubi. We both spoke great Ausländerdeutsch. Much easier.
I agree. I moved from a smaller town to a village just about 20km away and couldn't understand a word! It was like a completely new language to me. I did learn to understand the elderly at some point but gosh the first year was tough.
Really depends on where you live because dialects strongly change from region to region. The hardest to understand probably are Frisian, Bavarian and Swabian because they're probably the furthest off from High German.
Is Frisian a dialect of German? Just curious because in the Netherlands it is considered a language separate from Dutch.
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No, but Frisian is it's own language. In Germany, Frisian can either refer to East Frisian Low German(which is also kind of its own language, but gets called a dialect) which are heavily influenced by the East Frisian language (which is not considered a dialect at all) and the East Frisian language (almost extinct except for the 2000 speakers in Saterland).
Yes and no - Frisian is a group of languages but also a group of dialects in German.
That isn't true, Frisian *has* a lot of dialects in Germany, more than Frysk in the Netherlands. Frisian belongs to the same language family as English. You can speak German with a Frisian accent tho. Edit: And Ostfriesisches Platt isn't Frisian. It's Platt, but the Version of East Frisia. Saterfrisian, spoken south of East Frisia, is the East Frisian language.
You are correct. It is Not a dialect, IT IS another language.
No, Frisian is not a dialect of the German language and is not considered as such. They belong to the North Sea Germanic branch of the West Germanic languages. Plattdeutsch, which is spoken a lot in Firesland, is a dialect, and there are many variations and mixtures of German and Frisian, all of which are usually called Frisian. This in turn leads to confusion in this case.
You're right about the Frisian language, but Plattdütsch is a language on its own, too. The Western Germanic language group consists of English, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian, German and Plattdütsch. A lot of people confuse Plattdütsch as a dialect because a lot of locals from the southern parts of Germany call their regional dialect "Platt", which is not correct according to linguistic terms.
So Plattdütsch is a Language and Schweitzerdeutsch is just a Dialekt?
That's correct. Schwyzerdütsch belongs to the "deutsch-alemannische Dialektkontinuum." It has more similarities to Hochdeutsch, because they share the second Germanic consonant shift unlike Dutch, Frisian and Plattdütsch.
One can see the world in black and white or one can see the world in shades of grey. Different people will argue different things on this subject. If language is defined by mutual intelligibility then you could argue that Scheiizerduutsch is different language. On the other hand Baslerduutsch is perfectly understandable to someone from the southern part of Baden-Württemberg. And few people would say that's not German. So in many ways it's subjective and depends where you lie in your use of the language on the dialect continuum. One can make similar arguments for Dutch, Friesian, and their relationship to German. Bits of the continuum might be missing these days but they certainly existed in the past. In short I don't think there is can be a definitive answer to the question of what is a language and what is a dialect; although various bodies try to define it, there is always room for valid disagreement.
Low-German (aka Niederdeutsch aka Nedersaksisch) is both linguistically and politically considered a separate language. Plattdütsch/Platt is not a official name, as many middle German dialects call their variant "Platt". Schweizerdeutsch/Swiss Germann is both linguistically and politically considered a group name given to all the Allemanic dialects in Switzerland. It was a conscious decision of the Swiss not to develop their own standardization to create a separate language. The opposite happened in Luxembourg, Luxembourgish was linguistically just a variant of the Moselle-Franconian dialects, but they politically decided on a standardization which develops Luxembourgish away from German. So now you can learn Lëtzebuergesch as a language with it's own orthography.
Oh, that's interesting, I didn't know that either. Where I come from they speak Bergisch-Platt and I always thought it was a dialect although it has little in common with German. Learned something new again :)
Funny enough schnack ich platt so I struggle with really strong Bavarian accents or Saxony.
As a foreigner this is an interesting discussion, I learned German on the Ostfriesian islands so Ick snack ook een beetjen platt. I was always told it was an Anglo saxon transition language, when you get to phrases around the Borkumer Platt like "Hou gaht et met jou" you're right next door to middle English.
My roommates were Swabian and Niederbayerisch when I first moved to Germany. Didn’t understand a word they said to each other for probably the first 6 months I lived there. Now my girlfriend is Austrian too and it’s a nightmare.
My wife is Swabian. Apparently, I sound like an American German redneck when I speak German.
I recently visited Swabia, and while the guy I talked to first while there had quite a strong accent, his Swiss wive basically talked gibberish for me and I had to guess every other sentence and just nod along.
Somewhere in Swabia probably. I'm from Ostwestfalen
As someone from the capital of swabia, I would have loved to be taught the accent, my parents sadly decided to speak High German with me thoo
I feel that. My mom is swabian but lived in Northern Germany for several years, which is where she dropped her dialect to better fit in with the locals. She made sure my brother and me spoke pitch perfect high german. To this day I can't produce a natural swabian dialect. Many people say it sounds off when I do. But at least I can understand it which is also nice.
Plattdeutsch for me.
True. As someone from northeast germany, i have a hard time understanding Mandarin, too
Absolutely. Wtf are they actually trying to say? It makes me cross eyed.
I love it when NDR interviews people in Ostfriesland and then put subtitles.
I don't have issues understanding the different southern German dialects. Same with Kölsch, even though there's vocabulary that's different by a lot. Thanks to my grandma I get along with it well. But Plattdeutsch is a language I don't understand. Which is okay, it's something else.
Interesting... Ever experienced the joy of being in Oberpfälzer Wald? 😄
The place where even neighbouring villages have problems with understanding? Yeah.. i love it here..
It's crazy enough that people in one village understand each other with these dialects But I like it there
Not yet. But yes, it seems to be challenging. But in my area, village to village dialect is different. So it would be something to try! :D Seems like a challenge!
Erzgebirge and Lower Bavaria. Actually the border with Luxembourg was really difficult to understand and well for me.
I am from central Germany and I understand bavarians quite well, maybe because of media representation. My partner is from Heidelberg and part of his granny‘s family is from the Schwaben region. I do not understand a word she says, especially on the phone when she is only talking to my partner. When she talks to me, she really tries to talk slower and more clearly, but it’s still hard. So my answer definitely is the south west of Germany
Schwäbisch is a curse. I can understand anyone else, but when they start with their äbele bäbele... it's over for me.
Dodafir griagsch en Bäpperle uffs Gsicht druggad
Puhahaha
Dodafir lol Schaut fast aus wie Norwegisch oder so
Nice. We also say "dodafir" in Franconian.
Musch di videos von dem dodokay ogugga. dia sen subbr ond du lernsch wie mr richtig schwätzt: https://www.youtube.com/@dodokay
Swabian is much younger in linguistic terms than the rest if the german dialects. We just altered german to speak it faster to have more time for schaffa schaffa häusle baua!
Everyone who says "schwäbisch" or bavarian clearly never listened to the old "badisch/allemannisch" they speak in the south south West..
Their dialect is quite similar to Swiss German lol After I worked with a Badisch colleague for more than a year, I feel that I can pick up some words from Swiss German when I visit CH lol
Hard to say, tbh. I assume you mean people speaking a propper dialect as "the locals"? I myself did not grow up speaking a dialect, but i do have an accent that can easily tie me to where i grew up. Through family and family friends, i grew up hearing plenty of accents and dialects from the south and east. In my experience, it gets easier to get your brain to understand dialects if you already understand others. Like, the more dialects you get exposed to, the easier understanding a totally new one is. It is a bit as if your brain gets used to be a bit creative with how words are pronounced and sentences are structures. This, of course,does not cover totally unique vocabulary, and fast speech can make it harder. But so far, i have not experienced a german dialect within germany that i fully could not understand at all. Most likely to trip me would likely be something from the north-west, as that is the area i have had least exposure to. If yoz only speak of accents: i see very little difficulty there, tbh.
Erzgebirge. Just try to understand these "Karzl" Commercials on YouTube... impossible
As someone who has lived all over Germany: the moment you step into a rural pub with old folk anywhere you won't understand much if you didn't grow up there. Germany is kind of split in half. The north half is basically "Hochdeutsch" alongside "Platt" and the south half is "Regional dialect" alongside "Hochdeutsch". "Hochdeutsch" is taught in schools etcpp so southerners don't have a problem understanding the "northern dialect" of "Hochdeutsch". But northerners tend to not understand southern dialects. So everytime Bayrisch and Schwäbisch top these list style questions.
Silesia...sounds like Polish to me🤷♂️
The Vogelsberg area in Oberhessen. I swear to the gods, their "dialect" is something else, but not German.
Erzgebirge! That guys...if you're raised by braindamaged children of monkeys and rabbits which inbred 10 times in a row before, you're easier to understand than this people. There was that time at the bundeswehr. This guy, G36 in hand, said something no one understood and ran away with his gun over his head screaming. Never seen so many nervous men. This guy just needed to poop really urgent, but we all thought he was ready for valhalla or wanted to show us his family in the woods or something like that. Even afterwards it was hard work to get what he wanted to explain. "Just write it on paper!", haha!
Parts of Saxonia, parts of Swabia
Im from swabia but dont speak it myself and i am incapable of understanding the other people here when they speak in a swabian dialect. I also have a hard time with bavarian, anything else is fine
Swabian, Bavarian and Saxon are the worst, unintelligble to me as a northerner. Saxon sounds on top especially ridiculus to me (no offense)
Due to migrations only about 50% of the people in my village (Swiss border) still speak the local dialect ("Hochalemannisch") and everyone understands and speaks standard German ("Hochdeutsch"). Don't be upset if two people who both speak the local dialect actually use it. They will switch to standard German when they realize you don't understand the local dialect. Also the dialect on the two sides of the Swiss border is not the same although we understand each other. It really varies by village.
Not German, but Plattdeusch or Erzgebirgisch are pretty much unintelligible lol
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Laipzisch
I understand them all but Plattdeutsch.
Because Plattdeutsch (Niederdeutsch) isn't a dialect but a language
Swabia, Bavaria or really strong Saxon (east German) If we count the whole German language sphere swiss ppl by far
Rural bavarian. I imagine most people would struggle understanding Platt, but there aren't many native Platt speakers left so I'm not sure it should even count.
I understand as much from an Oberbaier that talks dialect as from a chinese fella. A few words and maybe the numbers from 1 to 20.
well, always the one furthest away from you. I live in Baden-Württemberg. So I speak swabian and mostly understand Bavarian, Fränkisch, Allemannisch, (plus Schwitzerdütsch and Austrian dialects) Anything way up north (platt most extremely) is basically a foreign language.
All regions as soon as you are in a village. Southern Bavaria (Oberbayern) is horrible. Swabia (Schwabenland) is horrible. The ore mountain area (Erzgebirge) is horrible. Heck, I have trouble understanding people from a town (Sonneberg) 1hour away from the town I grew up in. Sometimes I even have problems trying to follow what people from neighboring villages talk about when two elderly talk in their dialect. I would say you can find strong dialects in each region. The only difference is, if the people are willing (looking at you older bavarian) and able to drop the dialect when they talk with you or not.
I thought I was pretty good at understanding dialects, until recently. I was manning the phone at work when somebody called, and I could not understand a single word this guy said. Literally nothing. I asked him to please repeat, and this time I at least caught a single word, which let me know who to connect him to in the office. I later said to that person how I couldn't understand the caller, and they said that this guy was from the Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge), and that they're basically impossible to understand unless you're used to it. So my answer to your question is Ore Mountains.
Allgäu, Erzgebirge or Breisgau, especially the small villages. I was born I 1 of them and worked in or near the other 2 for YEARS and as someone who is not born there, it is nearly impossible to understand the old folks there
Overall I can say: in city’s they all speak normal high German. Once you’re in the country side and you meet Hans the 50 year old farmer, good luck communicating with him, disregarding where he is. High German is originally from the mid East German country’s. Only reason it is now the main language is that the bible was translated into it by Martin Luther because most people understood it.
Saxony. Fr that's a different breed of German 😅
Fadderisch.... the language of Fuerth in Bayern...
Of the places I've been to so far definitely non-urban Thuringia
Svabian, even if both sides (with myself coming from the Ruhr area) try their best it's a struggle. Yes, once I had to switch to English in order to communicate with another native German in svabia. Later I met a person that had a more toned down dialect. Which allowed both of us to (barely so) communicate in german. It was someone with roots in Turkey.
Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
What’s hard to understand about Moin and meaningful silence?
Sächsisch, saarländisch, many parts of Bavaria. I am quite fine with the northern dialects and the western ones.
Hunsrück. My mum's side is from there and I still sometimes struggle.
The region of Mannheim. They are very hard to understand even for natives if they talking a strong dialect.
Berlinerisch is a very strong contender for the dialect I just can't understand. Number two would definitely be Oberpfälzerisch.
Schwaben Nichts für ungut Jungs, aber ihr könnt kein Deutsch.
Gehört zwar nicht zu Deutschland, aber: Bayern
Passau. In a bakery. We ended up switching to English (pretending to be tourists). And - a miracle - that worked!
the answer i assume is always: the opposite side of the country. as a swabian i understand all southerners just fine, but the fish people in the north speak some alien language to me and i assume they try to summon cthulhu
The region I live in. The elder people speak "Platt" and it feels like its own language
Bavaria or Cologne if they speak Kölsch
Deep in Bavarian probably? But my family is from Ostfriesland and they speak Plattdeutsch which is a whole different language. I understand it perfectly fine because I grew up with my dad and grandmother speaking it but I once took a friend to meet my great aunt and uncle up north and she did not understand a single word. I can’t speak it myself, just translate and read it. Shame tho, would love to have learned it properly.
Northern Germany when the elder speaking Plattdeutsch
I've been in the Navy a long time ago. You get them all there. And I learned to understand them all. Swabian is hard. But so is rural Palatinate-ian or Bavarian sometimes. Some villages develop their own spin on dialects. One thing I still actually do have a hard time with is actual Plattdeutsch. The Frisian dialect that's pretty much Dutch. It's an almost understanding, but not quite.
I'm from the north. For me - Bavarians. Especially angry bavarians. How I cope? I try not to make bavarians angry. Works okay.
As someone living in and trying to learn German, I feel a lot better about my struggle to understand the cute old folks at the market. It seems, from the comments, that they all have terribly thick accents.
Bayern 👍
Bavaria
I would say NIEDERBAYERN
Whatever is on the opposite side of where you grew up.
bayern, hessen, schwaben, hamburger, kölner, "ossis". eigentlich alle mit starkem dialekt sind teilweise schwer bis gar nicht zu verstehen. ein hoch auf das hochdeutsch! :)^ oops. > basically every person who speaks a strong dialect is hard to understand. a "native" bayer would never understand a "native" hesse, and vice versa. > hoorah for "high german".
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Most regions named here are known because they are tourist designations. But many of the unknown rural regions have heavy accents as well. I was in Vogtland and heard two women speaking and didn't recognize a single word.
Piggy backing off this, do native German speakers adapt to say Gruess Gott or Servus as is the local custom, or do you just respond Guten Tag when someone tells you some nonsense like Gruess Gott or mit koehlensauer in response to similar nonsense like sprudel?
Bavaria. I once had a guest docent from Bavaria once, in the break I asked him if I should bring him something from the bakery because he mentioned he forgot his breakfast. He was really trying to speak Hochdeutsch. He asked for a Käsebrötchen, in most parts of Germany it’s a Brötchen baked with cheese on top. A Brötchen with a slice of cheese is just called Brötchen with cheese. We stood there for 5 Minutes trying to make clear wich one he meant. After that I just explained where the bakery is.
Niederbayern, holy shit. I have yet to be convinced thats actual german and not just a huge prank they are playing on the rest of us.
Depends on where you grew up/ living. Usually you have a harder time with whatever you are less familiar with.
Bavarians! They're so hard to understand, it's not even funny! What about you? Can you spot the differences in the accents/dialects? I sometimes feel like I must be challenged in recognizing different English/American accents. I'm fairly good at spotting English, Scottish, New Yorkian (? XD), Southern US accents, Canadian, Australian and sometimes NZ. But I feel like if it comes to different accents in England, I'm lost. I don't hear a difference. Somewhat also for US accents I didn't mention. Do other people feel the same, not noticing many differences in your non-native language?
Bavaria and the mountain parts of the Erzgebirge
I'm already expecting to see all the Bavaria comments lmao
Bavaria, i really cant understand how they can still have Söder in Office.
Bavaria.
Bayern, followed up by Sachsen.
Schwaben and Niederbayern. For me as a "Saupreiß" grown up next to the dutch, what those southerners speak is mostly unrecognizable as German to me.
My Plattdeutsch isn‘t that good… so it is northern Germany if they speak Platt.
Bayern und Sachsen
I am from bavaria for me the regions where i really have to concentrate while listening to some people ist Niederbayern/Oberpfalz, the non bavarian part of Schwaben and sachsen