Hallo from swabia!

[Simon Barden]

I was in a hotel restaurant in Frankfurt am Main when the young waitress started chatting. She said she wasn't local and apologised for being from the north. That was the first I'd heard of it.

[fender3x]

Coming from the Western part of the US, where you can go for hundreds of miles without hearing an accent that is different than mine, this came as a bit of a shock to me. You don't have to drive far (by US standards) to be in a region where the dialect is unintelligible to the peopple in the place you just left. I had a very embarrassing moment in Switzerland when I was just beginning to learn Germany where I asked a woman in a shop if she could speak to me in High German because I could not understand Swiss dialect. She replied that she *was* speaking High German.

[ThatCluelessGerman]

Ha. I grew up in Southern Germany and even though my mother and grandmother (who was my main carer back then) spoke with their native southern dialect, I couldn't properly understand them, let alone speak this dialect myself. It was a bit of a riddle for other people, because my younger brother could speak the dialect and I couldn't. I'm always joking about it, telling people I was raised by television but now I'm actually pretty relieved that my German is "pure" enough nobody here in the North asks where I'm actually from (they see me as one of their own, lol, yeah! ).

[JimC]

Back in the 70s when I was at college I did a course on Great Cumbrae, which is an island in the Glasgow estuary where they speak fairly thick lallan scots. One of the girls on the course was from up country in Devon, and had a strong local country accent. She needed a translator in the local shops, which is the only time I've come across mutual unintelligibility in the UK.

[JohnH]

Back in the 70s when I was at college I did a course on Great Cumbrae, which is an island in the Glasgow estuary where they speak fairly thick lallan scots. One of the girls on the course was from up country in Devon, and had a strong local country accent. She needed a translator in the local shops, which is the only time I've come across mutual unintelligibility in the UK.

My grandparents were from Deptford, London, and when they came to Australia they formed a large extended family with other ex pats. So, I grew up with lots of accents from the UK, and it never occurred to me that they could be unintelligible to other English speakers until I was over in the UK with some Aussie friends who were totally stumped - particularly by strong Irish or Scottish accents.

Then, to my even greater surprise, my wife and I were in Scotland and neither of us could understand some people.

[fender3x]

Funny how this works in different countries. In Germany every region has a regional dialect. My daughters grew up where the natives speak "Allemanisch," which is very much like Swiss German. In the valley, less than an hour away, where their mother was went to college they speak "Badisch" which is more similar to the Alsatian dialect spoken in France than to Allemanisch. My daughters were raised by people who spoke Swabian (from the area near Stuttgart) or Platt (from the area around Cologne), so they understand most of the dialects, but only speak High German. That's good for me because I really only understand well when I am hearing High German. When they switch to dialect--any dialect--I understand, as they say "nur Bahnhoff".

Meanwhile, in the US the two languages you hear most frequently are English and Spanish. Both are spoken with lots of accents, but encountering a dialect that natives can't understand is very rare. I would have thought that Britain was somewhere in between, until I tried to make sense of road signs in Wales...

[rocknrollo]

Hertzlich Willkommen beim Forum! Where in Swabia? I have a daughter who is a killer singer who lives in the Black Forest ;-)

Thanks for the warm welcome, everybody! Where does she live and what band is she in? The first band from the Black Forest that comes to mind are the Booze Bombs which feature my ex neighbor on drums, that's how I know them.

[fender3x]

She's the Hochschwarzwald. She was in a band called Namenlos, but I am not sure who she is singing with right now.