Speaking 22 Different German Dialects - Can You Understand All of Them?? 🇩🇪

Our second video which has 42 different dialects is now live and you’ll be happy to know we did actually have Germans from the east submit clips this time 😃 Watch it here: https://youtu.be/xn8wNa_R1-c

To summarize: All you non-native speakers can be REALLY proud of yourselves if you become fluent in German at some point 😂

can native german speakers understand each other?
me as a german: hell no

All of Germany: Karotte, Karotte, Möhre, Karotte, Möhre ...
Switzerland: RÜÄBLI

As a native speaker, i can say that most of us don’t even understand some other dialects. Like I am from Thuringia, when I was the first time in Austria and a man talked to me I only understood half of the words just because i knew someone who lived in Austria. So what do we learn from that: even german native speakers have some difficulties with it

I live in a rural small town Austria. Many foreigners struggle here despite them being able to speak German. They are not warned enough what could happen to them 😅

I live in Canada. My Dad was from Hamburg Germany and my Mom was from a small village near Salzburg Austria. They met and married here in Canada in about 1953. The German I learned was my Dad's version. My Mom's German is an Austrian dialect. I also learned the German that they knew from when they left Germany. They did not learn modern day terminology for new things like computers, cell phones etc. When I visit relatives I have no problem for the most part understanding my relatives from Hamburg. However, when we visit our Austrian relatives I often do not understand what they are saying. They speak a completely different German than what I understand. It was really funny one time when my Husband and I were travelling in Germany on our own, I was asked what part of Germany I was from because they could not place my accent. I laughed and told them I was not from Germany but from Canada. They said I spoke German quite well. I do however, speak an old German because I do not know modern terminology. It is still easy to communicate though because many German people speak and understand English.

I'm from Swabia and I understand every dialect in southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland. But the northern dialects are something else 😅

Reading Asterix in your local dialect is so much fun! Highly recommended. They mostly are sold out pretty quickly and can end up being collectibles.

This is actually really interesting for me as a German

When I was at University (East Germany) and learned a foreign language, there was one Schwabe with a very very deep dialect. The first time he said something in class, I think the only person who understood him was the (foreign) teacher - after 3 seconds of thinking. The whole class had the "spinning cogwheels" look on their face :D

And the best thing is: Every small town has its own variation of the local dialect. Or at least thats what I experienced here in southern bavaria.

I think Moin is the second most spoken original German greeting word and you can go with it neatly everywhere

I was born in an area where people only spoke Hochdeutsch and when I moved south to Freiburg im Breisgau, it took me YEARS to understand the people there, even if they only spoke a little bit of dialect. My brain could not compute xD And when I finally understood them, I moved to Bavaria...so back to start.. 😂

I love hearing Plattdeutsch. I'm from a region right at the Dutch border, where we also speak Platt, but it's always interesting to hear, that it sometimes completly varies from household to household. Sometimes it varies so much, that two Platt speakers can't even understand each other.

As a Saxon, I am extremely surprised and also a little disappointed that only a Berliner has appeared here as a representative for former East Germany. The statement that there are many other dialects that were just not made available is somewhat suspect. A simple check of one's own video would have quickly revealed that the former Soviet zone is extremely underrepresented. And in today's times I am convinced that surely enough East German speakers would have been found.
Regardless, it was a good overview of the dialects in my country. I would understand all of them, but every now and then I would have to think about what was meant.

A fun fact about Swabian dialects in Baden-Württemberg: the simple two words for "one egg" (Hochdeutsch ein Ei) can be pronounced as (and I will try to spell out how it sounds): ai ai, ai eu, eu ai, eu eu, or a eu ... :-D

As a German I can group dialects that I understand and groups I don't depending on their origin.

The Voice from the very north west speaks frisian language. It is not a dialect of the german language. It is a language of its own with completly different vocabulary and grammar. I live in this region (Nordfriesland - North Frisia) and cannot understand anything in frisian language. I just speak plattdeutsch, witch is for some linguist also an own language. Here in North Frisia we have danish speaking people, pattdeutsch speaking people, hochdeutsch speaking people and frisian speaking people. That makes North Frisia in a way unique in Germany

I am from South Tyrol (the region in Italy were German is one of the official language). We mostly speak standard German only in school, otherwise only dialect. No issues understanding the speakers from the rest of Tyrol, Austria, Bavaria, southern areas of Germany 😉

The situation is similar reg Italian dialects. People from the North don't really understand the dialects from the South (we would need subtitles).

Das ist eine saubere Arbeit, die ihr da abgeliefert habt.
(That is a clean work you have delivered there :-))