Colette,
Can you tell me if this is still true today or they all speaking one
uniform dialect.
Cindy
Indiana
Jetzt bin ich wirklich platt.
Hello Cindy,
when you hear a person speak German (let's exclude the anchor men and women on TV), you can often hear which region they are coming from.
As in the States (where, aditionally, you have many 'foreigners' who make you get used to 'special' English), you have an official (written) language + the wonderful variety (e.g. Southern drawl, New England wording, New York + ehnic flavors) of local language.
... VERY popular with (regional or ethnic) comedians who play on not only what they say ... but how they say it.
In addition, Austrians, Swiss and even former citizens of the DDR use a very different vocabulary (as do Amish in the States who preserved their language from when they left centuries ago). Languge lives and changes.
Unfortunately, some dialects from the former eastern German provinces are dying out (like good recipies getting lost ...).
But this seems to happen all over the world:
National Geographic Society und Living Tongues Institute provide the following world map of Endangered Languages: www.languagehotspots.org
Greetings
Hanno (V.J.Kolbe)