Was wir gelernt haben — What We Have Learned

Now go and meet the dialects

This course has taught you Hochdeutsch, standard German, which is the language of schools, broadcasting and print across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It is what everyone is taught and what everyone can speak. It is not always what they do speak. Walk into a village pub in Lower Bavaria, the Swabian Alb or the Black Forest and you may catch every third word — that is normal, it happens to Germans from other regions too, and the answer is simply to say Könnten Sie das bitte auf Hochdeutsch sagen? Nobody minds. Swiss German goes further and is genuinely a separate spoken variety, to the point that Swiss television sometimes subtitles it for German viewers, though the Swiss all write standard German. Plattdeutsch in the north is arguably a separate language and is now spoken mainly by the old. Austrian German differs mostly in vocabulary — Jänner for Januar, Erdäpfel for Kartoffeln, Sackerl for Tüte. None of this undoes what you have learned. Around a hundred million people speak German as a first language, more than any other language in the European Union, and every one of them understands the German you now have. Viel Erfolg — und alles Gute.