Normally they wouldn’t, but they do anyway because of training.
This is because all of us learn to speak Standard German and are exposed to other dialects at an early age, we learn to pick up on and track the grammatical changes that occur between these dialects.
This means that, when faced with a new dialect that we don’t understand, we can often listen to it, discern patterns in their grammar that are similar to another variation that we have heard before, and figure out what they are doing.
Natural German dialects also all have a kind of lyrical lilt that varies enormously between regions and even within regions. You have to hear your way into the song to parse where words end and begin. As far as I can tell, the only German dialect I’ve heard with no music in it is the artificially constructed, prescriptivist, academic, Standard German.
Once you figure out a few of those features, you can begin to follow what they are saying, because despite these obfuscations, you will usually recognize the roots portions of the words they are using, even if they are very archaic in your own dialect, or familiar from a completely different Germanic language.
For example, in Swiss German they say “Widder Luaga!” which is their equivalent of “Auf wiedersehen”.
Cognates of “luaga”, like the English word “look”, are not common in other German dialects, though you do have “lugen” (to take a peek) in Standard German, but I still instantly understood what they meant without having to think about it because my mind is trained to be flexible enough to accept a guess based on my knowledge of the related Germanic language: English.
Using this skill, speakers of significantly different dialects can learn to understand each other moderately well with a few hours or days of heavy exposure to the other dialect. That’s not the competence to speak it, mind you. That would be way more difficult.
It also helps to speak French because of all the loanwords in the Southern dialects.
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