I am an American who has spent 50 years living in Germany. Recently, my wife and I relocated to a tiny village high in the Austrian Alps where both the skiing and the golf are good. I am a writer and public speaker and an erstwhile TV talkshow host. I love to cook, drink good wine and entertain friends in our fully renovated "Old Forrester's Lodge". Oh, yeah: I also like to smoke Havanna cigars, as you can see on the photo...
If Americans and Britons are two peoples separated by a common language, as George Bernard Shaw famously said, then the same goes for the Germans - except there are hundreds of different languages to choose from. On the North Sea coast, German sounds like English (or maybe Dutch), whereas in Soelden, a remote Austrian valley in the Alps my wife hails from, they still talk a version of ancient Bavarian that was spoken in Southern Germany 500 years ago and is completely incomprehensible to anyone else - but it’s still a kind of German! Sometimes, dialects can vary hugely from one village to the next.
Broadly speaking, there are seven major versions that together comprise German, each the language spoken by one of the major tribes that migrated during the “Völkerwanderung” (“migration of the peoples”) after the collapse of the Roman Empire ca. 400 AD, namely the Alamanni, the Bajuwars, the Franks, the Friesians, the Saxons, the Swabians and the Thuringians. To make things more complicated, there are also a number of “linguistic islands” that stem from the fact that parts of Germany were settled by people who spoke completely different tongues, such as Serbs, Slavs, Flemish.
Charlemagne succeeded in uniting most of the German-speaking tribes around 900 AD, but not all of them, so in places like Luxembourg or Switzerland they still speak versions of German, but mainstream Germans can hardly understand them.
The biggest difference lies in what linguists call the “Lautverschiebung” (“sound shift”) between north and south, in which for instance “f” becomes “p” (schlafen →schlapen, Schiff →Schipp)), “t” becomes “d” (Tag→ Dag) and “ch” becomes “k” (ich or ech→ik or ek). These shifts generally follow the Uerdinger or Benrather Lines that run from east to west at about the height of Hanover.
“High German” is the result of Martin Luther’s attempt to translate the bible into German – only which German? Since he was hiding under the protection of the (protestant) Elector Friedrich III of Saxony at Wartburg Castle, and since he liked to spend the evenings hoisting a few with the locals at a tavern in nearby Eisenach, he decided to follow the local jargon, at least most of the time. He described this as dem Volke aufs Maul schauen (“to watch the mouths of the people”).
As a result, the first major book that was widely read in German happened to be written in the dialect of Eisenach, which is part of modern-day Thuringia. This kind of High German is about as authentic as the “Queens English” you can hear on BBC, but it is useful as a lingua franca for all “German-speaking” regions.
I myself moved to Germany when I was eleven, and I had to concentrate on learning High German in school, so I never really mastered the local dialect in my new hometown of Heidelberg. However, when I moved to Stuttgart in the 70ies I picked up a lot of Swabian, which most other Germans detest, but which I love. Whenever I’m in company with Swabians I can shift back and forth from “high” to “low” (dialect) almost without thinking.
My wife and her sister, on the other hand, both speak “Soelderisch”, which was recently given protected World Heritage status by UNESCO. If the girls don’t want me to understand what they’re saying, they simply start talking their own local lingo.
Personally, I would recommend learning High German first and asking people who speak dialect to simply translate for you.
