hello notamermaid and others. We have booked an escorted cruise for 8 days in July so I will now follow this thread with interest. I lived in Germany for a few years in the 1980s and have only been back a couple of times but this cruise will probably be the last time we visit - before old age and health overtake us. As I don't fly we will be travelling by train from Edinburgh to London where we will join our British organised tour with Riviera Travel. We then go from London St Pancras to Brussels and onwards to Cologne to join the MS Geoffrey Chaucer.
"What you learn at school and what you see written is Standard High German. As a spoken form of German among friends and family in its pure form it only exists around Hanover they say. Theoretically everyone who has been to school in Germany speaks it of course. But it is often easy to detect where a person comes from no matter how hard they try to use a newsreader type of Standard High German."
I found your piece about accent / dialect very interesting because I lived about 20 miles from Hanover and loved listening to and speaking German there. Obviously as I travelled round Germany that changed! My sister lived on the Bodensee and her in-laws were from the Black Forest /Schwarzwald so Schwabisch was another kettle of fish.