The southern dialects can really be hard to understand, especially when you leave the big cities and get into regions where only few people from distant areas have mixed with the local people. Baden-Württemberg made a great set of commercials from that fact, showcasing regional businesses, always ending with the slogan "Wir können alles außer Hochdeutsch." (We can do anything but speaking standard german). Example video

The same is true in principle for all regions, but as Hochdeutsch has its origins more in the northern area (Martin Luther's Bible translation had great influence on Hochdeutsch), the difference to Hochdeutsch is smaller. Of course, if people start speaking Plattdeutsch (a similar, but distinct language, not just a dialect), you are at least as lost as in Schwaben.

Plattdeutsch has influenced the northern accent, and so people often speak Hochdeutsch with a little bit of Plattdeutsch mixed in. Mix in a lot more Plattdeutsch and you get Missingsch, a kind of creole language that became famous by TV broadcasts of plays at the Ohnsorg-Theater. Many people still think that Ohnsorg plays are in Plattdeutsch. They aren't. Ohnsorg actors deliberately spoke (and still speak) Missingsch during TV recordings so people all across germany could understand what was said.

Plattdeutsch is also spoken in parts of the Netherlands, and because it was the lingua franca of the Hanse, it also had influence on scandinavian languages.

Plattdeutsch has a huge number of dialects. You will find that common words completely change at distances of 20 to 30 km, with exactly the same meaning. The word "to speak" can be "schnacken", "proten", "spreken". A girl or jung woman can be a "Dern", a "Wicht(en)", or a "Froon".

During most of the 20th century, up to about the end of the 1970s, Plattdeutsch was misattributed as the language of poor, uneducated, dumb people, and of the older people. Children were taught only Hochdeutsch. Plattdeutsch was frowned upon, especially in the larger cities. So there are one or two generations that never were native speakers of Plattdeutsch, even in regions where Plattdeutsch once was the every-day language. So Plattdeutsch started to become extinct. Starting in the late 1980s, Plattdeutsch was again tought in schools, as elective subject, essentialy as a foreign language like english, french, or latin. Public service broadcast started to send news and music in Plattdeutsch. Young people have rediscovered Plattdeutsch, but it is still far away from everyday use in the larger cities, and even in smaller towns, people tend to prefer Hochdeutsch. Plattdeutsch is generally used only if all people in the room are known to understand and speak Plattdeutsch. In regional retirement homes, being able to speak or at least understand Plattdeutsch is very important for the caregivers. It is often the native language of the older people, and it is the language they trust more. This lead to the situation that caregivers where hired from all over the world, and one of the first things they were taught was Plattdeutsch, not Hochdeutsch.

It's still strange to hear Plattdeutsch, as good as from my grandparents, from young people with a clear african, indian or asian origin. And even more strange when the same people struggle speaking Hochdeutsch.

Alexander