No need to get personal, I thought we were having a friendly discussion here. My main point was that you said acsenray was wrong, while he was in fact right. That is not nitpicking. But let’s forget this, it’s a hijack of the original thread anyway. No hard feelings.
Let me rephrase this sentence to soften mk12:
Well, this is wrong as it confuses different categories. “Hochdeutsch” (used geographically) is actually a collective word for “Oberdeutsch” and “Mitteldeutsch”, where Oberdeutsch is far south and Mitteldeutsch is in the middle between north and south. “Plattdeutsch” is the most famous dialect that is part of the dialects collected beyond the word “Niederdeutsch” (Low German).
Those terms are not obsolete, but have been replaced in common usage by “norddeutsch” and “süddeutsch”. Only Linguists still use them in their older meaning. “Mitteldeutsch” und “Niederdeutsch” is still in use, but often to describe locations and rarely to describe dialects (again common usage!).
cu
My German SO, is from Saxony and Nordrhein Westphalea. She says she has never heard anyone use Heute Nacht to mean last night, regardless of the context of the sentence.
I guess this is more of a souther Germany tradition?
Yes, this seems to be the case. I found through Google, many references of “Heute Nacht” as “last night”, but they were in the minority, and of course I could not find out if they originated from northern or southern Germany.
cu
I know as a nongerman speaking [more or less] american, when I visited someone in Gaertringen last year, I could hear the difference between him dialectically speaking to his Munich born and dwelling father, his normal german [as opposed to speaking bavarian dialect] and the schwaebisch of the people in the store down the road, and his neighbors. I have to say I actually like the Munich accent in regular german. Bavarian is just very baffling to me, it is very fast and slangy=\
I learnt my German in Hanover, so don’t really know much about regional differences in the south.
I never heard people use “heute nacht” to mean “last night” which is why I assumed it was literary / archaic.
When I learnt the language in India (Goethe Institute), we were informed right at the start that we would be taught Hochdeutsch. They also told us that the dialect spoken in the Hannover/Hamburg region is closest to it.
I lived in Germany for about a year, in Hamburg and in Munich, and I never once heard “heute Nacht” being used in the past tense, and it would never have occured to me to use it as such either.
Well, I’m originally from Germany (grew up in Südhessen to be exact), and to me “Heute Nacht” always means last night.
This example from eagle:
“Heute Nacht möchte ich mit dir tanzen gehen.” means “Tonight I’d like to go dancing with you.”
Would sound better to me as “Heute Abend möchte ich mit dir tanzen gehen.”. To me “Nacht” is only the nighttime when you are sleeping, and “Abend” is used for the evening or night if you go out.
Oh and eagle, where in “Schwaben” are you from? From your description it could almost be Ellwangen, where my grandmother is from. So, “grüass Gott” from someone who is three-quarters a “Sauschwob”.
Oh, and also “Ade” to finish my post. It’s a little early for “guat’s Nächtle” 
North German exiled to South West Germany here.
I’d use “heute nacht” as “last night” only in the morning, or when it’s clear from context that I refer to the preceding night:
“Heute nacht war eine laute Party beim Nachbarn” = “Last night my neighbour had a loud party”
“Heute nacht wird mein Nachbar eine laute Party haben” = “Tonight my neighbour will have a loud party”
BTW “tonight” does not translate well into German because usually if it is before midnight (or even a bit after midnight) and you are still vertical it’s “Abend” (evening) rather than “Nacht” (night). When I learned English I and I read of people going to the theatre or to restaurants “tonight” I first wondered: when do these people sleep? If you express your intention to spend time with a German “heute nacht” you might stray dangerously close to double entendre (or even single entendre) territory.
@Mycroft Holmes:
“Guada Morga” (well, actually, it’s a bittle late for good morning),
Yes, “Heute Abend” would be used more likely, and I said so in post #7. The rules when to use “Heute Nacht” in its different are made by me as a draft, and subject to debate. As native speaker I don’t think about it much, I just use the words.
I live in Dillingen, grew up in Bergenweiler and went to Gymnasium in Heidenheim. Don’t know exactly, but it is less than 100km south from Ellwangen. The hard to understand Swabian dialect is the dialect used on the Härtsfeld, tradtionally the villages on the Härtsfeld have been quite isolated, so their dialect developed differently, but still is a Swabian dialect. (BTW: NASA astronauts did some of their training for the moon explorations in the Härtsfeld, to be exact in the crater of Nördlingen.)
@Spectre et. al:
There actually is a well documented historical use of “Heute Nacht” meaning "last night: On September 1st, 1939, Adolf Hitler said at 10 am in front of the Reichstag (and broadcasted on the radio): “Polen hat heute nacht zum erstenmal auf unserem eigenen Territorium auch bereits durch reguläre Soldaten geschossen. Seit 5.45 Uhr wird jetzt zurückgeschossen! Und von jetzt ab wird Bombe mit Bombe vergolten!” I’m still not sure about the debate if it’s only a southern usage or not, but it may be. However, I think everybody in Germany will understand it correctly, even if not everybody will use it in this way.
@mk12:
I’m a insecure person suffering from SAD, so if someone criticizes me in public for something, that I am sure is correct, then this troubles me. So I spent some time last night, to evaluate the meaning and etymology of “Hochdeutsch”. My findings and conclusions:
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The one and only meaning of “Hochdeutsch (n.)” is “standard written German”. Source: Brockhaus Enzyklopädie in 30 Bänden (The Brockhaus is for Germany what the Encyclopedia Britannica is for UK, it is the authority on common knowledge for Germany.)
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Linguists actually do not use “hochdeutsch (adj.)” at all, but instead use “althochdeutsch”, “mittelhochdeutsch”, “frühneuhochdeutsch” and “neuhochdeutsch”. All these adjectives have been introduced as an afterthought, when linguistic studies tried to classifiy the development of the different dialects spoken and written in Germany for the last 1600 years. It is a fiction, created to complement the already existing use of “niederdeutsch”. Dialects southern from the so called Benrathen line are either “-oberdeutsch” or “-mitteldeutsch” and when referred to together, then “-hochdeutsch” is used. (Source: Duden Herkunftswörterbuch. Duden publishes the standard references for the German language, that is Dictionaries, Grammars, Etymologies, etc.)
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The development of a modern standard German actually began when Luther translated the New Testament from Latin into German and this translation was widely spread in Germany through progress in printing technology. Luther actually used for his translation an “ostmitteldeutschen” dialect. This dialect became so much a standard for German, that it caused many replacements of words in “oberdeutschen” and “niederdeutschen” dialects. One Example: “Bühl” meant hill in Swabian before Luthers Bible, and was replaced with “Hügel” after it. The word “Bühl” is still present in geographical names like “Dinkelsbühl”, “Sonnenbühl”, but it’s meaning has been lost. (Source: Duden Herkunftswörterbuch. see above)
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I was not able to confirm the development of the word “Hochsprache”, but after what I read last night, I actually doubt, that it’s meaning comes from “-hochdeutsch”. Instead it’s more likely a composition of the adjective “hoch” and the noun “Sprache” and therefore it’s literal meaning would be “Hohe Sprache”, which is best translated as “high level language” and has absolutely nothing to do with any geographical references. This leads to the conclusion, that the meaning of “Hochdeutsch” (see 1.) is actually also not geographically derived, and so it’s not surprising, that it’s only common meaning is “standard written German”. However, Linguists developed a taxonomy for the dialects using “-hochdeutsch” in a different sense, and therefore to prevent ambiguousness they had to introduce “Standarddeutsch” for the original meaning of “Hochdeutsch”. It is however only used in this sense by linguists. If you were to say to a Swabian speaker “Du sprichst einen hochdeutschen Dialekt” (You speak a High German dialect.) then he would most probably think you are crazy, because for him “hochdeutsch” and “Dialekt” are incompatible words, as are “angular” and “wheel”.
Finally a few corrections:
“Schlesisch” is a southern German dialect.
“Badisch” is correctly called “Alemannisch”.
“Bayrisch” is actually typed “Bairisch”.
So almost everything I wrote yesterday was indeed correct, and contained only minor errors, that are now corrected with this post.
Yet I’m still interested in the resolution of the southern/northern aspect of the usage of “Heute Nacht” as “last night”/“tonight”.
cu
My greatgrandmother was from a simple farm on the Härtsfeld (talk about a hard life. It seems the fields on the Härtsfeld contain more boulders than top soil) and when she told me about her life (fascinating stories) I had trouble understanding her sometimes. She might as well have been speaking Chinese.
The Nördlinger Ries is incredibly interesting. It is a large (diameter of about 25km) impact crater that was formed 15 million years ago. Because some of the unique rocks formed (Suevit for example) are very similiar to moon rocks, the NASA astronauts actually spent some time there for training.
I must agree with you on the use of “Hochdeutsch” to mean only the “standard written German”. I have only ever heard Germans use “Mitteldeutsch” or “Oberdeutsch” for the southern dialects. In fact, the dialects are so localized that most of the time they differ between neighboring villages and are named after the villages. Example: just north of Ellwangen there is a little town called Jagstzell where they speak a Swabian dialect, while three kilometers away in Stimpfach they speak Fränkisch.