I’ve been wondering about something of late, and thought I’d throw it open to European 'dopers, especially those who speak the Germanic languages.
My first language was English, and I grew up on a media diet of Canadian, American and British TV and movies. While I know there are regional differences, English is largely the same everywhere. Unless it’s heavily infused with slang, I can basically understand it when I hear it.
A couple of years ago I started studying German for a planned trip that was scuttled by the pandemic. And, while I did know that there were a number of regional varieties, I figured it was mostly the same throughout Germany, until my teacher made a point of dialects. We did learn various different greetings and whatnot, as in “The Austrians will say goodbye like this, but this phrase is more common in Switzerland…” I’ve previously studied Welsh, and in class we learned both “northern” and “southern” Welsh (there are more dialects than that, obviously…every village has its quirks that distinguish the locals from the heathens on the other side of the dyffryn) but someone from Cardiff won’t find a local in Llandudno incomprehensible.
Long story short, my question is: do Germans from any region have to actually study a different dialect to learn it? If someone from Hamburg gets transferred for work to Vienna, does he have to do a night school class to learn Austrian German?
And, related to this: I know from being a total amateur linguist that some other northern Germanic languages are sort of on a continuum. For example, Danish and Swedish are similar, more so the closer you get to their connecting bridge(s?). I loved the show “The Bridge” which was set in Copenhagen and Malmö, and the Danish and Swedish characters communicated really without any hurdles. Watching the credits of the show, I’d see that some technical credits used the same word, and others would include both, separated by a slash, and one version would have maybe one more letter or an accent, so practically the same.
Question #2, then: in Sweden, does one take a class in Danish, or vice versa, for purposes of work or travel? And just generally to Europeans, especially the ones who can hit two or three other countries with a rock from their backyard, how do you pick up the languages of your neighbors, when they’re more or less mutually intelligible?