That's far more difficult than Schweizer Deutsch.When I lived in Bonn, a guy moved into an apartment in my building and I took him to my
Stammkneipe one evening for a drink. One of my Rhenish informants came up to tell me some joke in Kölsch. After he did and I made note of it in a little book I always kept with me, the guy left, and my new neighbor (who was only from as far away as Wuppertal) turned to me and exclaimed in English. "Good God. What was that man speaking? It was no kind of German I could understand." Some of my informants really couldn't speak Hochdeutsch only the local dialect.
Funny dialect.Now them's fightin' words! Grr.
Funny story, the third (or fourth) printing press was established in Cologne, and the books published were one-third in Latin, another in Dutch, and the final third in Kölsch. Luther had yet to establish his Saxon brand of German as a literary standard.
