Self-consciousness about dialect

[pne]

I was slightly amused just now watching a documentation on people with dwarfism.

They showed one child getting shoes custom-made, and the shoemaker spoke with a southern accent. (Austrian? Bavarian? I'm not good at pinpointing regionalisms.)

He seemed to be self-conscious about the fact, since a couple of times, he repeated himself in a slightly more standard phonological form, as if he seemed to feel the need to speak as standard a German as possible on camera, even though the first version of each utterance was perfectly comprehensible to me—merely obviously regional. ("Heechstens—Höchstens" and "Auf jeden Fuj. Do wird sich net viel verändern—Da wird sich sicher nicht viel verändern. Ganz sicher nicht.") So he needn't have worried about being comprehensible to viewers from other parts of the country IMO.

Comments

[nitaq.livejournal.com]

You'd be surprised how difficult it is for some people to understand accents.
It's very surprising to me because I have no problems to understand most german accents, unless they go intentionally weird and fast.
Maybe that's because when I was little, I was exposed to many accents.

Where I work loads of people have problems with strong bavarian accents.
At first I thought the problem may be due to the fact that one of them was our Turkish apprentice (wo wasn't the brightest anyway), and even though her German was probably better than her Turkish she wasn't completely accent free.
The other one with that problem was our secretary with a bit of a polish accent. So that was understandable as well.

But now I get calls for help from two more of my colleagues ("Hilfe, da ist ein Bayer am Telefon und der nuschelt so!!!") and their first language is German. But I guess they haven't had contact with accents before, and no need to understand them.

And Bavarians I know have the nasty habit to increase their accent when they realize someone has a problem understanding them. Their kind of fun.