Should I watch Return of the King? - Shameless attempt to get 100 post count.

[Gatac]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]Well, language invariably crosspollinates. I find that there's no major West-East language drift in German, but the North-South axis really kicks you in the shins. I was on vacation at a friend's house in Austria, and although I got the gist of what they were saying, there was quite a lot I felt I was missing.

The real difficulty in German dialects was the variant spelling, which was cleaned up when Hochdeutsch was introduced. (As early as Luther translated the bible, which is commonly seen as the first step to introduce an actual written German - as opposed to Latin and later French which was prevalent amongst the ruling class.) I generally consider myself to speak a pretty "high" German in that it's very close to official spelling, but I love using dialect to spice it up some, and then there's the whole slang aspect of being A) young B) into hacker culture and C) speaking fluent English. I tend to think I'm pretty understandable when I consciously keep myself on track - I've certainly never met somebody who didn't understand me for reasons of dialect. On the other hand, when I crack out my special style, German relates to it like

[code:1ost_uid0]
int main()
{
printf("Hello World!");
return(0);
}
[/code:1ost_uid0]

to the Obfuscated C Contest.

But the language you should never get me started on is Russian. I barely scraped by in school, and all I remember is how to read the cyrillic alphabet and say "I don't speak Russian" in Russian.

Gatac[/colorost_uid0]