Saarbrücken, the barely moderate-size city I studied at in Germany, has three distinct dialects. It lies right on the French border. At least one dialect has he

Saarbrücken, the barely moderate-size city I studied at in Germany, has three distinct dialects. It lies right on the French border. At least one dialect has heavy French influence and one does not. Most of the local students I talked to spoke German that was very close to Hochdeutsch plus some linguistic peculiarities and slang terms. As far as I could tell this was the dialect they used at home, when drunk, talking with childhood friends, etc., and I could understand it easily. Every once in a while, though, I would meet someone (usually of a slightly older generation) whose dialect I found completely unintelligible. I'm not sure how easily the average local German could understand the different dialects. Most of the local people I talked to regularly were computational linguist students, German teachers, or worked in the international student office, so they had a particular interest in learning languages.