I agree... I always find it a little sad that Germany fails to embrace the diversity of its local dialects. When I grew up in the south of Germany I could tell

I agree... I always find it a little sad that Germany fails to embrace the diversity of its local dialects. When I grew up in the south of Germany I could tell which village someone was from after listening to a couple of sentences they spoke. But when moving away one must quench that local dialect and try to speak "hochdeutsch" ("high-german")—Otherwise one can't even buy bread in a bakery without being called out as the "swabian" (which seems to be the catch-all for all southern dialects in Northern Germany). Compare that to Switzerland, where people proudly speak their "Mundart" wherever they go (and are wound up by high-German speaking immigrants). Germany has such a wonderful regional diversity, but at the same time that inherent hostility against it... and Germans are, for some reason, super-afraid to discuss it.